Liberal England

It looks as though Labour have hit upon a promising new strategy - and the Guardian has certainly won our Headline of the Day Award:

Senior Labour figures tell Keir Starmer to stop making mistakes

The other day I used Bluesky to pass on some of Lord Bonkers' table talk:

Lord Bonkers writes: What all this nonsense about Katy Perry and "the first all-female space crew"? I well recall that a British rocket took off from Woomera 56 years ago almost to the day. Its crew? Marguerite Patten Helen Shapiro Pat Coombs Marion Mould on Stroller

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— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers.bsky.social) 14 April 2025 at 17:13

Think of this as a sort of free extra from the old boy - a Patreon you don't have to pay for. (That is unless I'm short of inspiration for his next diary, when it will appear there too.)

But who, I hear you ask, were Marion Mould and Stroller?

Marion Mould won the silver medal in the individual show jumping at the Mexico Oympics of 1968. I remember her as Marion Mould, though she must have been Marion Coakes at the time, as she did not marry until the following year.

And Stroller was her horse, or rather her pony. It was rare for ponies to compete in top-level show jumping, but he and Marion won 61 international competitions together.

Oddly, I don't remember hearing much of Marion Mould in the early Seventies, when show jumping (it seems so unlikely now) was a huge television sport. My memory may be at fault, or perhaps she did fade from the scene.

But you can see her above in the third episode of the fourth and final season of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

My memory of that fourth series (the one made without John Cleese) is of watching it each week, willing it to be funny, but being disappointed every time.

Watching this episode today it doesn't seem so bad to me - if you like Python then you will like this. Perhaps the individual sketches are allowed to run on too long, but it's not as weak as I remember it.

And this little selection featuring Marion Mould is certainly funny. Show jumping obstacles did get overblown like this when the sport was at the height of its popularity.

"Kennedy has already indicated what he expects the 'findings' to be: that vaccines did it, even though all legitimate science shows that is false. To make sure no real science accidentally happens, he has put a non-scientist/non-doctor in charge of this non-study: David Geier, a man who has been fined for practicing medicine without a license. Worse, his 'treatments' of children are better described as pointless torture." Amanda Marcotte says RFK's pledge to discover the cause of autism isn't just a ploy: it's a war on children's health.

"With just two days until we mark three years since the invasion, we need to talk about this man, because no one truly knows what could have happened if he hadn’t been there to lead. This is a man who could have left. A man who was expected to leave. The world was really expecting he would run." Victor Kravchuk pays tribute to Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Jennie Kermode is worried that US politicians are again talking about mass sterilisation: "The US first began sterilising people with mental illness - requiring neither their consent nor that of their next of kin – in Pennsylvania in 1905, and in 1927 this was formally ruled to be in accordance with the constitution. Although never actually banned, it decreased dramatically after 1978, when new regulations ruled that consent was ... necessary."

When did rock 'n roll die? Chris Dalla Riva and Daniel Parris offer a statistical analysis.

"In an unnamed city, Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) keeps his head down in the Department of Records, covering for ineffectual boss Mr Kurtzmann (a brilliant Ian Holm). Meanwhile in his dreams, he is a winged warrior, who soars amongst the clouds, battling a giant samurai creature and rescuing a Botticelli Venus from her aerial cage." Tim Pelan celebrates the chaotic genius of Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

Londonopia finds that the grazing of sheep in London's parks has a long and complex history: "Just when you thought sheep had permanently retired from their park-keeping duties, along came World War II. With food shortages rampant and every inch of available land needed for practical use, parks across London were repurposed for the war effort. Victory gardens sprung up in many green spaces, and in some cases, sheep were reintroduced to provide both wool and meat."

Ben Austwick takes us to Lud’s Church, a natural geological feature in the Staffordshire Peak District, with rich literary and religious connections.

BBC News wins our prestigious Headline of the Day Award.

And there's a local angle to the story below:

A grandmother who climbed on top of a freight train as part of a climate protest has escaped a prison sentence.

