Josh Babarinde makes progress with his campaign for a separate domestic abuse offence

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The Guardian has slapped an "Exclusive" label on its report that Josh Babarinde has called for a specific defence of domestic violence to be introduced.

This is a bad case of overselling, given that he appeared on Good Morning on 10 December to talk about the idea.

But there are encouraging developments in the report. Josh says he has received support from both Labour and Conservative MPs, and its claims that:

Officials are examining whether to change the way domestic violence crimes are recorded after a campaign by an MP who says the lack of a specific offence allows abusers to be freed early from jail.

The quote from a Ministry of Justice spokesperson at the end is less definite than this:

"Domestic abuse comes in many forms, not just physical. Under the current system, domestic abusers already face longer sentences as it is considered an aggravating factor in sentencing for a wide range of offences. However, the independent review of sentencing, led by David Gauke, has been tasked with looking at how best to address crimes of violence against women and girls in future."

The other day I heard David Blunkett quoted as saying this government has "hit the ground reviewing," but let's hope something good comes of this one.

Josh spoked movingly to the Guardian about his own childhood, saying he recalls violence as creating a "really lonely" home life: 

"I would be upstairs in my room hearing an argument unfold, voices raised, shouts, screams, things smashed, and I would pull my covers over me and just sit crying. I didn’t know if my mum was OK."

We need to talk about "discombobulated"

‘Gimp play is a craft’: how a Canadian writer went from fetish sex work to creating powerful BBC drama

runs a headline on the Guardian website. And if it marks the birth of a way to a showbiz career that doesn't involve the Cambridge Footlights, then it's nothing but good news.

No, it's the first paragraph of the article below that worries me:

When the Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill moved to London in 2016, it was the week after the EU referendum. “For my partner at the time, who was British, it was a devastating kind of discombobulation,” Tannahill says.

Because you can't have "a devastating kind of discombobulation".

"Discombobulation" comes from "discombobulate", a word invented in the 19th century for comic effect. Dictionary.com explains:

Discombobulate “to confuse, upset, or frustrate” was originally a jocular American coinage from the North Midland U.S. (from Ohio west through Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, to Nebraska). Discombobulate is a pseudo-Latinism like absquatulate and confusticate, and based on learned Latin words like disaffiliate or disaggregate, or humorous alterations of discompose or discomfort. 

The many variant spellings include discombobligate, discombobolate, discomboberate, discombooberate, and discumboblificate. Discombobulate entered English in 1825 in the spelling discomboberated.

And for me the word maintains its slightly enforced jocularity. It's redolent, if not of red noses and outsize shoes, then at least of an uncle who can waggle his ears and wants to organise the children to play party games.

It's fine in letters between friends - not that friends write each other letters any more - and, if you must, on social media.

Simon Williams is one of those invaluable chess players who talks about games as he plays them and then posts the whole thing on YouTube (see also John Bartholomew and Daniel Naroditsky). If he succeeds in disrupting his opponent's smooth development in a game, he may remark that "White's queenside is discombobulated", and the word works in this informal context. But I have doubts about the use of "discombobulation" in a serious newspaper

And "a devastating kind of discombobulation" doesn't work at all. It's yoking together two words in completely different registers. All I see is a clown blowing his nose and miming exaggerated weeping.

Having a mate called Danny whose nickname is Danzo, "cuz he’s the king of Lanzo"

If you were lucky enough not to have come across this, er,  unique Guardian article 'The rise of Britishcore: 100 experiences that define and unite modern Britons', do not click this link.

It was suggested to me by on Twitter that the author must be the son of someone on the paper to have got it published.

The new Private Eye shows that was almost right: he's the long-term partner of someone there.

When the editor saw this article, the Eye goes on, she gave orders for it to be buried in the depths of the Guardian's website. But I recruited a team of professional cave divers to help me this afternoon, and we found it.

