Fred Titmus goes to the opera

In his latest book Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and the Mind, Mike Brearley writes of being an intellectual among professional sportsmen and turns it into a reflection on the accident of our birth:

Similar cynicism came my way when I was doing philosophy in my early days playing cricket for Middlesex Fred Titmus, the senior player (whose first game for Middlesex in 1949 coincided with the first of my father's two games, so that after Fred played in my last game at Lords In 1982 he was able to say he 'saw the father in and the son out'), would prod me with questions like: "This philosophy that we're all paying for, what's it all about?" He was being sarcastic, goading, but he was genuinely curious. 

I took his curiosity seriously, and tried to give some sort of answer. In other lives, with different backgrounds, Fred might have been doing philosophy and I might have been born and brought up in King's Cross and had left school at fourteen, and learned cricket, football and boxing at a local boys' club. (I once had a spare ticket for Benjamin Britain's Peter Grimes, and asked him if he'd like to go. We sat in the gods, and Fred was taken with it.)

Brearley talked to the Australian cricket journalist Gideon Haigh about this book and his life for the podcast Cricket, Et Cetera. It's well worth a listen.

None of the six Young Musician of the Year semi-finalists went to a state school

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I've been moaning about the way the BBC is presenting Young Musician of the Year this time. It's being treated as though it were The X Factor or Master Chef.

Give it a couple more years and the contestants will all have stories about their dying granny's wish that they should play the bassoon and cry when they are put through to the next round.

But there's something even more depressing at work this year, as Richard Morrison points out in an article that has somehow escaped The Times's paywall:

None of the six semi-finalists for the UK’s most famous instrumental competition studies at a state school. Two are at private schools, two at the Royal College of Music, and the other two attend specialist music schools. 

The last are fee-paying too. And although the government offers bursaries to help exceptionally talented children from less wealthy families to attend them, most parents still need to fork out a hefty sum to send their child to one. 

This private-school dominance of the arts and sport is becoming a real problem in Britain. When I was writing about the film Last Resort last month, I said of Paddy Considine: 

I used to wonder what it was that was so different about him, but now suspect  it’s just that he’s a working-class actor in an industry where that has become a rarity.

And amid the Guardian's celebration of Leonard Rossiter, it's a sobering thought that, obliged to go out to work at 18 after his father's death in wartime bombing, it's unlikely that he would have made it as an actor today.

Whataboutery won't get Labour far as a defence

When it became obvious that Labour were going to win a general election in 2024 or 2025, commentators assumed that Keir Starmer would be keen to show how different his government and party were from the Conservative Bacchanalia that had gone before.

Woe betide the first Labour backbencher to be found doing something that appears a little dodgy, the commentators said. They would be out on their ear, as Starmer showed he wasn't going to tolerate any misbehaviour.

It hasn't turned out like that. Nothing happened when, to his shock, the poor condition of flats let by the new Labour MP Jas Athwal was revealed.

And now we have Angela Rayner defending accepting a free holiday in New York because she has declared it and didn't break any rules.

I like Angela Rayner, not least because it's such a change to have a Northern and working-class voice in the cabinet, but this won't do. 

Most voters earn a lot less than Rayner now does and manage to pay for their own holidays. Why should she be any different, particularly when the risk of someone buying undue influence over a senior politician are clear? (I'm sure Lord Alli has acted from generous motives, but not everyone is so public spirited.)

If such a holiday is within the rules, then the rules must change. But rich people do like receiving perks.

The Labour reaction to this news story, and to similar ones like that on Starmer's new wardrobe, has been to say the Tories were worse.

The Tories were worse - much worse - but whataboutery won't get Labour far as a defence when voters were led to expect they would be different.

And, deep down, I have a fear that Keir Starmer has more in common with Boris Johnson than we imagined. He's been very good at saying what people want to hear - a gift that deserted him as soon as he became prime minister - but does he have any strong political beliefs of his own?

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"Labour’s recent creative industries plan, published in March, avoids any talk about new horizons or radical change, either in the country or the wider world. Rather, it presents arts and culture as an existing 'part of 'our national story' and 'our sense of national pride.' References to technology are always balanced with something more traditional." Wessie Du Toit reminds us that Labour has lost Tony Blair's faith in creativity and the future.

Anno Girolami looks at the Flixborough disaster and its place in the battle for workplace safety: "Fifty years ago, at tea time on a Saturday in June, the Nypro chemical plant near the North Lincolnshire village suffered an explosion that killed 28 of the 72 people on site and seriously injured a further 36. Had it been a weekday, many more people would probably have died."

Stuart Whomsley on being a working-class professional: "When a person enters clinical psychology as working class, they are taking on more than a job role; they are entering a culture of middle-class professionalism where the values and way of being in the world of the middle class are the norms."

Children's playgrounds are part of the solution to many problems, argues James Hempsall.

Philippe Broussard searches for a mysterious photographer who snapped occupied Paris and mocked the Nazis.