Karen Wildin, 60, managed to stop the goods train as it travelled to Drax power station in North Yorkshire on 11 November 2021.

The wagons were transporting wood pellets which Wildin objected to being burned for fuel.

She appeared at Leeds Crown Court on Monday and was told to pay a £3,000 fine.

The private tutor, from Leicester, waved an Extinction Rebellion flag during the protest, which took place during the COP26 climate change conference.

This was clearly a principled protest rather than vandalism. Nevertheless, the judges were insistent that I post their favourite video again.

More about the JCPCP on the Egalitarian Publishing site. I've slightly lost the thread of which issue which column has appeared in, but this one has certainly been published. In fact, I don't remember writing parts of it.

The progress of the working-class grammar school boy and the estrangement from his background it brought about were once such a theme of English letters that it was honoured with a Monty Python sketch inverting it. 

A coal miner returns home to his playwright father and receives a cold welcome:

“Hampstead wasn't good enough for you, was it? You had to go poncing off to Barnsley, you and your coal-mining friends.”

The grandfather of this school of writing was D.H. Lawrence, and I was studying his novel The Rainbow for A level when David Storey’s Saville won the Booker Prize. Our teacher talked of Storey’s debt to Lawrence and suggested we considered reading his novel.

Saville introduced me to David Storey, whose early life encompassed elements no novelist would dare combine. At one time, Storey’s posthumous memoir A Stinging Life reminds us, he was studying fine art at the Slade in the week and supporting himself by taking the train north at the weekend to play rugby league for Leeds.

Fashions change, and a few years ago I saw Andy Miller from the Backlisted podcast exclaiming online that Saville had won the Booker Prize yet he could find no one who had read it.

******

Writing for the online publication Too Little / Too Hard, Rachael Allen recalls being the first in her family to receive any kind of schooling after the age of 14:

At Goldsmiths, I did not meet the children of cleaners or shop workers. I met the children of landlords, the children of airline pilots, and actual princesses, the children of executives at mega pharmaceutical companies, people so wealthy they owned their own charities. I met the children of TV personalities and doctors, barons and writers.

And she goes on to record a revelation that many of us have experienced:

One of my most eye-opening experiences as a working-class person moving into educated and middle-class spaces was the correction to my misconception that wealthy people are clever. I held onto this misconception for longer than I should have, because, at university, and then into my professional life, I was surrounded by the rich.

The English are indeed likely to confuse an upper-class accent with intelligence – a failing that more than one contemporary comedian has exploited to land a more serious column. But Allen says her working-class father reads more than anyone she knows, giving himself a summer to read War and Peace and then everything around Tolstoy and Russian literature he can find. She grew up with him pointing out flowers, leaves, and trees in the Latin that he had taught himself over the years as an amateur naturalist.

My own class background is complicated – my mother once claimed to have “gone from rags to rags in one generation” – but when I was a poor teenager, I was still able to pass as middle class. The disadvantage of this was that, in an instance of the same fallacy, it did not occur to any teacher that I might be having problems. 

******

Class, which once held a central place in our political discourse, now competes with other sources of injustice. The Conservative MP David Johnston once wrote about his time running social mobility. recalling a firm which, while it thought itself fully signed up to the concept, nevertheless raised queries like: 

“Our clients need us to have worldliness and you get that by travelling the world. So how will the young people you work with be able to demonstrate it?"

and

“They’ll be alongside the children of high net-worth individuals who we’re teaching how to invest the assets their parents gave them, so you’ll have to send us someone suitable.”

Johnston would watch banks professional service firms fall over each other to hire black graduates if they were privately educated and from professional families:

These young people were deemed to have the requisite social capital they claimed their “clients expect from us”. If, however, you were the sort of black young person my organisations typically helped – poor and from a council estate – enthusiasm waned.

All these companies, said Johnston, would talk on their websites about valuing diversity, but diversity of social background was not tend to be high on their agenda. You could be black or white, but you had to be middle class.

