Alistair Carmichael marks 75th anniversary of Jo Grimond’s election

Alistair Carmichael is the latest guest on Iain Dale's All Talk podcast, talking about his own career and about the former Liberal Party leader Jo Grimond. 

The Liberals and then Liberal Democrats have held the Orkney and Shetlands seat ever since Grimond won it at the 1950 election.

Thanks to Caron Lindsay for flagging this up on Lib Dem Voice - follow that link to see a photograph of a very young Alistair. He is his usual engaging self in the podcast.

I never met Jo Grimond. The nearest I came to it was in the 1983 general election, when he did a public meeting for us in Kew. Being a good activist, I went canvassing instead - and there were no certificates and medals from Mark Pack in those days.

He gave his speech, I was told later, and then said, looking at the timetable he'd been given:

"It says 'Questions' here, but as I'm stone deaf these days, that's no use. I'll just come round the hall and meet you all."

And so he did, charming everybody.

But I did meet Laura Grimond, a significant figure in the party in her own right in her day, and also the wife of Jo, daughter of Violent Bonham Carter, the gender-fluid gangster even the Krays feared Violet Bonham Carter and granddaughter of Mr Asquith.

She came to Market Harborough a couple of times in the Eighties, and I've found a photo from those days in the British Newspaper Archive. It shows Laura Grimond, Phil Knowles (the current leader of Harborough District Council) and me. One day I'll share it with you.

Are there Liberal thinkers for good times and Liberal thinkers for hard times?

Politicians can be divided between those suited to good times and those suited to hard times, or so I suggested in a post I wrote here back in 2008.

Looking at some leading politicians of the day and of past days, I divided them like this:

Good times: Tony Blair, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, George Osborne, David Miliband.

Hard times: Gordon Brown, Margaret Thatcher, Vince Cable, Denis Healey, Alistair Darling

We have lived in hard times for so long now that it's hard to know who among today's politicians would be more suited to good times, so I'm not sure this categorisation is useful today.

But I have been wondering if, among Liberal thinkers, there are some suited to good times and some suited to hard times.

The growing threat of Russian aggression in Europe makes Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin look more relevant than they did 20 or 30 years ago. It's unfair to dismiss them as 'Cold War Liberals', as many on the left do, but their views were formed as a reaction to tyranny and the threat of tyranny.

By contrast, I am an admirer of the postmodern Liberal philosopher Richard Rorty, yet when I came to write about him for Liberator in 2017, I found I had growing doubts about him. I did question Rorty's account of George Orwell, but there was a more fundamental doubt that I steered away from.

It was whether postmodernism's relaxed view of truth was so appealing in a word where Trump was US President and the internet was choked with lies and conspiracy theories.

Rorty, it seemed, was a Liberal thinkers for good times, not hard times.

You might think of Mill as a believer in progress, and thus a good times man. But I remember writing a seminar paper about On Liberty in which I commented on its pessimistic tone. One reason Mill wanted freedom of thought and speech was that he was dissatisfied with the intellectual climate of the day.

There is definitely an element of "All great men are dead, and I'm not feeling too well myself", in Mark Twain's words, about On Liberty.

So if I put Mill in the hard times column, it's more about his temperament than the fine details of his philosophy. 

And, for the same reason, he is joined there by Charles Masterman. Though Masterman was a practical politician - he was the minister who spent countless hours taking Lloyd George's health insurance act through the Commons in the face of implacable opposition from the Conservatives and the medical profession - there is an air of melancholy about his writings - notably The Condition of England.

Jo Grimond, by contrast, has a sunny temperament and that gets him into the good times club.

What do you think? Is this distinction useful?

Lord Bonkers' Diary: "Call them Orkney and Shetland"

When I tweeted a picture of a couple of my Liberal Party membership cards from the 1980s, something about the map on them attracted the attention of the President of the Liberal Democrats. 

He commented in reply: 

I'm not sure @amcarmichaelMP  would approve of his constituency being left off :)

Which got me thinking...