The Joy of Six 1217

"Everything John Barnett said about Boeing’s problems was true. Everything. If the company had been willing to listen to him, 346 airline passengers would still be alive. And maybe Barnett would be too." Joe Nocera on the death of whistleblower.

Tim Eaton and Christopher Phillips look at British foreign policy with David Cameron as foreign secretary. "Cameron’s energy ... does not appear to be part of a broader foreign policy strategy. The UK’s response towards Gaza and MENA [ the Middle East and North Africa] in general remains reactive and Britain is not at the forefront of discussion on what comes next."

Roz Kaveney, a veteran trans activist, talks to Hackney History about the history of the struggle: "I noticed a lot of bleakness creeping into trans social media and thought it my job as a community elder to remind young people that things had been, if not worse, at least as bad in different ways... The important thing about life in an embattled community is to have each others backs."

"There are loud voices, currently holding the microphone, who seem determined to run classical music into the ground. Even Arifa Akbar, The Guardian’s chief theatre critic, recently announced that traditional modes of listening to such music (respectfully and quietly) are elitist. This is only going to get worse. Those of us who really care about classical music, whether listeners, performers, educators, critics or arts administrators, need to be prepared to stand up and speak out." Alexandra Wilson says classical music is under threat from accusations of elitism.

"Train travellers approaching Peterborough from the south can still, for now, see what might once have been the future of train travel. It might have been yet another fruit of what many see as the engineering genius of the UK. What went wrong?" J.J. Jackson finds out.

Andy Walmsley takes us back 50 years to the launch of Radio Caroline.

Why does "Back to square one" date from the early 1960s?

Barney Ronay often appears the Private Eye's Pseuds Corner. That's because he writes intelligently and allusively about football, and nothing reveals the Eye's roots among public school boys of the 1950s more clearly than that column.

For the Eye, being dismissive of football is still an important social marker - you prefer rugby, of course - and artistic or other esoteric interests are to be teased out of your classmates in case they affect their ability to run the Empire in later life. (As I once blogged, it took the public schools decades to notice the dwindling of the British Empire.)

I'm saying all this because I'm now going to disagree with Ronay, who tweeted today after the prime minister warned us all against "going back to square one":

"Back to square one" is a phrase from early radio football comms when paper with squares on was used to convey where the ball was. It meant passing back to your own defence. In an irony lost on Rishi all successful modern teams go back to square one constantly

I'm not convinced by the logic of this gotcha. With my philosopher's head on, as Glenn Hoddle would say, I distrust the idea that an expression's meaning is decided by its derivation, so that it can "really" mean something other than what we all think it means.

Because, as Wittgenstein wrote, "the meaning of a word is its use in a language". There's no hidden, 'real' meaning to be discovered. (Incidentally, my philosophy professor at York was called Ronald Atkinson. It didn't seem funny at the time.)

I also doubt this story about "back to square one" coming from its use in early football commentaries. The question of its derivation was once debated in the Guardian, and this produced a pretty convincing debunking from a George Brindley:

As a boy in the 1930s, I regularly listened to such broadcasts while following the movement of the ball on a football-pitch chart in the Radio Times which was divided into eight squares. Captain H B T Wakelam gave the commentary while Charles Lapworth would murmur "Square 3" . . . "Square 5" . . . as the ball moved about the field. Wakelam never mentioned the squares, and Lapworth said nothing else. The phrase "back to square one" was never used. 

On the 50th anniversary of broadcast commentaries in 1973, an article in the Radio Times credited the phrase to these commentaries, but one has only to look at the diagram to see that the phrase could have no relevance: "back" to one team would be "forward" to the other; the restart after a goal was never in square one; and a pass-back to goal could also be "back to square two", "square seven" or "square eight".

My hunch was that it came from Snakes and Ladders or a similar game, though even the meanest snake won't drop you back on square one. So I turned to the British Newspaper Archive, expecting to find lots of 19th-century examples.

But it turned out to be very rare in those days, and you are as likely to find "back at square one" or "back in square one" as the phrase we are looking for.