Without the right social connections you will never break into the circles where the best jobs are on offer. Andy Burnham was mocked when he spoke of the problems in this he had still faced with a Cambridge degree – hadn’t been in the cabinet before he was 40? – but then he had found an alternative network in the shape of the Labour Party.

******

I saw a tweet from another female academic, Professor Amanda Vickery, the other day:

Found Saltburn unpleasant. Brought back memories of being working class at uni. Am decades from that & obvs privileged now, but still recall that any time I said "no my father was a bricklayer & no we never went skiing", boys would launch into the Monty Python sketch.

There’s little doubt which sketch that was, though the Four Yorkshiremen were originally seen in an earlier television programme, At Last the 1948 Show, and the sketch was written and performed by Marty Feldman, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor, as well as John Cleese. You know, I think we’ve found a hill I will die on.

A radical reading of the Four Yorkshiremen is possible – we are laughing at the self-aggrandisement of the rich as they tell increasingly incredible stories of their own childhoods – but Vickery’s fellow students found the very idea of poverty amusing and old fashioned. It’s become just one more of those odd notions that private school pupils tease one another out of holding so they can be sure of fitting in.

Which may be why, if British novelists wrote of nothing but the experiences of the bright poor boy in the Fifties and early Sixties, they now seldom mention the working class at all.

Anna Tarrant praises Ed Davey's celebration of fatherhood and says we are all better off when men do more of the caring.

"Looking back to that December morning in 2019 I don't think any of us could have imagined that it would come to this. That picture of Boris Johnson, arms aloft celebrating victory, was a painful one for those of us on the opposition benches. Five years later his ejection from the scene has not saved the party whose reputation he did so much to damage, and the divisions he encouraged threaten to engulf them." Christine Jardine asks if the Tories are facing the equivalent of the Liberal party’s 1922 election disaster.

"A decade ago, the Islamic State swept through northern Iraq and declared a ‘caliphate’ and soon after launched a genocidal assault on Iraq’s Yezidi minority, murdering Yezidi men and capturing woman and girls as sex slaves. Now, six years after IS was defeated, accountability for those horrific crimes is in doubt." Deb Amos on the failure of the international community to hold anyone to account for the Yezidi genocide.

Richard Carr reviews a new book on cross-party politics in Britain since the second world war - Clegg, Cameron and all.

Meth-Addict Fish, Aggro Starlings - not heavy-metal bands but the result of pharmaceutical compounds polluting the ecosphere. Patrick Greenfield reports on a worrying trend.

Philip Cowley and Matthew Bailey offer a history of fringe parliamentary candidates: "At the Crosby by-election in 1981 [Lt Commander Bill] Boaks shared the ballot paper with Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim-bus-stop-F'tang-F'tang-Olé-Biscuitbarrel, although the returning officer took the understandable decision to shorten it to Tarquin Biscuitbarrel. Tarquin (original name: John Desmond Dougrez-Lewis) had his origins in a Monty Python spoof on election night coverage."

Well done to the Mirror for winning our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges have again recommended a video to accompany this post. It's not that it's a bad choice, it's the principle of the thing. This is my blog.

But I shall have to make enquiries about the extent of their powers before I tell them to stick it up their wigs.

I remember the phrase "Take this plane to Cuba" from my primary school years in the late Sixties and early Seventies. You would, as I recall, hear it as a punchline in comedy sketches or see it as a caption on newspaper cartoons.

To understand why the phrase was so widely known, you can read a 2016 article on Vox by Libby Nelson:

The hijacking of EgyptAir Flight 181 on Tuesday morning, when a man claimed to be wearing a suicide vest and demanded to be taken to Cyprus, was surely terrifying for the 64 people on board. But after it came to a conclusion on a Cyprus runway with the arrest of the hijacker, the safe release of the passengers, and no bloodshed, what was most striking was how retro the whole drama seemed.

