Liberals hold Harborough (112 years ago)

Thanks to Liberal History for pointing out on Twitter that today is the 112th anniversary of a by-election in the Harborough constituency:

17th June 1904 

The Liberals hold the Harborough by-election 

The Hon. Philip Stanhope, the younger son of the 5th Earl, wins the Harborough by-election in Leicestershire following the resignation of the sitting Liberal MP, J.W. Logan, increasing the Liberal majority by over 400 votes. Stanhope had previously been Liberal MP for Wednesbury (1886-92) and Burnley (1893-1900). 

He was strongly anti war, opposing British participation in the Boer War and was sometime president of the National Peace League. He was also vocally against woman’s suffrage and in 1914 was attacked by a suffragette at Euston Station who mistook him for Asquith. He was raised to the peerage in 1906 as Baron Weardale.

The fact that Harborough chose a candidate who had lost his previous seat because of his opposition to the Boer War suggests the local Liberals were good radicals in those days, even if Stanhope was not sound on women's suffrage.

J.W. Logan was to return as MP for Harborough at the general election of December 1910 and represent the seat until he resigned for a second time in 1916.

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Clement Freud documentary is on ITV tonight at 11.05

The ITV documentary that gave rise to the revelations about Clement Freud is on ITV tonight at 11.05.

You can find a full preview on the Radio Times site:

The programme is being broadcast in the Exposure strand, the ITV documentary series that first exposed the seriousness of the crimes of Jimmy Savile.

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Clement Freud exposed as a child abuser

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A shocking story has appeared on the Telegraph site this evening:

Sir Clement Freud, the former broadcaster and politician, was exposed last night as a paedophile who sexually abused girls as young as 10 for decades. 

Freud, who died in 2009, spent years abusing a girl who he brought up as a daughter, and violently raped a teenager while he was an MP. 

His widow, Lady Freud, has apologised to his victims, saying she is “shocked, deeply saddened and profoundly sorry” for what her husband of 58 years did to them.

It goes on to say:

Freud was unmasked as a child sex abuser after one of his victims contacted ITV’s Exposure documentary team, who also broke the story of Jimmy Savile’s paedophilia four years ago. 

Sylvia Woosley said Freud befriended her family in 1948, when he was working at a hotel in the South of France, and started abusing her when she was 10. 

Four years later, following a family crisis, her mother asked Freud and his wife Jill if they would look after Mrs Woosley, and she found herself living under the same roof as her abuser, being brought up as a daughter. The abuse continued until she managed to move away when she was 19. 

Another woman told ITV that Freud started abusing her in the 1970s, when she was 11, and eventually raped her when she was 18.

The story also makes links with the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. I have read before that he befriended her parents in the aftermath, but in following these celebrity abuse stories I have formed the view that a reference to the McCann case is a reliable sign that the author is a member of tinfoil bat brigade.

The 1970s and the Liberal Party of that era seem an even stranger, sicker place tonight.

Later. This story is also on the front page of the Daily Mail.

Later still. Exposure: Abused and Betrayed – A Life Sentence airs on ITV at 11:05pm on tomorrow.

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John Creasey, creator of George Gideon, was a Liberal candidate

John Gregson as Commander George Gideon

Writing about the Gideon's Way police series from the 1960s the other day, I suggested that John Gregson played the hero as "a world-weary liberal".

I may have been on to something because, as an article by Ian Millsted from the Journal of Liberal History once revealed, the author of the books the series was based on was himself a liberal - and a Liberal

John Creasey, who wrote the books, once said:

I have been a political animal all my life. At twelve I was organising and speaking at street corners for the Liberal Party.

Creasey fought Bournemouth West for the party in 1950, finishing third with 17 per cent of the vote. This was a very respectable vote for a Liberal candidate in this era, though the party had come second in the seat in 1945.

In the second half ot the 1960s, though he was often seen in Liberal circles, Creasey fought a number of parliamentary by-elections to promote the All-Party Alliance, He had set this up himself in 1996.