And there was absolutely no sign of the expression catching on between the wars, as we would expect if the theory about it coming from early football commentaries were true. I expect suspect we have found another instance of the rule that all popular etymology is wrong.

What really surprised me is that the expression took off in popularity at the beginning of the Sixties and has never looked back since. The Ngram below confirms this.

Should we be looking for a forgotten television quiz or radio panel game where "Back to square one" was a catchphrase? Because something at that time caused it to become suddenly popular.

What does the panel think?

"For me he's written that too well. If he'd just dashed something off, he'd have beaten the keeper."

"He's trying to compete at the top level and he's taken way too long over moving the game on. It's embarrassing."

Later. Thanks for to a reader for sending me the link to an edition of Balderdash and Piffle from 2006 that considers the derivation of 'back to square one'. It examines and rejects the football theory, as well as another about the phrase coming from the game of hopscotch. It finds a 1959 example of the phrase that mentions the game of Snakes and Ladders, but the fact the author has to spell out his meaning suggests the phrase was not much in circulation then.

Besides what interests me now is the reason for the sudden popularity of the phrase from 1970. I shall go back to the British Newspaper Archive for clues.

Cricket journalist Matthew Engel wins Golden Valley South

One of my favourite cricket writers, Matthew Engel, was this evening elected as councillor for Golden Valley South ward of Herefordshire Council.

He was standing as an Independent in a by-election caused by the death of the sitting Independent councillor Peter Jinman.

Later. Engel received over 60 per cent of the vote, beating Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem candidates, as well as another Independent.

Somehow this disqualifyingly moronic assumption did not deter Russell Brand's political acolytes

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Twitter yesterday was full of people arguing that, because Russell Brand - who denies all the allegations made against him on Saturday's Dispatches programme - was being defended by right-wing conspiracy loons, there were no lessons for the left to learn from his rise and fall.

If you pointed out, as I did a couple of times, that Brand had written a Guardian column for years and edited a special issue of the New Statesman, some were outraged.

So I was pleased by Marina Hyde's article in the Guardian this morning, which looks at the role of the press - the Guardian and herself included - in boosting Brand over the year.

Here are a few quotations from it:

Back in the day, though, a lot of people were thrilled to be on what they thought was Russell’s side of the line. For a certain type of mournfully uncool man on the left, Russell Brand was quite the excitement. You only had to watch their little faces in his presence – lit up at being fleetingly indulged by the kind of guy who would probably have bullied them at school. 

And:

The apogee of this particular stage of Brand’s inevitable journey toward alt-right-frotting wingnut was surely the ludicrously feverish speculation over whether he’d endorse Labour in the 2015 general election. 

Keen to be awarded his royal warrant, the then Labour leader, Ed Miliband, traipsed to Brand’s London flat during the final stages of the campaign, for a filmed interview where committed non-voter Russell inquired rhetorically: “Since suffrage, since the right to vote, what has meaningfully occurred?” Nothing much, he reckoned. Somehow, this disqualifyingly moronic assumption did not deter his political acolytes.

And:

What is completely bizarre, with the benefit of 2023 hindsight, is how the Sachsgate story was framed, both by those who were reflexive defenders of the BBC and “comedy” and free speech (then a somewhat lefty preoccupation, funnily enough), AND by those who wished their destruction. Fleet Street quickly settled into tribes and covered it as a story where each assumed the other was acting out of vested interests. This was back when our only culture wars were about things that happened on the BBC. (My how we’ve grown.) Mail vox pops were incandescent; some Guardian ones found it an “overreaction”.

Hyde also reminds us that the Liberal Democrat contribution to this climate was Nick Clegg telling GQ he had slept with 30 women.

I have sometimes resisted the cult of Marina Hyde in the past, but this is a brave and important column.

Later. Sadly, the column isn't or brave as I first thought. Here is a Lost in Showbiz column by Hyde from January 2009 - thanks to Gerry Lynch for tweeting it:

Today in Jesus Wept we must turn to Sachsgate breakout star Georgina Baillie, who has thus far managed to parlay Russell Brand's insult to her dignity into an excruciatingly candid red-top buy-up and a number of semi-mucky photoshoots.