Before 9/11, this is what hijackings were like: Individuals driven by personal gain or idiosyncratic requests diverted planes to places they weren't supposed to go. These hijackings ended with inconvenience, not with mass tragedy.

And this type of hijacking happened with stunning frequency in the United States. Between 1968 and 1972, more than 130 American airplanes were hijacked. Sometimes there was more than one hijacking on the same day. In a 2013 book, The Skies Belong to Us, Brendan I. Koerner, a contributing editor at Wired magazine, dubbed the period the "golden age of hijacking."

The hijackers, or "skyjackers," wanted flights to communist Cuba, or millions of dollars in ransom, or maybe just an outlet for their rage and frustration. And for years, airlines largely gave in, fearing that customers would find metal detectors at the airport more off-putting than the possibility of a midair diversion.

That site also has the video of a (not terribly funny) Monty Python sketch that I have posted above.

Or, as I first did, you can listen to the podcast American History Hit's episode on D.B. Cooper & the 70s Hijacking Craze.

L.P Hartley was right: the past is a foreign country.

"The self-styled free market task force seems to be yet another dark money outfit in British politics – led by senior figures from US and UK free market think tanks who have been funded by fossil fuels, the Koch Brothers, climate change deniers, the tobacco industry and much more." Peter Geoghegan looks behind the scenes of Liz Truss's new 'growth commission'.

Anny Shaw and Hannah McGivern find that funding cuts and a weak economy have sent Britain’s visual arts into crisis.

"For six decades, To Kill a Mockingbird has been taught with the comfort (and power) of white students (and their mostly white teachers) in mind. Ensuring this comfort has led millions to an absurd reading of a seminal work of literature." Andrew Simmons on teaching America's 'national novel'.

"While his florid, stentorian contributions to Dadaist 60s trad-jazz mutilators the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band influenced everyone from the Beatles to Monty Python, a peripatetic path through the 70s saw him appear as the Master of Ceremonies on Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells and as a regular lyricist for Steve Winwood, before his 1978 solo LP, the grandiloquent, gothic spoken-word masterpiece Sir Henry at Rawlinson End." Andrew Male has helped rescue Viv Stanshall's unfinished work.

Alex Grant says Northampton needs to grow up and become a city. On a personal note, it took me some years of exploration to realise what a historic place it is.

Rose Staveley-Wadham on baseball's fascinating history in Britain. By 1938 the game had taken such a hold that the British team beat the American one at the inaugural Amateur World Series tournament.

This morning Twitter is working normally on my PC, but when I try to use the app on my phone it's a disaster area.

My conclusion is that Twitter has major technical problems and Elon Musk's announcement about rate limits was a calculated move to distract us from them. It seems to have distracted the media too, as journalists continue to report Musk's remarks at face value and neglect to ask what is really happening with Twitter.

Here is an honourable exception.

I don't want to be one of those people who believes that everything in the news is there only to distract you from something else, and that if something isn't in the news it's because someone has taken out a super-injunction) but I find the phrase 'dead cat' springing unbidden to mind.

There's a programme about Les Dawson that used to be shown regularly on high-numbered TV channels. One of the people who pays tribute to Dawson is John Cleese, who was a regular in two series of Sez Les.

Cleese describes Dawson as "an autodidact, a very smart guy who was fascinated by words " and mentions in passing that something the Monty Python team had in common was an interest in and affection for music hall.

And that interest in music hall may explain why Leslie Sarony is in the cast of The Crimson Permanent Assurance, the short that begins Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

As I blogged last month, Sarony was the composer of Jollity Farm, a song from 1929 that the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band recorded in the 1960s, and also played Uncle Staveley in the final series of Peter Tinniswood's I Didn't Know You Cared in 1979. The Crimson Permanent Assurance was made in 1983.

So here's another of Sarony's songs. One of my pet theories is that the Victorians were less Victorian than we imagine and that much of that awful English mania for respectability actually dates from the early decades of the 20th century.