Millsted says:

Its principal aim was to see elected a government of the best people from all parties in order to sort out the problems of the day.

In the last of these by-elections, Oldham West in 1968, he beat the Liberal candidate into fourth place.

The aim of the All-Party Alliance may sound naive, but Jeremy Thorpe was to call for something similar in the general elections of 1974.

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Why Labour did surprisingly well in the South of England yesterday

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One of the features of yesterday's local elections in England was that Labour managed to hold on to what the Telegraph calls "key southern outposts like Exeter, Southampton, Crawley and Slough".

Earlier today I heard someone on radio or the television suggest that this was because Jeremy Corbyn's views go down better with university-educated Southern voters than they do with more traditional working-class voters.

And I thought of the Richmond and Barnes constituency in the 1983 general election.

This was a knife-edge contest between the Conservatives and the Liberal Party (or Liberal Alliance, as we called ourselves in those days).

I was to find myself arriving on a doorstep 10 minutes before the polls closed, just as a Conservative activist arrived there too. We compared notes and found we were chasing the same voter.

The Liberals were eventually to lose by 74 votes and I am convinced we would have won with a more dynamic candidate.

On the last weekend of the contest the young activists (this was a long time ago) were sent out to call on the Labour supporters identified in our canvass and ask them to consider a tactical vote for the Liberals.

This approach received two distinct reactions. Working class voters were generally happy to consider the idea, even if they had a Labour posters in their window.

Middle-class Labour voters, typically teachers, however, were often offended to be asked. You had to vote for what you believed, they told me, even if your candidate had no chance of winning.

It is this second group of voters, I suspect, that Jeremy Corbyn appeals to. Which means that he may well be surprisingly successful in maintaining his party's Southern outposts.

But it also means that he may struggle to resist the appeal of Ukip to working-class Labour voters.

Incidentally, the Labour candidate I was urging people not to support was Keith Vaz. I think I did the right thing.

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Police to reopen Jeremy Thorpe case

From ITV News:

An investigation into the alleged involvement of the former leader of the Liberal Party in a plot to kill is to be reopened. 

Avon and Somerset Police has passed the files from the original investigation about Jeremy Thorpe, former MP for North Devon, to colleagues in Wales. 

The alleged hit man Dennis Meighan told The Mail on Sunday that he met representatives of Thorpe in 1975. He claims they wanted Norman Scott, said to have been the MP's gay lover, silenced. 

However a few days later Mr Meighan says he backed out of the plot and told the police. But he alleges that all mentions of Jeremy Thorpe in his police statement were removed. He believes that someone in Whitehall covered up his claims. He was never called to give evidence at Mr Thorpe's trial along with three other men accused of attempting to murder Scott. All four men were acquitted at the high profile trial.

First Lord Lucan and now this. Seeing the scandals of my teenage years being recycled makes me feel young again. Can John Stonehouse be far behind?

The odd thing about this is that Meighan's story was known at the time of the Thorpe trial. As I blogged in December 2014:

Here is Auberon Waugh writing in the Spectator on 5 June 1981. Among six questions that remain to be answered about the affair, he lists:

Why Denis Meighan, the man who sold Newton his gun, was not allowed to mention Newton's offer of £1,000 to do the job - of murdering Scott - for him.

So it may be that the police are concerned about something else.

And I think I know what it is.

One of Thorpe's co-accused was a nightclub owner from South Wales by the name of George Deakin.

As I revealed earlier in 2014, he was the uncle of the guitarist in Black Lace.

You know: "Agadoo doo doo, push pineapple, shake the tree."

Lock them up, I say. Lock up the whole bloody family.

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Charles Sydney Buxton (1884-1911)

I went to the antiques market in Market Harborough this morning. The best thing there was a table of ephemera. On it I found this little piece of Liberal Party history, which obviously dated from one of the 1910 general elections.