"No writer before T.H. White, I think, had been so flamboyantly anachronistic in fantasy. The Sword in the Stone (1938) is rooted in anachronism, steeped in it, inhabits it as its element. The clash of periods is embodied in Merlyn, the ancient wizard, who not only lives backwards ... but seems to have lived for hundreds of years, since he remembers all the major incidents and changes of fashion between White’s lifetime and the fifteenth century." Rob Maslen accounts for the magic of The Sword in the Stone.

Laura Marling: Patterns

Laura Marling is wondering whether to sacrifice her career for motherhood, she recently told Rachel Aroesti in the Guardian:

The 34-year-old singer-songwriter, who first found fame with her enchanting yet earthy folk as a teenager, has decided to stop touring completely after becoming a parent. In fact, she might pack in the whole music thing entirely. 

“One of the great privileges of my life is turning out to be that I started my career early, and I can sort of wind it down,” says Marling with cool-headed contemplation: her conversational trademark.

But she's issuing a new album later this year, and this is the first single from it. Aroesti calls it "the kaleidoscopically celestial, meditatively finger-picked Patterns".

Reviewing the album (Patterns in Repeat) on Stereogum, Chris Deville says it's "fleshed out with a gorgeous string arrangement, and it’s liable to send you careening* into your feelings".

Reading that Marling's father is a fifth baronet who ran a recording studio does nothing to dispel the idea that, like so many other sporting and cultural fields, is now largely a preserve of the upper classes. Her husband is "a songwriter turned charcutier".

But it turns out that the first baronet was Sir Samuel Marling, Liberal MP for Gloucestershire West from 1868 to 1874 and for Stroud from 1875 to 1880. So that's all right.

* For some background of this use of 'careen', see World Wide Words.

Social class: Another column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

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.

Sighcology

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.

Looking back at Simon Titley's writings for Liberator

The new issue of Liberator was posted on the magazine website this morning. You can download it free of charge from there - it's Liberator 422.

As well as Lord Bonkers' Diary, which I'll start posting here tomorrow, it includes an article by me on Simon Titley and his writings. The photo here was taken during our lunch in Melton Mowbray.

Does a decade make a difference?

Simon Titley was fond of claiming that he joined the Liberator editorial collective in the 1980s because it was the only way of ensuring that his articles were pasted down in the correct order. Whatever the truth of that, his individual take on politics soon became central to the magazine. He was well informed about machinations inside the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats, interested in new thinking from well beyond those parties and aware of the continuing importance of social class in British politics, when a more common view among his fellow Liberals and Lib Dems was that, yes, class existed, but it was rather bad manners to mention it.

Now that, incredibly, it is approaching ten years since Simon’s death, this seems a good time to look back at some of his contributions to the magazine. You can find a collection of them on the magazine’s website and I’ll give the issue number of those I mention so you can read more for yourself.

Let’s start with a characteristic article. In Liberator 351 Simon looked at Liberals’ fondness for the words ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ and asked what they mean to us in concrete terms. He begins by quoting Ralf Dahrendorf’s account of being held in solitary confinement by the Nazi regime as a teenager and how he had found himself feeling “a visceral desire not to be hemmed in, neither by the personal power of men, nor by the anonymous power of organisations”.

It is that feeling, Simon goes on to say, that Liberal Democrat talk of ‘freedom’ consistently fails to convey:

It is because the Liberal Democrats have such difficulty talking about freedom in meaningful terms that I have been regularly referring to the concept of ‘agency’ in my writing. By ‘agency’, I mean the capacity of individuals to make meaningful choices about their lives and to influence the world around them. I define freedom in these terms because it is better to think of freedom as a practical ability than as a theoretical abstraction. Unfortunately, ‘agency’ is jargon in some professional circles but I shall stick with it because it encapsulates the meaning I seek better than any other word I can think of.

Defining freedom in these terms forces us to realise the extent to which the maldistribution of power is at the root of most of our political ills. It also forces us to realise the relationship between exercising freedom and wellbeing. We can then incorporate freedom as an integral part of our policies across the board, rather than tack it on as an afterthought or omit it altogether.

An insistence on agency also counteracts the classical liberal argument that market forces are the only legitimate means by which people may exercise power.

This emphasis on the importance of the lived experience of abstract ideas can also be found in an article about social class that Simon contributed to Liberator 345. In this case the experience was his own:

Rarely have I encountered worse snobbery than within the Liberal Democrats. The symptoms are wearily familiar; the snide put-downs, the supercilious smirks, the casual discounting of one’s skills or arguments. The low point came when a ‘fellow’ party member once addressed me as “your sort”.

My own experience is more benign. If I transgress the unwritten rules in something I write online, then I’m generally told a particular comment “is unworthy of me”, with the implication that I pass muster the rest of the time. I’ll admit the speed with which public school and Oxbridge ranks close is impressive, but it tells us much about why British society is the way it is.

Sometimes Simon chose less ostensibly political subjects. Here he is in Liberator 331 on the tyranny of ‘cool’, and in particular the British middle-class take on the concept, which gives us:

A world where it is no longer permissible to have hobbies or intellectual pursuits. A world where enthusiasm or erudition earns contempt. A world where, if you commit any of these social sins, you will immediately be slapped down with one of these stock sneers: ‘sad’, ‘trainspotter’, ‘anorak’, ‘anal’ or ‘get a life’.