But can we please draw the line at the trenchant newspaper comment pieces? It seems not. Breaking another ten second silence, Manuel's estranged granddaughter takes to the pages of today's Sun with an opinion column unlikely to give PJ O'Rourke any sleepless nights.

Entitled "My View", it sees the Satanic Slut attempt to gain some sort of purchase on this latest Jonathan Ross "outrage", the details of which I literally cannot be bothered to even look up, let alone confect horror over. The world can now be divided into people who genuinely think caring about this crap is important, and people you might wish to know socially.

If Russell Brand was the school bully who was briefly your friend, then in these columns Marina Hyde was the most popular girl in the school, and she was being mean to someone else.

It's a shame she didn't acknowledge that in today's article. What appeared to be an admission of guilt now looks more like an attempt to hide it with fake candour.

Russell Brand was a creation of television and the tabloids, not the comedy circuit

Until last night's Dispatches, I had never seen Russell Brand's comedy act. I now look back on those days with affection. 

But that doesn't mean I wasn't aware of him. As I complained in 2013:

Russell Brand turned up writing on football for the Guardian. He guest edits the New Statesman. He's interviewed on Newsnight. I can’t get away from him.

He wasn’t much of a sportswriter and his political views on Newsnight were ridiculous – a bunch of media-left slogans and a call for unelected officials to tax us all.

But then why should he be expected to be an expert on these things? He is a niche comedian.

Brand’s trouble is that he has become a symbol of youthful cool and everyone wants to be associated with him.

Jonathan Ross’s exit from the BBC arose from his inability to grow middle aged gracefully. He wanted to show how young and hip he still was. And the way to show that was to demonstrate to us that he knew all about Brand’s love life.

And two years later Owen Jones fell under Brand's spell too. And have a look at the Guardian's contributor page for Brand to see just how much the paper loved him.

The extent to which Brand was a media creation was brought home to me by something Simon Evans tweeted this afternoon:

Brand is not now and never was a comedian. He was never on the 'comedy circuit', which is now being traduced as an unreconstructed sewer of nodding, winking, pawing, leering predatory men, with a code of silence to match their coercive behaviour.

He's a TV/tabloid/PR construct and that is the sewer you need to navigate if you want to understand the culture that allowed him to thrive. Pretty much the exact same one that allowed his illustrious precursors in disgrace to thrive before him.

I was a stand up from 1996 and gigged hard on the circuit until 2010 or so. I didn’t see Brand on a bill once. I’ve been in multiple dressing rooms with everyone else from that era, however quickly they elevated to TV and tour shows. That’s how it works. I’ve never even met Brand. 

The only time I saw Brand at a show was  standing at the back of a one off gig being hosted by his friend Simon Amstell. I am not guilting Simon by association, I don’t know him. But that’s who he was there with. 

Brand is (or rather was in those years) 100 per cent the product of the very culture that C4 deliberately cultivated like a pseudo left wing Daily Mail sidebar of shame, with a dash of Eurotrash. I found it nauseating but they loved his bad boy shock factor.

My honest gut feeling was that he would have been despised in 90 per cent of 'dressing' rooms on the circuit. They were old fashioned enough on the whole and If nothing else he showed a good deal of self awareness in steering clear of the place and booking himself on the fast track to notoriety via Big Brother and Bizarre.

And for some sharp analysis of the way the media kowtowed to Brand, read Evans on his appearance on Newsnight in the video above.

He says of it:

It’s not a masterpiece (and I cringe at some of the boosted “laughter track”) but then it was written and performed in a 48-hour period. And the hat was misjudged. I did not quite understand the format. 

But I will assert that my chosen take on Brand was driven through against the prevailing perception of his having spoken truth to power in that Newsnight interview. Prevailing in the SUFTW offices at any rate. And particularly among… but no. I’ll leave it there. 