Charles Sydney Buxton, it turned out, fought Woodbridge at the January 1910 election. It had been gained from the Conservatives in the landslide of 1906 by Robert Everett (a veteran fighter for farmers' interests against the landlords).

Charles proved unable to hold it and the Woodbridge division remained Conservative until it was abolished after the 1945 election. The prominent Liberal journalist Roger Fulford managed a second place there as late as 1929.

Charles's father, grandfather and great grandfather were all Liberal MPs. His father served in the cabinet under both Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith.

His mother was Constance Mary Lubbock, which makes him a kinsman of Eric Avebury who died today.

Charles did not live to contest another election. He died from peritonitis in 1911 aged 27.

Not so long ago he would have been described as a forgotten figure. But thanks to the internet you can read all about his short life.

Go the University of Toronto website and you will find a PDF of a book about Charles commissioned by his father - Charles Sydney Buxton: A Memoir by H. Sanderson Furniss:

I had thought of calling this last chapter "The End," but on thinking it over I changed the title to "Plans for the Future"; for it was not the end. 

In the Sussex Memorial scheme, founded to bring education to the agricultural labourers in the Sussex villages ; in the Buxton Memorial Scholarship, which brings each year an agricultural labourer as a student to Ruskin College; in the annual scholarship, founded in his memory and provided by past and present students of the College; in Buxton Cottage on the Chiltern Hills, bought by the Workers' Educational Association and opened in his memory as a resting-place for those who are devoting their lives to working-class education; above all, in the hearts and lives of those who were inspired by his example, Charlie still lives.

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Big Brother in a Northamptonshire park

I came across this notice in a park in sunny Rothwell this morning. How long have the authorities felt themselves free to use such totalitarian imagery?

When I was a child I acquired the idea that not having to have an identity card was part of our reward for winning the war. As a teenager it seemed almost a moral duty to read Nineteen Eight-Four to learn about the sort of society Britain Was Not Like.

Today we have lost this instinct for defining ourselves by contrasting Britain with tyrannies. The Soviet Union has gone, while drawing parallels with Nazi Germany makes the cool kids laugh at you. Godwin's law and all that.

Note too the subject matter of this notice. Have a million Focus leaflets demanding that councils do something about minor nuisances brought us to this? Must Liberals and Liberal Democrats bear a share of the blame?

Whatever the reason, we have won the victory over ourselves. We love Big Brother

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Happy Birthday to the oldest living former Liberal MP

James Davidson is 89 today - thanks to Mr Memory from telling me.

He gained Aberdeenshire West (roughly equivalent to the modern Kincardine & Deeside seat) for the Liberal Party.

Wikipedia says of him:

During the 1966 general election campaign one of Davidson's main policy points was the establishment of a development authority for the North East of Scotland (on the lines of the Highlands and Islands Development Board) and he was a strong advocate on behalf of small farmers and of improving communications in remote areas like the Highlands by improving road links to the major cities. He also campaigned for better air and sea links with Scandinavia.

Davidson was Liberal spokesman on foreign affairs and defence issues in Parliament, a particularly important brief given the ongoing war in Vietnam and the arguments over Britain's role East of Suez. 

In February 1967, he took a leading role in the opposition to the government's plans to raise fees for foreign students at British universities and introduced a Bill to give the people of Scotland and Wales referendums on devolution. This was as part of the Liberal strategy to draw the sting of the increasing popularity of the Scottish National Party and re-establish the Liberal position on 'home rule all round' with the Scottish electorate.

He chose not to defend his seat at the 1970 general election. Laura Grimond fought it for the Liberals but lost to the Conservative Colonel Colin 'Mad Mitch' Mitchell.*

By contrast, Eric Avebury is a mere boy of 87.

* Some sources suggest he was madder than Mad Jack McMad, the winner of last year's 'Mr. Madman' competition.

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Liberal Democrats will compromise and do want national power

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Miranda Green has an article in the Guardian looking at the prospects for Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the coming year.