But Ain't It Grand to Be Bloomin' Well Dead! reminds us that there was a great appetite in popular culture for laughing at respectability then too.

I remember it 1971, when it served as the theme song for That's Your Funeral, a BBC sitcom starring Bill Fraser that was cancelled after one series but was still turned into a feature film, as many sitcoms were in those days, by Hammer.

One final discovery: it turns out that Jollity Farm was a riposte to a song from the previous year called Misery Farm.

At Last the 1948 Show is part of the prehistory of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Written and performed by Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graham Chapman, John Cleese and Marty Feldman, this sketch show was broadcast nationally by ITV in 1967.

Here talkingto Dick Fiddy about it in front of a British Film Institute audience, John Cleese is agreeably surprised at how good it was. 

Though it's worth pointing out that, well before Python, Round the Horne and The Goon Show were into subverting broadcasting conventions. Both dragged the BBC announcer into the show, for instance.

And a point that's got me into more than one Twitter argument: the Four Yorkshiremen sketch comes from At Last the 1948 Show and not Monty Python.

But you try an' tell the young people of today that, and they won't believe you.

"It was an absolute stain on our country that we once kept children locked up in immigration removal centres, such as Dungavel in Scotland. To make the mistake once was bad enough. To return to the policy would be unconscionable." Alistair Carmichael says detaining child migrants is a stain on our country will not deter small boats.

"The review’s findings suggest that, although Washington has since 2014 imposed multiple rounds of sanctions on Russia due to its invasion of Ukraine, the Justice Department under the Obama and Trump administrations did not prioritize prosecutions related to that war - filing relatively few cases until after Putin escalated it in 2022." Nahal Toosi examines how the US let Russia off the hook after its annexation of Crimea.

Samira Ahmed on the uncovering of the tape of the Beatles concert at Stowe School: "He brought along an extract that we played through the stage PA system turned up as loud as possible to match the experience he’d had back in 1963. It was emotional for all us, including two young A level music students who came along to listen. It was like time travel."

Pen Hemingway lays bare the brutal history of British prison hulks.

"The film met with both critical acclaim and considerable controversy upon its original release. But thinking about Life of Brian as a parody of biblical epics is both the best way to appreciate it and serves, paradoxically, to illuminate the aspects of the Christian faith that even Monty Python could not puncture." Jack Butler offers a Christian reading of Python.

Mike Klein looks at the chess career of Emory Tate, father of the obnoxious Andrew. who was a trailblazing African-American player.

We now go over live to the Leicester Labour Party.

From the Leicester Mercury:

Labour members have responded with fury after 19 sitting councillors were told they will not be able to defend their seats in May’s elections. The decision has been slammed as undemocratic, an attempt to silence members, and a demonstration of "utter contempt" by those not selected.

The choice of who can and cannot stand in May’s election was taken out of the hands of local party members after national Labour figures decided to take control. They announced the decision to overrule any local decision making in February, saying "power struggles and organisational issues" could damage Labour candidates' prospects in both the local council and city mayoral elections.

That decision was widely condemned by local members at the time as undemocratic. The national party has now made its decision – and 19 Labour councillors, some of whom have served their wards for decades, will be deselected and not be able to stand for Labour.

Already Patrick Kitterick has said he will stand for the Greens in May, while Rita Patel will challenge Sir Peter Soulsby as an independent in the mayoral election.

Now the Mercury says more of the 19 councillors have

declared they will be standing as independent members for their wards, while others are considering joining with other political groups.

What with the influence of the mayor on a council with a huge Labour majority, and the national party taking control of selections, there doesn't seem much room for democracy in the party in Leicester any more.

Judging by the vacant expressions of my younger readers, I had better explain that the idea of having to get into the fish tank and sing Jerusalem because someone has said a certain word to someone else comes from the Monty Python sketch Buying a Bed.

As I first came across it on an LP of theirs I got for Christmas in 1973, it must be at least 50 years old. It's as though, when I joined Liberator 10 years later, the magazine had a column that required a knowledge of comedy from the 1930s. 