"You can always get away with being rude about the Midlands"

On Twitter today, Brynley Heaven, who once wrote a guest post for this blog about three unlikely heroes from Grantham, mentioned the Blair government's long-forgotten proposal for eco-towns.

This reminded me that I had written an article for the Guardian website opposing the idea that one of them should be built just to the east of Leicester.

It began:

These days, there are few prejudices people feel comfortable displaying in public, but you can always get away with being rude about the Midlands.

This dismissive attitude goes back a long way. Hilaire Belloc described the Midlands as "sodden and unkind", and when Leicester council engaged a London advertising agency to boost the city's image, it was naturally offered an achingly ironic campaign with the slogan "Boring, boring Leicester". 

As with all prejudices, the most insidious effect of "Midlandsism" is the way its victims internalise it.

On his blog Unmitigated England, the writer and photographer Peter Ashley describes one of his favourite Midlands locations, the lane that circles Cranoe church in a hairpin bend as it drops into the Welland valley: "I once used to say to companions on this road 'Look at this. You could be in Dorset. Or Devon. You'd never think you were in Leicestershire.'"

But he has managed to raise his consciousness: "I have now realised what a fatuous remark this is. This is Leicestershire, and in fact very typical of the eastern side of the county."

And Midlandsism has actual detrimental effects on people who live here. In particular, it is hard to believe the Pennbury site in Leicestershire would have got anywhere near Caroline Flint's eco-towns shortlist if it were in the south east.

Read on to learn why Pennbury was not the place to build a new town: thrill as I absolve myself of the charge of Nimbyism.

These days you will find Peter Ashley on Instagram.

Liz Truss's leadership campaign is being run from a Westminster house owned by a former private secretary to Enoch Powell

A couple of week's ago the Guardian took us Inside Team Truss.

The one interesting thing I learnt from this article - and thanks to the reader who pointed it out to me - is that Truss's campaign is being run from a Westminster townhouse owned by the Conservative peer Greville Howard, who was private secretary to Enoch Powell between 1968 and 1970.

Beyond that. it's largely gush. 

We're told of one team member:

"She’s as dry as a pancake but got a great policy head," said one Tory source.

And before we've finished wondering why this Tory source thinks a pancake is proverbially dry, we've been told that one of the two people directing "strategic communications" is a former media adviser to Prince Andrew.

But no political journalist is going to slag off the backroom staff of a possible future prime minister. Because these may well turn out to be, for years to come, the very people this journalist needs to take her calls.

Two weeks on, we know that Truss's campaign has been run in a harebrained manner unrivalled in modern times - unless it is by the campaign being fought by her rival Rishi Sunak.

Suspect in shooting of Lady Gaga’s dog walker mistakenly released from jail

Today's Headline of the Day contest sees a victory for the mainstream media. Well done, the Guardian.

The right looks for converts: the left looks for traitors

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You don't have to be active in British politics for long before you recognise the truth of this quotation:

The right looks for converts: the left looks for traitors.

Today, for instance, Twitter is full of left-wingers crowing about the redundancies at the Guardian because they believe the paper did not do enough to boost the saintly Jeremy Corbyn.

You even see this attitude in Liberal Democrat Twitter, which is strange given how inchoate the party's philosophy is.

Meanwhile Boris Johnson is showering Labour Leavers with peerages.

But where does the quotation come from?

Duncan Hill has kindly directed me to a blog post by Tom Maguire, who had asked just this question:

John Leo, columnist for US News and World Report (and proud possessor of a link from Matt Drudge, no less), was kind enough to send me an e-mail assuring me that the original source is Michael Kinsley. Apparently, Mr. Leo included the line in a Nov. 26, 1990 column rounding up the best aphorisms of the year. He also is kind enough to tell me that the correct quotation is:

"Conservatives are always looking for converts, whereas liberals are always looking for heretics."

Apparently Mr. Leo complained in his original column that he did not like the "whereas"; I'm with him.