The phenomenon of ‘cool’ has been examined thoroughly in a pioneering book, Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude by Dick Pountain and David Robins. Cool is essentially about narcissism and ironic detachment. Its modern origins can be traced to American black culture of the 1940s, when young black men adopted a defiant posture as a means of defence. It was then picked up by rebellious white icons of the 50s such as James Dean. During the 60s, ‘cool’ began to be exploited by advertisers as a means of selling consumer goods and in the 70s it moved from the counter-culture into the mainstream. But while ‘cool’ people today affect an air of rebellion, in reality they are conforming to commercially-driven norms.

Because he moved back to Lincoln a couple of years before he died, I was able to meet Simon three times in the East Midlands before he fell ill. Our last meeting was at a very Titleyesque event – the Melton Mowbray Food Festival – and it will be no surprise to anyone who knew him that one of his last articles for this magazine (Liberator 354) was concerned with the decline of the dinner party, suggesting that a turn taken by some television cookery programmes might be in part to blame:

The BBC’s Masterchef (“cooking doesn’t get any tougher than this”) promotes the mistaken idea that, for any dinner party host, nothing less than Michelin-starred restaurant standards will do. It makes people feel ashamed to offer a homespun casserole, even though that is much more practical for a domestic dinner party than Masterchefs labour-intensive, chefy food. Another disincentive is provided by Channel 4’s ‘Come Dine With Me’, which creates the impression that the average dinner party consists of incompetent cooking shared with a bunch of arseholes.

If you want to see Simon’s approach to politics summed up in a single piece of writing, then I recommend ‘Really Facing the Future’ (Liberator 349), which he wrote with another of the party’s original thinkers, David Boyle. It was written in response to ‘Facing the Future’, a paper from the Liberal Democrats that had failed to live up to its title. David and Simon described their article as:

an attempt to encourage Liberal Democrat policy makers to think more radically – partly because the challenges that lie ahead require more radical thinking and partly as an antidote to the idea that party policy is at its most effective when it tentatively suggests a few tiny changes that don’t threaten the status quo. 

Liberal Democrats believe the opposite is true. The justification for the party’s existence is to think radically, to force the political establishment to recognise the real world, and to put radical change into effect. If the party does not do that, it will find that people lose interest and the supply of committed activists begins to dry up.

The Simon Titley articles I enjoyed most were the ones that revealed the machinations of those on the right of the Liberal Democrats who saw political success much as Jeffrey Archer’s novels see success in business. To them, it was the result, not of new thinking and hard work, but of a clever trick, a new alliance or a bit of clever positioning. As many of these people work in public relations, as Simon did himself, he knew whereof he wrote.

So his review of Mark Oaten’s forgotten memoir Screwing Up gives us a pretty brutal portrait of the author:

Oaten … appears to have no fundamental political values but merely jumps from one bandwagon to another. In the 1980s, he joined the SDP but can justify his choice only in terms of it not being Labour or Conservative. In the 1990s, he was an überchampion of the Blairite ‘Project’ but can justify this only in terms of admiring Paddy Ashdown’s leadership. In the 2000s, he became defender of the classical liberal flame when he founded Liberal Future and the Peel Group, but can justify this only in terms of opposing the ‘nanny state’ (having presumably taken the opposite view in the SDP). In a Guardian interview on 8 January 2005, he admitted “I only really got a philosophical belief about three years ago” (i.e. nearly five years after being elected as a Liberal Democrat MP).

But Simon also discusses the book’s strange failure to mention Paul Marshall or Gavin Grant, who were important backers of Oaten’s varied projects. He also reminds us of the name of the Guardian journalist who penned a succession of articles which questioned the competence of various Liberal Democrat MPs while praising Oaten as a ‘rising star’. Who can have briefed her?

Simon also contributed a telling account in Liberator 339 of the reaction of some to the outbreak of Cleggmania that followed the first leaders’ debate in the 2010 general election campaign:

As Lib Dem opinion poll ratings soared, one cheerleader for the right-wing cabal running the campaign wrote on Facebook: “So... 26-34% in the polls, almost all the boost down to media skills and leadership not leaflets and target seats... I’ve got to ask... anyone missing Rennard...?” The complete collapse of the ‘surge’ to 23% on polling day, just 1% more than the party won in 2005, suggests there was no basis for such conceit.

To end, let’s go back to 2001 and the very first article by Simon on the magazine’s website (issue 277). Not for the last time, we find him asking why Liberals are so fond of apologising for being Liberal:

Liberals are often pilloried as timid and petty-minded. We sit on the fence and wring our hands. When we rebel, it is through self-indulgent individualism (for example, calling ourselves ‘Jedi Knights’ on the census forms) rather than confronting what matters. 

