Six of the Best 572

Mark Pack and David Howarth have published a second edition of their 'The 20% Strategy: Building a core vote for the Liberal Democrats'.

Michael Oakeshott is an important 20th-century British Conservative thinker. Aurelian Craiutu reviews his notebooks.

Richard Gooding looks at the trashing of John McCain, which helped George W. Bush win the Republican nomination in 2000.

Like Ray Gosling and Alan Moore, Jeremy Seabrook is a product of working-class Northampton. Here he writes of growing up gay in the town in the years after World War II.

"Robert Mitchum considers The Night of the Hunter one of his most impressive roles. Gentle, subtle and seductive, but deranged and psychotic, Mitchum’s character is one of the scariest villains in film history." Cinephilia & Beyond on the only film directed by Charles Laughton.

"It was while working on Time Out’s annual pub guide in 2000 that I heard the tale of the Camden castles. A reviewer claimed that there were once four Camden pubs with castle in their name – the Edinboro, Windsor, Dublin and Pembroke – and these had originally been built for navvies digging Regent’s Canal." Peter Watts gently explodes a myth.

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A witness statement by a victim of Greville Janner

Only a few months ago the press was finding conspiracies of powerful child abusers under every stone.

Now, judging by the headlines about Lord Bramall and John Inman, the same papers are incensed if the rich and famous are even investigated.

The truth, no doubt, is somewhere in between.

So to remind ourselves that such people can be guilty of such offences, let's look at one of the witness statements alleging abuse by Greville Janner.

It was reproduced in the Daily Mail and on The Needle in April 2015 and begins:

From my earliest childhood I never knew my parents and believe that I was in the care of the Leicestershire Local Authority from when I was about two weeks of age. I recall that I was fostered by a family called Wilkinson ... until I was about seven years of age when I went to live at The Cottage Homes at Countesthorpe, which was a Local Authority owned establishment.

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Shrewsbury in colour in 1959

There's no sound, but there is plenty of great colour footage in this 1959 film of the last day of Smithfield cattle market in the centre of Shrewsbury.

Click on the image above to go to the film on the BFI site.

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Lord Bonkers' Diary: Corbyn sends for Christopher Robin Milne

The old boy turns out to have known Labour's new Executive Director of Strategy and Communications since he was so high.

Jeremy Corbyn sends for Christopher Robin Milne

There is only one area of our national life where the hereditary principle holds greater sway than it does here in the aristocracy. I refer, of course, to the press and broadcasting. There are whole neighbourhoods of London where it is impossible to toss a brick without hitting a Coren or a Dimbleby – not that one would try too hard to avoid doing so. Thus I was not surprised when the son of my old friend Milne went into journalism nor when he became director of communications for the new leader of the Labour Party.

I remember him as a golden-haired little fellow in the Nursery astride his rocking horse in a sailor suit or kneeling at the foot of his bed saying his prayers. Less happily, I remember him down from Winchester or Oxford talking the most awful rot about the need for Socialism. Why, he even spoke up for Stalin! I don’t think he would have been so keen on him if he had met the fellow as I did. Then came the Guardian and endless articles with titles like ‘Did 20 Million Really die?’ Now he sits at Corbyn’s right hand recommending purges every second day.

No, I cannot pretend to care for Christopher Robin Milne.

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

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

A shadow cabinet maker

Giving Isis one up the snoot

Andrew Neil's press gang

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