I am with him too. The formulation people have settled on is more elegant.

You can read more from Michael Kinsley on his website.

Six of the Best 941

Melissa Black argues that our system for diagnosing mental disorders doesn’t work and offers a humane, clinically sound alternative,

"'Build build build; is the wrong starting point. Planning is dominated by a target of building 300,000 homes each year, and the prime minister’s rhetoric reinforces that narrative. But one simple quantity metric on housing is dangerous and limiting when planning encompasses so much more." Alister Scott calls for any changes to the planning system to take account of the full range of problems we face.

Should the Guardian be accepting a subsidy from this government? asks Brain Cathcart.

Jonn Elledge reveals that the rise of outdoor socialising has exposed a previously hidden problem: the UK has privatised its toilets. 

"Take Hold My Hand for example. Three pitch-perfect harmonies, a driving percussive section and a palette of colourful guitars and the result is a pop song that stands nicely with many of the tracks Badfinger, ELO and, even, Wings released around the same time." Eoghan Lyng says 1978's 'The Rutles' album is a classic in its own right.

Stuart Broad is not guaranteed a start in Wednesday's first test, but Sam Morshead offers seven reasons why we should love him.

Why shouldn't people take pork pies to Europe?

From The Scotsman a couple of days ago:

Britons travelling to the EU will no longer be able to carry meat and dairy products with them in the event of a no-deal Brexit, the European Commission warned. 

EU Customs Commissioner Pierre Muscovici said the risk of a no-deal Brexit and major disruption was increasing, and said customs checks would “apply to all goods arriving from the UK”. 

Tourists would be prevented from carrying British cheeses and meats with them to the continent.

This is a good reminder that, far from reducing red tape as its proponents imagine, Brexit would introduce a 1001 small and large annoyances into our lives.

So you might expect Remain campaigners to have made something of it.

Yet almost all the comment on this story I have seen from our side of the debate has been concerned with laughing at people who might want to take British food with them.

Some Remainers have gone on to list all the Continental foods they enjoy in a self-congratulatory way.

If there is a second referendum I want Remain to win it. These snobbish attitudes will be no help in achieving that goal. Freedom of movement is for everyone: not just Guardian readers.

Besides, I am a Liberal. I want to be able to get on a train at St Pancras and take a pork pie anywhere I damn well please.

Should South Shropshire be a national park?

The idea that South Shropshire should be a national park seems to be gaining momentum.

The Shropshire Star reports that the man tasked by Michael Gove with look at whether any new parks should be created, thinks so.

Julian Glover, a former speechwriter for David Cameron and the first person to commission me to write for the Guardian, says:

"I know Shropshire very well. 

"I partly grew up in the Shropshire Hills, and they are as beautiful as anywhere in a national park."

Indeed they are. Someone once described them to me as being like the Lake District without all the visitors.

Andy Boddington, the Lib Dem councillor from Ludlow, also supports the idea.

He writes on his blog:

We live in one of the most beautiful areas of the country. We have so much beauty surrounding us that we often forget its there. It is ordinary to us but astonishing to people who come here. 

My view is that national park will be beneficial for South Shropshire. It will promote the economy. But there could be downsides like too many visitors or rising house price. There could be upsides like more affordable housing. More businesses within and around the national park.

And he concludes:

My view is that we should at that point submit a bid for national park status. 

A national park that stretches from Ironbridge to the Mortimer Forest. Embracing the Titterstone Clee, the Long Mynd, the Stiperstones, Bishop’s Castle and Clun.

He urges people in the county to attend a debate organised by the Shropshire Council's Ludlow and Clee local joint committee on 29 November.

I welcome the idea, but I can think at once of a couple of problems that need to be tackled if it is to be a success.

The first is affordable housing. When I discovered the county more than 30 years ago I used to wonder at how cheap houses were. Then the weekending classes discovered the restaurants of Ludlow and everything changed.