We have only ourselves to blame for acquiring this reputation. Why are Liberals so embarrassed? Why do we lack the courage of our convictions? One of the main reasons is our faith that everyone is reasonable like us. All we have to do is sit round the table and eventually we can reach agreement. If only that were so. In fact there will always be many people, probably a majority, who are not Liberals, who will never be Liberals, and whom we must confront. Beyond that, however, are groups so violent in their hostility that to tolerate their behaviour is to invite our own demise.

The contempt for Jedi Knights is an authentic Titley touch, but beyond that, I don’t know whether to be depressed or lost in admiration that his words are needed just as much today as they were all those years ago.

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Gaby Hinsliff reviews Tom Baldwin's biography of Keir Starmer: "The kind of overly simplistic working-boy-made-good stories politicians are coached to tell about themselves on the campaign trail invariably hide complicated subplots, in this case about those who will always be vulnerable or left behind in the most upwardly mobile families. If Keir Starmer still seems frustratingly hard to pigeonhole, maybe that’s ultimately our problem, not his."

"In almost every recent by-election, Reform have underperformed compared to what the Brexit Party's vote share in 2019 and current national voting intention would predict," say Paula Surridge and Sophie Stowers.

"Benefit sanctions imposed by the Department for Work and Pensions have become harsher amid the cost of living crisis, according to newly released government data - with the average penalty lasting a week longer in 2023 than in 2019," reports Chaminda Jayanetti.

Anthony Broxton on how middle-class voters fell out of love with Clement Attlee's Labour Party after 1945.

Polly Pullar celebrates the revival of the pine marten: "From a once detested varmint that polarised people’s perceptions, to an ambassador for an ecologically richer Scotland, the pine marten offers a glimpse into what else might be possible with a change in our attitudes."

"For two long decades, Australian rugby has rotted from its head office to its heartland. The once-proud and powerful code is fractured in so many places, in so many ways, few believe it can be rebuilt." Angus Fontaine dissects the crisis in Australian rugby union.

Photo by Dani Kropivnik

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"It’s sometimes proposed that councils should raise more of their own taxes – but this could lead to richer areas raising more money per head. Our proposal avoids this and improves on councils’ heavy reliance on council tax and business rates." Kevin Muldoon-Smith and Mark Sandford propose four reforms to prevent English councils going bankrupt.

David Gauke sets out the moral and patriotic reasons why no Conservative should hope that Donald Trump wins the US Presidential election.

"Mansplaining describes the specific moment when a man assumes ignorance of a topic by a woman who is actually at least as knowledgeable, if not more knowledgeable, about the topic. In Solnit's words, 'men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about'." As a female historian, Charlotte Lydia Riley is familiar with mansplaining.

Kenan Malik pays tribute to E.P. Thompson on the centenary of his birth: "For Thompson, the working class 'made itself as much as it was made'. This idea of agency, of people, even in the most inauspicious circumstances, possessing the capacity to act on the world was central to his life work."

Gareth Edwards remembers Barry John: "Lots of people ask me to compare Barry with the other great outside-half I played with for Wales, Phil Bennett. Phil had to have the ball in his hands before he decided what he was going to do, whereas Barry’s computer-like brain was always scanning and summing up his options before he got hold of the ball. Barry didn’t have the shuddering sidestep of Cliff Morgan, Dai Watkins or Phil, but he was lithe and much quicker than people gave him credit for, and he could simply glide past people. On top of that, he was a fantastic kicker and was never afraid to try things on the international stage that were out of the ordinary."

"The majority of the action underground is split between two locations. The cannibals’ lair, which it’s implied is further down the line, was in fact shot in Shoreditch at the Bishopsgate Goods Marshalling Yard. However, with the area around that now taken up by the Powerleague football pitches, and access not possible, I opted to visit the other unusual location: the now closed Aldwych tube station." Adam Scovell goes in search of the locations used for the 1972 film Death Line. "Mind the doors!"

Why expensive private schools now preach inclusivity - it's not to help the poor

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The website of Eton College promises that “Eton believes in equal opportunity for everyone irrespective of gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, belief, disability or social demographic background”. Before you dispatch your progeny to claim their free first-class education at this socialist paradise by the Thames, it is worth checking the “fees” section of the same website, which takes a rather less egalitarian line on the issue of “social and demographic background”.

There's a good article by James Marriott on The Times website about the dark side of the new-found enthusiasm for social justice that expensive public schools are exhibiting.

I think the link above will take you round the paywall, but here is the heart of the argument in case it doesn't:

A friend who was interviewed for a job at a London private school was asked whether he would run its activism society. As he astutely observed, what this ostensibly progressive group did was to introduce some of the wealthiest children in the country to the effective manipulation of the levers of political power: writing to MPs, organising campaigns, starting protests.

The pious posturing of public schools has little to do with aiding the disadvantaged and lots to do with furthering the interests of the wealthy. Fluency in the language of “inclusivity” is now de rigueur in many of society’s most exclusive institutions. Banks and corporate law firms boast equality statements and diversity officers. 

Progressive gestures and language constitute the high-society etiquette of today. Elites must be instructed in it, as they once learnt to play the harpsichord or to cross a ballroom gracefully. Providing such instruction appeals to the virtuous self-image of idealistic young private-school teachers who may be haunted by the thought that the really ethical thing would be to go and work in the state sector.

