As I mentioned in yesterday's post on the botched attempt to oust Nick Clegg in 2014, the new Liberator is out. Which means, whether we like it or not, it is time to spend some more time at Bonkers Hall.
A shadow cabinet maker
My cabinetmaker calls this morning to effect some repairs to one of my Sheraton sideboards. They are occasioned by too vigorous a celebration of the anniversary of Graham Tope's victory at Sutton and Cheam – really, once the members of the Liberal Democrat Women’s executive committee get a few pints of Smithson & Greaves Northern Bitter down them no piece of furniture is safe.
I always enjoy watching a skilled tradesman at work, but I am puzzled by the man he has brought with him. At every turn he exclaims "You’re doing that all wrong" or "I wouldn’t do it like that". When the fellow is out of the room, I ask who he is. "Oh," comes the reply, "he’s a shadow cabinet maker".
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.
The new Liberator is out, which means a limited amount of copy from it is available on the magazine's website.
From there you can download a PDF of an article by Seth Thévoz - "A Very Nearly Successful Coup."
It tells the story of the attempt to topple Nick Clegg as Liberal Democrat leader and argues that it came far nearer to succeeding that was generally realised at the time:
What destroyed the coup was when the second wave of MPs got ‘the wobbles’. A disciplined media grid had set out a detailed timetable of MPs who would go public in waves of two or three at a time, staggered with other parliamentarians, to build a sense of momentum.
On day one, a members’-led open letter calling on Clegg to resign was released as per the plan. (This was never a petition as claimed – it was an open letter which envisioned 20 signatures. It accidentally secured over 400.)
On day two, the first two MPs went ‘over the top’, publicly calling for Clegg’s resignation, and were joined by a third MP who wasn’t scheduled to declare until several days later, jumping the gun.
Then on day three, we were badly let down by one MP. The response of his colleagues was “If he’s not going, I’m out” – which spread like a chain reaction among MPs and peers. The activists roped in to do the MPs’ dirty work were left holding the baby.
The moral is clear. If you want to know what is going on in the Liberal Democrats you should subscribe to Liberator.
On I promised a Sunday music choice inspired by the great drought of 1976. And here it is.
The other day I was followed on Twitter by Mike Batt, the man behind The Wombles. They were the biggest selling British band of 1974 - and if you look at what else was in the charts that year, you can see why.
By 1976 drugs, Bungo's relationship with a Japanese conceptual artist and the inevitable differences over musical direction had caused the furry creatures to fall out with one another.
The result was that Wellington Womble tried a solo career with a song called Rainmaker. It turns out not be a cover of the Traffic song but a topical song inspired by the drought.
"Aspinall was a total crook," says Sir Rupert [Mackeson] now. "He started in the days when gambling was illegal away from racecourses. His mother Lady Osborne was a real force behind the operation."
Aspinall and his mother were charged with "keeping a common gaming house" but were acquitted on a technicality in 1958. ...
Aspinall opened the Clermont in 1962 after gambling had been legalised and its founder members included five dukes, five marquesses and nearly 20 earls.
Aspinall was determined to relieve the bluebloods of their money and use the funds to finance his private zoo where he bred tigers.
"He employed crooked dealers and used a wide range of techniques for cheating," says Sir Rupert. "He encouraged rich people, young aristocrats and in particular rich divorcees, to come to his club. A lot of people were ruined. Lucan lost a fortune and so became a house player for Aspinall."
Some of the money Aspinall fleeced from the aristocracy went to fund his zoos and wildlife breeding projects. But lest you feel too warm to him about that, read this anonymous blog post:
Both Howletts and Port Lympne seemed to attract human disaster. Aspinall's daughter-in-law, Louise, was bitten by a tiger cub and needed 15 stitches. A boy of 10 had his arm ripped off by a chimpanzee at Port Lympne, and was awarded £132,000 in damages. Bindu, an English bull elephant, crushed a "bonding" keeper to death at Howletts and later Darren Cockrill, who was crushed by an elephant at Port Lympne in February 2001.
In 1994, the local council banned the keepers from entering the tiger cages after one of their number, Trevor Smith, was killed at Howletts.
My reason for writing about Aspinall, beyond the Lucan and tiger story, is his mother. Because Lady Osborne is also the grandmother of George Osborne.
Her first husband was Dr Robert Aspinall and John was the child of that marriage (though John is said to have discovered in later life that he was not Robert's son and to have found and supported his real father).
Her second was Sir George Osborne. They had four children together, and George Osborne is the son of the third of them.
He was famously christened Gideon, but changed his name to George, in honour of his grandfather who was dead by then, at the age of 13.
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
One of them, as this video from the Shropshire Star shows, is currently the cause of controversy:
A wood and perspex cover protecting the Grade II-listed “African grave” may have to be removed as it does not have permission to be there.
But the locals who made the cover and put it there to save the 200-year-old monument say action needs to be taken now to stop it eroding further.
The grave belongs to a man only identified as ID, who is said to be a native of Africa who died in Bishop’s Castle on September 9 1801.
Such monuments have to be looked after, but the locals say the cover is only temporary.
It is hard not to see this incident as a new Ealing Comedy. An inspector, perhaps played by Raymond Huntley, is dispatched to Shropshire to call the locals to heel.
Once there he is plied with beer from The Three Tuns, shown the wrong churchyard and sent back to Whitehall defeated.
And this part of Shropshire is one of the few places in England where you can still imagine this happening.
I recently saw an old episode of The Green, Green Grass of Home, which is set in the county. An American who had been stationed there as a serviceman decades before wanted to go round the village to see how it had changed.
"Oh it's not changed, sir," came the reply. "If anything it's more like it was now than it was then."
Earlier this week Newsnight reported on a mystery - you can see the report below.
On 11 December a man travelled from Ealing Broadway to Euston and then caught the train to Manchester. He then made his way to Saddleworth Moor, where his body was found the next day.
He has still not been identified, which is mysterious enough. But, as Newsnight reported, Greater Manchester Police have added to the mystery.
Perhaps fuelled by watching too many reruns of Lewis on ITV3, they have suggested that the man's death may be connected with an air crash that took place near where the body was found.
In 1949 a British European Airways Douglas DC-3 on a flight from Belfast Nutts Corner Airport to Manchester came down at Saddleworth. You can see some scraps of footage of the wreckage above.
The crew and 21 of the 29 passengers on board died. But among the survivors were two little boys. That is what interested the police. Could one of them be the mystery body, grown old and gone back for a final pilgrimage to the site of the crash?
The boy survivors were Stephen Evans (5) and Michael Prestwich (2).
Michael, the 2016 press agrees, died at the age of 12 in a railway accident. It sounds as though he did not have the misfortune to be caught up in two disasters but was hit by a train on the way home from school.
A search of The British Newspaper Archive does not reveal a report of his death, but does throw up headlines like 'Michael (2) gets family fortune' and 'Boy who survived air crash inherits £35,000,' because the rest of his family died at Saddleworth.
But could the body be Stephen Evans?
No. Because, as Newsnight revealed, he is now a distinguished professor and lives on the south coast.
The latest theory is that the mystery man is Hugh Toner from Armagh, who has not seen his family for 20 years.
The moral, as ever, is that the recent past is a stranger place than we think and that stories that once hogged the headlines are soon forgotten.