I was struck by this passage:

For the Lib Dems, polling day was cruel: not only a massacre of MPs, but a rebuke to the very idea of power-sharing. Coalition had blunted the party’s identity and destroyed at a stroke its appeal to anti-establishment protest voters. 

Tim Farron, never a minister, has chosen “a fresh start” as his new backdrop: while careful not to disown the Clegg era, he is more at home with the Liberal tradition of dissent than the necessary compromises of government. 

Activists in both opposition parties have dug out dog-eared copies of the old scripts: the one (Labour) rehearsing traditional scenes of internal feuding, the other (Lib Dem) doggedly clawing back council seats and denouncing Westminster as a distraction from local campaigning.

There are two questionable assumptions here: that Liberal Democrat members do not grasp the necessity for compromise in politics and that there is a conflict between local campaigning and winning power nationally, with those members' hearts being in the former.

First, compromise. For the 1983 general election the Liberal Party agreed to form an alliance with the SDP, standing down its candidates in half the constituencies.

A few years later the Liberals voted to merge with the SDP to form a new party that its leader hoped would be known as the Democrats. The SDP voted the same way, with a larger minority against.

And after the 2010 general election the Lib Dem members voted to join a governing coalition with almost no one against.

When I wrote my post saying we should "accept David Cameron's offer in some form" I thought a) I was being terribly daring and b) that we would go in for some variety of confidence and supply arrangement.

But it turned out that I was being timid and, for better or worse, the membership was keen to endorse Nick Clegg's wish for a full coalition. No sign of an unwillingness to compromise there.

On the contrary, at least in those Alliance years of the 1980s compromise had an almost mystical attraction for Liberals. Many gave the impression of believing that, if only we compromised on enough things, we were bound to win power.

Looking back, this may have been a generational difference. Many of the older Liberal activists I met had been brought into the party by Jo Grimond and were tired after years of campaigning. Not surprisingly, they welcomed the short cut to power that the Alliance appeared to offer.

Me? I was young enough to have energy in those days and stupid enough to find ideological purity appealing.

Second, national power and local campaigning. That enthusiasm for coalition in 2010 does not suggest any ambivalence about taking power nationally.

Nor is there any necessary opposition between the local and national. What was remarkable in the early years of the Lib Dems, particularly under the influence of Chris Rennard, was the way that local success was afterwards turned into victories in Westminster elections.

Besides, local campaigning is also about power - there was as a time recently when the Lib Dems ran many large cities across the country. If some party members became disenchanted with Nick Clegg it was in part because they felt he had lost them that power.

Nor was the party a stranger to power before Nick came along. We were in government at Holyrood before he was even elected to the European parliament.

The great problem with the Liberal Democrats is not the two discussed above: it is (and I suspect Miranda would agree with me here) is that we have failed to establish a clear identity in the public mind.

But this post has gone on long enough and I will write about that another day.

Later. Miranda has kindly replied:

@lordbonkers I don't disagree with any of your blog. My preoccupation in this piece is more with what voters want and how they judge LDs

— Miranda Green (@greenmiranda) January 1, 2016

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Jeremy Thorpe and Des Wilson go shopping

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A scene from the Hove by-election of 1973.

Des Wilson was already well known as a campaigner, particularly as the founding director of Shelter, and joined the Liberal Party in order to fight this election. He later became a significant figure in the party and in the Liberal Democrats in that party's early years.

The Liberals had not fought Hove in 1970 (though they did achieve 16 per cent there in the 1966 general election), when the Conservatives had won 69 per cent of the vote in a straight contest with Labour.

In what was seen as a brave by-election campaign in an unwinnable seat, Des Wilson came second with 37 per cent of the vote. He was less than 5000 votes behind the winning Tory.

Today Hove is a Labour/Tory marginal. Labour won it in 1997, held it until 2010 and then won it back in 2015.

I guess the retired colonels and their ladies have died out, hitting the Conservative vote.

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