In praise of Ladybird Modernism and classless aspiration

I think it was those parodies from a few years back - some of them published by Penguin, who would once have looked down their beak at the idea - that cemented a false idea of Ladybird Books in the public mind.

The truth is rather different:

Since I first wrote about the Ladybird books obsession with modernism (article here) I've become increasingly fascinated by the role they played in fostering a spirit of excitement in Britain's postwar schemes to modernise. Picking up copies in second hand bookshops I've started to see a much more concerted effort to portray a positive image of the rebuilding of Britain in these books than even I'd given them credit for. 

With their warm and sensible illustrations and no-nonsense prose, Ladybird has an incredible knack of bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the fairy-tale and the starkly realistic, taking the fear out of everything and showing a unified, positive and optimistic vision of life. 

That's John Grindrod writing on his imagined Ladybird Book of Post-War Rebuilding. He presents much the same material in the video above.

Before I moved to Leicestershire at the age of 13, I lived in the new town of Hemel Hempstead. In many ways it was, for the reasons Grindrod gives, like living in a Ladybird Book.

I am tempted to use the term 'Ladybird Modernism' for the sort of humane, pre-Brutalist variety of modernism that flourished for some 25 years from the end of the war. Examples of this include Hertfordshire's postwar primary schools, Coventry Cathedral and the University of York's original campus.

Another criticism of Ladybird, and of their Key Words reading scheme in particular, is that they presented a middle-class lifestyle as the ideal to aspired to.

It may be here that the Key Words scheme was unfortunate in being launched in 1964. Because from my observation of crowd photographs, 1965 was the year everything changed in Britain.

Take the crowds thronging the platforms of obscure railway stations after on railway enthusiasts' excursions. Before the change, the men were in sports jackets and flannels, and the boys were in short trousers. Then suddenly everything changed and everyone was wearing jeans and anoraks.

So it was that Ladybird felt it necessary to commission new illustrations for the Key Words books. The 1964 Peter was dressed as the young Prince Charles had been: the 1970 version got to wear jeans and had longer hair and a cheeky grin.

And there is a danger in dismissing these books as designed to make the working class aspire to a middle-class lifestyle. Because any group taken up by the left is in danger of losing agency as part of the bargain.

Where is the evidence that working-class aspirations are different from those of the working class? Aren't a bigger house and a garden things that everyone would like to be able to afford? Or do they really crave a larger bath to keep their coal in?

The social position of Ladybird is well described in a brochure created to accompany an exhibition of  Ladybird illustrations by Harry Wingfield held at the New Art Gallery, Walsall, from 1 February 2002, which was shortly before Wingfield died:

They were aimed at the (predominantly white) families who were moving from the back-to-back terrace housing of their childhood to the newly built, green-field council and private estates of the 60s and 70s. 

Peter and Jane and their family supplied aspirational role models, intended to represent happiness and family unity, as well as teaching children how to read.

The brochure 

Follow that link to admire Wingfield's work and see what Ladybird gained by commissioning leading commercial artists to produce illustrations. His alarm clock is a work of art.

Looking at the Ladybird website, it appears that the Key Words books are now illustrated with cheap cartoons. Can't we do better for out children today than that?

Christopher Eccleston was right about Billy Elliot

Saturday's Independent had an interview with Christopher Eccleston by Helen Brown:

Eccleston has also turned down roles that he feels patronise working-class people. He’s described his own supportive parents – his father Ronnie was a forklift truck driver and his mother Elsie a cleaner – as his “biggest break”, and tells me he’s “tired of seeing working-class parents portrayed as being vehemently against their kids going into the arts. What was that f***ing ballet film everyone went mad for?” Billy Elliot? “Yeah! I was offered a meeting to play the father. But I said I’m not going to do that, it’s offensive. It was a middle-class view of the working-class experience, made for the American market. F*** it!”

Way back in 2006 I wrote a post on this blog with the clickbait title The ten most overrated films.

And one of those films was Billy Elliot, about which I said:

Worst of all it patronised the working class. When newspapers set out to find "real Billy Elliots", they found several and each had received tremendous support from his family.

Me and the Doctor, we see eye to eye.

GUEST POST Sex, spies and scandal: The John Vassall Affair

Historian Alex Grant explains why an often-overlooked spy scandal of the early 1960s matters – and  how it changed British journalism, and security vetting, for ever.

"He had 'minor public school' printed all over him," an old friend told me during my research into the life of the clerk turned spy, John Vassall. "Because he was not in the same social class as the ambassador and other senior diplomats, he hadn’t the nerve to go to them when he got himself in a spot of bother."

Who was John Vassall, what was this "spot of bother" and why is it important? With typical British understatement, the term a "spot of bother" was a euphemism for some of the worst possible predicaments - rape, entrapment and blackmail. And Vassall was entrapped by his delicate position in Britain's class structure, as well as by his sexuality.