I always say that the problem with this Diary is not that Lord Bonkers is getting old, but that I am getting old.

Be that as it may, this entry ends our week at Bonkers Hall.

Friday

To the new Liberal Democrat HQ in Vincent Square (or that may be the name of the helpful chap on the desk – I got caught in the rain on the way back to St Pancras and my notes have run rather). 

I arrive to find the place in turmoil: our own dear leader, Ed Davey, has placed a bucket over his head and is resisting all entreaties to take it off. Vincent Square (if that is his name) explains that someone has just mentioned the European Union to Davey, and that the only way to persuade him to remove the aforementioned pail is for us all to climb into the ornamental fish tank that dominates the entrance lobby and sing ‘Jerusalem’. 

So your diarist, Vincent Square, the lovely Sarah Green MP and a bicycle courier who arrived at the moment juste brave the angelfish and give it both barrels. Sure enough, our leader is soon bucketless.

Conversation turns to what we shall do if another MP mentions the EU (perhaps quite innocently) while Davey is seated in the chamber. I suggest keeping a collapsible canvass tank behind the Speaker’s chair so that backbench Lib Dem MPs can leap into it at a moment’s notice to sing. 

“But how would we fill it?” asks one Bright Young Thing. “Oh,” I airily reply, “through the usual channels.”

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

The great man was born on 7 February 1812.

This clip is from David Lean's 1948 film of Oliver Twist and the boy himself is played by John Howard Davies, who grew up to produce Monty Python, Fawlty Towers and The Good Life.

I once blogged about a Radio 4 documentary on his experience of making the film:

Years before I had a blog, I wrote an article on Oliver Twist. In it I said that, while the workhouse boys in Oliver! are obviously stage school brats, those in Lean's film look as though they would eat you given half a chance.

Davies confirmed this was pretty much the case. Describing the scene in which the boys peer through the window at the workhouse board enjoying a banquet, he said that in 1948 none of the child actors had ever seen a meal like that in real life.

Jethro Tull, God bless them, have a new album. RökFlöte. coming out in April. 

To think that I saw them at the NEC in 1986 with some colleagues from Golden Wonder and we made jokes about them being old even then.

And it wasn't the best era to see them either. Ian Anderson had decided he wanted to be a guitar hero, so there were too many Mark Knopfler imitations and not enough flutes and cod pieces.

Here they are 10 years before that, playing a version of Thick as a Brick, their album from 1972.

Anderson once said of it:

"Monty Python lampooned the British way of life," says Anderson. "Yet did it in such a way that made us all laugh while celebrating it. To me, that’s what we as a band did on Thick As A Brick. We were spoofing the idea of the concept album, but in a fun way that didn’t totally mock it."

I'm down so many rabbit holes at the moment that I feel like a portly ferret, but here's a little more on Eric Idle at the Phoenix Theatre in Leicester.

The Leicester Daily Mercury for 7 December 1965 ran a short profile of him, complete with a Rutlesesque photo:

Phoenix Face

Cambridge graduate, Eric Idle, who has joined the Phoenix Theatre company for the current production "Oh, What A Lovely War" and "One For The Pot," gained his first theatrical experience with The Footlights company and the university's Amateur Drama Club.

He went to the Edinburgh Festival for two consecutive years with university groups and after obtaining an Arts degree in English went into cabaret at The Rehearsal Room and The Blue Angel. Eric's choice of career followed his interest in script writing and acting for the Cambridge revues.

One of the Cambridge productions was "The Tempest," directed Carey Harrison - new assistant director at the Phoenix.

Eric has written material for the B.B.C. 3 programme, and is releasing a comedy record with the next few months. He is also writing a musical.

The record must have been The Tiger, written with John Cameron, whose release 'this week' was announced in the 1 February 1966 edition of the Mercury. I can find no other reference to it online.

It does occur to me, though, that 'Eric Idol' would have been a great name for a Larry Parnes artist.