Two years ago it was announced that Hope primary school near the Stiperstones was to close. Heather Kidd, the Lib Dem councillor for the ward, saw no alternative because young families cannot could to move to the area - see her comment on that post too.

The second issue is bus services, which being cut in Shropshire just as they are everywhere else.

The Secret Hills shuttle bus that runs at weekends is a shadow of what it was a few years ago, when you could use it to reach Bishop's Castle, Clun and Much Wenlock.

And the bus from Shrewsbury to Bishop's Castle is under threat of withdrawal.

I support the idea of giving my favourite landscape national park status, but unless something is done about these and other issues in the area, I am not sure how much it will really achieve.

Jacob Rees-Mogg is no Sister Julian

The Guardian letters page wins Headline of the Day for the first time.

C.P. Scott would be so proud.

Vince Cable: Dancer, novelist (and politician)

Henry Mance has interviewed Vince Cable for the Financial Times.

There is a lot about dancing, but some politics did slip through:

Cable became a Liberal as a teenager, rebelling against his far-right father. He married Rebelo, whose family was of Indian origin, at a time when his home town of York was virtually “monocultural”; the couple was ostracised by his parents and hers for several years. For him, leftish liberalism was a choice, and he does not take it for granted. 

“I’m just as radical now as I was at the beginning,” he says. The anti-immigration sentiment around the Brexit vote was a sign that “we’ve gone back a long way . . . The potential for societies when they’re under stress to start turning on minorities — you’ve seen quite a lot of that in recent times, and that is alarming.” 

Yet having worked around the world, he is less pessimistic than many western liberals, who see the power of Trump and the ascendance of autocratic China as the beginning of a dark era. “The rise of [emerging] countries out of extreme poverty and isolation is a phenomenally positive development.” The west is “no longer the centre of gravity of the world”, but western Europe still has the power to be “a major counterbalancing force”, says Cable.

I am not sure York would take happily to be called a "town", but Mance does make the important point that Vince "represents a form of progressive politics that isn’t built on privilege".

Meanwhile, Sam Leith has reviewed Vince's novel Open Arms for the Guardian.

"Perfectly readable" is about as enthusiastic as he gets, but then this is the Guardian talking about the Liberal Democrats.

Ignore Polly Toynbee by all means, but what lessons should the Lib Dems learn from the Coalition years?

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Polly Toynbee has an article in today's Guardian whose headline tells you all you need to know:

Why I can’t forgive Nick Clegg and his party of useful idiots

Those of us who remember Polly Toynbee from the SDP - and even from David Owen's Continuing SDP - find it hard to take her entirely seriously in Tribune-of-the-People mode. We Liberals called them "the Soggies" for a reason.

And there is a dishonesty at the heart of her argument. When she writes:

The Lib Dems swallowed the story that the country needed a boiling down of every function of the state to its bare bones. They were useful idiots for what was always an ideological project

she ignores the fact that Labour fought the 2010 general election promising spending cuts that would be "tougher and deeper" than those implemented by Margaret Thatcher.

In other words, most of the cuts made by the Coalition would have been made by a Labour government too.

But I don't suppose you would make yourself popular with Guardian readers if you reminded them of that.

Even if we can set Toynbee's article to one side, we Liberal Democrats do need to decide the lessons we should learn from the Coalition years. Because I liked seeing us in power and I want to see it again.

So let me suggest three lessons - no doubt there are many others.

First we need to be more politically astute. Even if we are in coalition with another party, its members are not our friends and do not wish to see us prosper.

And I think Nick Clegg now recognises this. As he said in Saturday's major interview with Simon Hattenstone: "I did not cater for the Tories' brazen ruthlessness."

Second, we need a distinct Liberal Democrat approach to economics. One of the problems with the Coalition was that we had four considerable economists - Cable, Huhne, Laws and Webb - on our front bench, yet we ended up with Danny Alexander at the Treasury.

David Laws might have had the intellectual heft to challenge George Osborne (whether he would have wanted to is a separate), but with Danny as chief secretary that was never likely to happen.