Vassall, the son of a Church of England vicar, was born in 1924. After being forced to leave his minor public school - Monmouth - in 1941 (his impecunious parents could no longer afford its fees) he served briefly in the RAF and then found work as a junior clerical officer at the Admiralty, where he beavered away quietly until he was sensationally exposed as a Soviet spy, prosecuted and imprisoned in 1962. 

Only then was it discovered that Vassall had been photographed in compromising positions while working at the British embassy in Moscow in 1954. Over the next seven years he had been blackmailed into handing hundreds, if not thousands, of British defence secrets over to his Soviet handlers, both in Moscow and in London. 

Vassall’s arrest and trial, and a subsequent judicial enquiry by Lord Cyril Radcliffe, dominated the front pages of newspapers for several months. The press’s salacious reporting was full of homophobic innuendo and half-truths. 

As a gay man being prosecuted for spying, several years before decriminalisation, Vassall was given no quarter. Newspapers, and the judge at his trial, overlooked the ugly truth: that Vassall had not been seduced in Moscow, but had been drugged and gang-raped.

The scandal led to the resignation of a well-regarded government minister - Tam Galbraith, whose private office Vassall had worked at in 1957-9  - amid what was arguably Britain’s first modern tabloid witch-hunt. There were hysterical rumours that Vassall was not a lone operator, but part of a large, and secret, homosexual cabal in Westminster and Whitehall. Macmillan's government almost fell.  

Two reporters were sent to jail for refusing to reveal their sources, which caused lasting fury on Fleet Street, and helped to fan the flames of the Profumo scandal a few months later. A crackdown after Vassall’s conviction led to a tightening of woefully lax security procedure at the Admiralty - and the modern system of 'positive vetting' for certain civil service posts, which still persists today.

Yet the Vassall scandal is barely remembered now. The Profumo one, which followed fast on its coat-tails, seems to have erased memories of Vassall, even though it was just as a big a story at the time. And remarkably, apart from a homophobic account of Vassall’s espionage, published in 1964, no book has ever been written about it – until now.

Another reason why Vassall was treated so unsympathetically was that he was on the cusp of two social classes Curiously, he was both a snob and a victim of snobbery. Although he was presentable, well-spoken and a vicar’s son, he had never risen higher than clerical officer. His social pretensions irritated his colleagues just as much as his campness did. 

There is evidence that being cold-shouldered by more senior diplomats at the British embassy in Moscow may have driven him into the arms of Russian men. Naively, Vassall never suspected that most of them were covert KGB agents.

Although Vassall died in 1996, I managed to track down several people who knew him,  including two women who worked with him in an archive after his release from prison in the 1970s, when he used the alias John Phillips to avoid his past. More importantly, in the autumn of 2022, the National Archives released thousands of documents on MI5’s surveillance of Vassall, and their breathtakingly intrusive investigations of everyone he knew socially. 

MI5’s files confirm for the first time that Vassall had relationships with two Conservative MPs -  Fergus Montgomery and Sir Harmar Nicholls - before his arrest. By a neat coincidence I live in Oundle, in what used to be Nicholl’s Peterborough constituency, where Nicholls is still fondly remembered as a diligent MP, about whom no whisper of a connection to Vassall was ever heard).

While neither MP seems to have known anything about his spying, they managed to keep their names out of the papers and their careers continued until the 1980s and 1990s. Two other MPs – Tam Galbraith and Denzil Freeth – were not so lucky. Galbraith spent the last 18 years if his life on the backbenches, while Freeth was forced to leave parliament entirely in 1964, merely because of rumours he had once attended a party with Vassall. 

Once Vassall was released, he found that many of his old friends and lovers had been persecuted or dismissed from the civil service in Britain, America and Australia.

Then, just as now, Westminster and Whitehall were brutal places, where careers were either brutally cut short, or gilded, depending on luck, and what friends in high places you had. Despite Vassall’s constant name-dropping, he really stood no chance against a British state that wanted to make an example of him, and which ignored the role that its own homophobia had played in his downfall. 

Some aspects of the Vassall scandal – Minox cameras, undeveloped films in cardboard boxes sealed with Scotch tape, Vassall taking ministerial boxes up to Galbraith in Scotland on the night train from Euston – seem very old hat nowadays. But others are all too familiar. 

One would hope that Vassall would be treated more leniently by the courts today, as a victim of sexual violence rather than an ideological traitor. But would the press, and social media? report the story more sensitively than they did in the early 1960s? I am not so sure.   

Alex Grant’s book on the Vassall scandal - Sex, Spies and Scandal - can be ordered from Biteback Publishing. www.bitebackpublishing.com/books/sex-spies-and-scandal. You can read his blog Alex Grant and follow him on Twitter.

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Stephen Williams entices us with the prospect that the general election of 2024 will see the collapse of the Conservative Party.

Ruxunda Teslo offers a bracing outsider's view: "Trains do not arrive in time, houses are getting old and you cannot build new ones because of weird regulations, wages are stagnating and so on. Britain, captured by the comfortable illusion of its past, seems to observe the world's relentless march from afar, reluctant to emerge from the cocoon of inaction."

"Co-operatives fix things. Co-operatives share power as well as wealth. We prioritise social good and generate substantial social impact and we reinvest in our communities. I'm inspired every day by the actions and activities of our members attempting to fix things, to solve problems and not just for today, but laying the groundwork for tomorrow." Rose Marley from Co-operatives UK on the prospects for the sector.

Rachael Allen reflects on being a working-class academic: "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."

"These days Gervais’s adoring fanbase seem more enthusiastic at the prospect of upsetting their political opponents than about the material itself." James Bloodworth says Ricky Gervais is a reactionary bore.

"It’s always annoyed me when people ... dismiss voice-overs as a failure of storytelling, as if cinema was a pure art form and not a mongrel one made up of all the others, plus that little bit extra, that alchemical magic. There are tons of sloppy voice-overs, of course, but the best add mood, poetry, depth and complication. Voice-overs and narration have been so essential, in fact, to so many great films the history of the medium would be immeasurably poorer without them." Brian Phelan speaks up for the use of voice-overs in films.

Matthew Goodwin and his 'new elite'

This passage from a Kenan Malik article published earlier this year in the Guardian sums up the weaknesses of Matthew Goodwin's concept of 'the new elite' economically:

For Goodwin, though, the new elite are the "people who really run Britain", having largely displaced the old ruling class of "upper-class aristocrats, landowners and industrialists". 

The idea that Gary Lineker or the US-based British journalist Mehdi Hasan or Sam Freedman, a fellow at the Institute for Government thinktank (all of whom Goodwin has namechecked as key members of the new elite) shape our lives more than Rishi Sunak or Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England is, to put it politely, stretching credulity. 

Similarly, the suggestion that those who have been responsible for austerity, anti-trade union laws and the imposition of real-terms wage cuts on nurses and railway workers are not the ones who really have power over our lives is bafflingly myopic. 

It exposes the postliberal concern for the working class as being as performative as the antiracism of the 'new elite'.

Or as Calder's Fifth Law of Politics holds:

No argument that involves expressing indignation on behalf of a third party is to be trusted.

There is some explanation of an earlier formulation of this rule on this blog.

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Andrew Page thinks the media be overestimating the importance of Labour's victory in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election.

"When a child arrives in need of a placement it is a rush to the phones to find somewhere that can provide for the needs of that child and the net is cast far and wide across the country. As smaller providers are closing or being bought by larger concerns this very bespoke pool reduces and the sector can become a bidding war for any remaining places available." Chris Carubia, deputy leader of the Lib Dem group on Wirral Council, makes the case for government regulation of childcare placement costs.

Euan McColm on the Tory nonsense over 15-minute cities: "Andrew Bowie entered the House of Commons as a politician of the moderate centre ground, a man regarded even by opponents as an honest broker. I wonder if he ever imagined he'd one day be reduced to peddling conspiracy theories in order to win the support of reactionary right-wingers."

Why are true stories about active police investigations going untold in the media? Charlotte Tobitt explains.

"This inability to make pro-active decisions for the good of the game, because they may upset or disturb the privileges of an elite minority, is typical of the game’s administration over the last century. Moreover, this behaviour explains why the recommendations of previous reports ... have never been enacted." Duncan Stone doubts that the England and Wales Cricket Board's ambition to make cricket Britain's 'most inclusive sport' will be fulfilled.

Philip Concannon takes us inside the restoration of Michael Powell's 1960 film Peeping Tom.

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"The never-not-mentioned 'slick campaigning machine' of the SNP was true in about 2006-11, but after the landslide 2011 election and especially after the referendum, complacency allowed it to dwindle." And that's just one of the Scottish Nationalist Party's problems, according to Robert McAlpine.

Matthew Pennell says an overarching health and wellness policy for children must include play.

"[Devon Malcolm] and his England colleague Phil DeFreitas - who received death threats from the Nazi National Front - successfully sued Wisden Cricket Magazine in 1995 for an article titled 'Is It In The Blood?', which accused England’s foreign-born and black players of being insufficiently committed." Andrew Stone goes deeper into the recent finding that racism, sexism and elitism are "baked into the structures" of cricket.

"In 2013 the late Labour MP Paul Flynn told the Commons that a Brethren campaign for charitable status was 'the most egregious example of intensive, million-pound lobbying by hundreds of people that I have experienced in my 25 years in the House'." Pippa Bailey takes us inside the Exclusive Brethren sect.

Travis Elborough watches No Two The Same, a 1970 film essay on Pimlico by the architectural writer Ian Nairn.

Howard Williams considers the Saxon church at Brixworth in Northamptonshire as a 'landscape of memory': "The later medieval sculptural fragments (many from tombs) are given no pride of place and stacked out of the way without heritage interpretation in a side-chapel at the east end of the south aisle."

The royal family should send their children to state schools

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In the past year I have read two good books about the British and private education.

Sad Little Men: Public Schools and the Ruin of England by Richard Beard looks at what the experience of being sent to boarding school at the age of eight does to the psyches of those who grow up to lead us.

And Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin England by Robert Verkaik looks at how these schools operate and how they have fought of all attempts to reduce their influence.

The other day Verkaik sent this tweet:

If the Cambridges really want to send a message of normality and community engagement they could start by sending their children to one of the local state primary schools. Rather than the £20,000 a year Lambrook school.

If the Cambridges really want to send a message of normality and community engagement they could start by sending their children to one of the local state primary schools. Rather than the £20,000 a year Lambrook school.https://t.co/mNKtGsn5oc

— Robert Verkaik (@robertverkaik1) August 22, 2022

The BBC News report he was commenting on tells us:

William and Catherine want privacy and a rural setting for themselves and their three children - George, nine, Charlotte, seven, and four-year-old Louis.

All the children will be starting at nearby Lambrook School, a private co-educational school near Ascot in Berkshire.

The school's prospectus says it has "first-class teaching and superb facilities" - including a 25-metre swimming pool, a nine-hole golf course, an orchard with bees, chickens and pigs, as well as woodland where it says children can get muddy.

Sending their three children there as day pupils will cost more than £50,000 a year in total, presuming no sibling discounts.

The golf course sounds like something out of an absurdist comedy, but it's noticeable how private schools now trade ("children can get muddy") on their freedom from the straitjacket imposed by the Gradgrinds at the Department for Education.

But why not send royal children to state schools? There are security considerations, of course, but if they can be overcome at private day schools they can be overcome there too.

I used to be fond of quoting a passage from We Should Know Better, a book by the former Conservative minister George Walden. It's just as relevant today:

In no other European country do the moneyed and professional classes - lawyers, surgeons, businessmen, accountants, diplomats, newspaper and TV editors, judges, directors, archbishops, air chief marshalls, senior academics, Tory ministers, artists, authors, top civil servants - in addition to the statistically insignificant but eye-catching cohort of aristocracy and royalty - reject the system of education used by the overwhelming majority pretty well out of hand, as an inferior product.

In no modern democracy except Britain is tribalism in education so entrenched that the two main political parties send their children to different schools.

It's not just that sending George et al. to a state primary would "send a signal", as people always say, it's that the wider experience of life this would entail would make them better able to do their job as royals later in life.

At present things are so bad that Charles and Diana's decision to send their sons to Eton - sparing them the absurdities of Gordonstoun - looked like a beacon of reform.

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I have long regretted choosing 'Six of the Best' as a name for a feature on this blog. I mentioned this in a recent post and, thanks to a suggestion there by Epictetus, I have my new title.

At least I can be confident that I will never come to regret using one based on a naff Seventies sex manual.

So on we go...

Shev Fogarty blames the Jersey government's new licensing system for the current fishing dispute.

"Having spent time in 2005 asking people around Scotland how they planned to vote, and why, the most common answer to the second question was ‘that’s how we’ve always voted’, often with an invocation of a father. ... These days, the most common answer is 'I’ll see what they have to say'. The SNP didn’t become a part of people’s identities in the way their old parties used to be. It just convinced them to be open-minded." Adam Ramsey explains how the Scottish political landscape has changed.

James Kirkup says education, not class, is Britain's real political divide.

Amanda Perkins talks about her experiences working with farmers, ornithologists and volunteers in the Shropshire hills on curlew conservation.

"By the time he wrote The Owl Service, [Alan] Garner was subverting both the style and the narrative structure of fantasy, creating a distinct voice and a numinous experience. Garner’s fantasy novel focuses on the angst, loves and rivalries of its teenage protagonists: what is at stake is the home and the family. And what disrupts them (but also offers the possibility of redeeming them) is a coherent mythological tradition: in this case, Welsh legend." Dimitra Fimi celebrates a novel that broke the rules of fantasy.

Ben Clifford takes us on six walks that encompass Croydon’s boundaries and history.

A Conservative MP who's willing to talk about class

David Johnston, the Conservative MP for Wantage and Didcot, has written a valuable article on diversity and social mobility for the Unherd website.

Here are some of his insights:

When I ran social mobility charities, I would watch professional service firms and banks fall over themselves 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.

Countless companies in my experience would talk much on their websites about valuing diversity, but diversity of social background did not tend to be high on their agenda. You could be black or white so long as you were suitably middle class. I think this points to a real problem in the UK. And it is just one example of why I think when we talk about race, we also need to talk about class.

And:

At my charities, we did encourage employers to spread opportunity. Some firms struggled: "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?" This was a genuine enquiry from someone who did want to work with us. Skin colour didn’t matter, but background certainly did.

Then there was the offer of work experience from another firm that came with the warning: “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”. Most of the people we helped were eligible for Free School Meals. It was like she lived on a different planet.

I know from my own experience that it is in the area of life experience and social capital that someone from a poor home who gets good qualifications can be lacking. Which suggests to me that the downgrading of anything in education that does not lead to exam success will not help social mobility.

You can also argue that all you really lack if you come from such a home is knowledge of the subtle signs by which people from a privileged background identify one another and exclude everybody else.

Still, it's good to see a Conservative who's happy to talk openly about social class. I wish there more Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs doing it too.