We fell too easily into saying that Labour had "overspent on its credit card" - or rather, we said that but had little interesting to add to it.

Third, we need a clearer idea of who the voters we want to appeal to are. The problem with imposing tuition fees was not just that we broke a pledge we should never have signed: it was that we let down the group that should be part of the core vote for a Liberal party: the educated young.

David Howarth's thoughts on this - and the lessons of coalition in general - are worth studying.

One thing I would say in Nick Clegg's defence is that these problems - a certain naivety about power; a lack of economic identity; a failure to decide who we are trying to appeal to - existed in the Liberal Democrats long before he joined.

Book review: Engel's England by Matthew Engel

Engel's England: Thirty-nine counties, one capital and one man
Matthew Engel
Profile Books, 2015, £9.99

When I was a small boy one of my favourite things was a wooden jigsaw of England and Wales, where each piece was an individual county and the pieces were decorated with little pictures showing the local industries.

It is very much that England that Matthew Engel sets off to look for in this book. Rarely does he find it, but he is an amiable companion and Engel's England is a likeable book.

I first came across Engel as the Guardian’s cricket correspondent. He reminds be particularly of the summer of 1985 when David Gower batted and batted and England won back the Ashes. He writes on a wider range of subjects these days and the travel book format certainly suits him.

Here he is in Norfolk:

Norwich is more than just a county town, more like a capital. It evens feels like a capital, of an agreeable and small Continental country: all those huddled, companionable streets with Dutch gables – plus repulsive modern additions that hint at a phase of joyless Communism. A bit like somewhere round the Baltic, maybe. 

There are many good things in the book and places Engel makes you want to visit. Farleigh, an unspoilt village four miles from the centre of Croydon. Barrow-in-Furness, where he seeks and finds the England of Coronation Street. Dungeness, which is “not everyone’s cup of tea,” as a resident tells him, but is mine.

Talking of places I know well, in Leicestershire Engel covers the obvious subjects of multicultural Leicester and fox hunting, but he gains bonus points for getting to Breedon on the Hill. He does better in Rutland, where he meets the indefatigable blogger Martin Brookes.

When he gets to Shropshire there is a lamentable failure to write about derelict lead mines, and his sociology of the south of the county is awry. Bishop’s Castle was a centre of the counter culture two decades before London foodies discovered Ludlow.

Few places are treated unfairly. I would suggest the east side of Derbyshire (the Derwent Valley is a marvel), Birmingham and Swindon, where has more to it – the Great Western Railway, Richard Jefferies, Don Rogers – than the Magic Roundabout.

And in Buckinghamshire, after being half seduced by Eton, he is damning of the county’s selective secondary education. Hell hath no fury like a privately educated Guardian journalist confronted by a grammar school.

Before he return to his adopted home of Herefordshire for the final chapter, Engel takes us to London. In his discussion of the way the capital dominates our national life, and the way it is being remade by foreign monies, he makes important points.

Local boundaries have been rubbed out or redrawn in a way that would be simply unthinkable in the more federal United States. My jigsaw, for instance, can be dated to between 1965, when Huntingdonshire absorbed the Soke of Peterborough, and 1974, when it was itself absorbed into Cambridgeshire.

Some counties have resisted their erasure from history, notably Yorkshire (the largest) and Rutland (the smallest). Elsewhere Berkshire is fading from memory and no one seems to have heard of Huntingdonshire at all.

Soon it will be as lost as the Cotswold county of Winchcombeshire from the 10th and 11th centuries.

Stewart Lee talks to Alan Moore

Stewart Lee's last television series was hard going at times even for those of us who admire him.

But I suppose the BBC's decision not to commission another series represented a comic triumph of sorts. It's just what the character Lee becomes on stage would have expected.

In this video Lee talks with the great Alan Moore about his new collection of columns Content Provider.

I was not such a fan of these, but Lee is not David Mitchell and for that we can all be grateful.