Saturday

I first met Jo Grimond during the 1950 general election campaign. He proved a charming companion, and as we made inroads into a bottle of Auld Johnston, that most prized of Highland malts, he laid out his plans to me. 

“Britain needs a strong Liberal Party, yet it’s practically impossible to get elected in our colours these days. So I’ve decided to invent a constituency and just turn up at Westminster after the election with all the new MPs. I’ve dreamt up two groups of islands off the North coast of Scotland - call them Orkney and Shetland - as I don’t suppose anyone at Westminster will have been sea bathing at Thurso. Besides, my father fagged for the Serjeant at Arms, so there won’t be any awkward questions.” 

And his plan worked better than I had imagined possible. Over the years he got rather carried away with inventing new features in his constituency – ancient stone circles, a Viking cathedral, a Nissan hut turned into a gem of a chapel by an Italian prisoner of war – but no one smelled a rat. 

When the time came for Grimond to stand down, we agreed that the scheme was too clever to be allowed to die, so first Jim Wallace and then Alistair Carmichael were let into the secret. 

From time to time, I come across maps in our party’s policy documents or on membership cards that leave off Shetland or even Orkney, and have to make urgent phone calls to get them made consistent with our story. 

I say, it’s a good thing there’s a lock on this diary!

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

Earlier this week....

• Their eyes hollow from think-tank reports and self-abuse
• The outside risk of drowning
• Have a Go with Thérèse Coffey
• A Norman Lamb dhansak with naan bread
• "You didn't argue with Violent"

GUEST POST A lifetime among the Liberals

Paddy Briggs looks back over a lifetime's political involvement and forwards to the next election.

I was 13 and for the first time I started to take an interest in politics. It was JFK wot did it. That summer of 1960 a man born in the same century as me was campaigning to be President of the United States. He was beautiful as was his wife. He wasn't Harold Macmillan or Ike or de Gaulle. He had charisma (though I don't think I knew that word at the time). He won!

 

In 1962 I got a bit excited again. Now Eric Lubbock wasn’t JFK but he made me momentarily famous at my boarding school. You see I lived in Orpington which hitherto had only been famous for its chickens. I decided to be a Liberal when he won. Of course I did.

 

As a student in the late 1960s there were plenty of good causes for liberals to care about. The old men defended the deadly nonsense of Vietnam. I didn't. They defended even the racial obscenity of Apartheid. I didn't. 

 

Surely the Liberal day had dawned ? But what did that mean ? Well it wasn’t Socialist (Good). Or Conservative (even better). So I knew what it wasn't – but what actually was it? That was more difficult.

 

The real dawn of the liberalism I believed in wasn't to come until the 1980s. Like Charles Kennedy and a few other good men and true I joined the SDP. Social Democracy and Liberalism. Perfect match. The SDP did well actually but the electoral system killed us. Charlie survived and a few others. I was mortified.

 

The Liberal Democrats were a decent post-SDP refuge and they did pretty well. Mainly as a home for those of the Centre/Left who lived in constituencies where Labour was nowhere and the Tories weren't that popular. Including mine – Twickenham. Vince was an old colleague of mine in Shell and a kindred spirit. Easy call. 

 

I liked the Coalition and thought the love-in in the Rose Garden was fine. My wife told me it was a public schoolboy alliance. She was certainly right but it suited me. But Nick didn't use his power as wisely as he could have. 2015 was a disaster. Even Vince lost. 2016 was the beginning of the end. The hideous referendum. Trump. Liberalism and pro Europeanism (my watchwords) became dirty words. 

 

So what now? Well first and foremost there’s Keir Starmer. He must be a man that the Libs can do business with. Surely to goodness. The policy is staring us in the face. Labour and the Lib Dems have much in common. An electoral alliance please. Labour to stand down in Lib Dem constituencies and in Tory constituencies where the LD’s are running second. The Lib Dems to do the same. Don't stand in Tory Conservative/Labour marginals.

You can follow Paddy Briggs on Twitter.

Rediscovering the Liberalism of the left-behind

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Populism, all right-thinking people agree, is a Bad Thing. Yet in the far-off days when I was a Liberal activist and then councillor, there was a definite populist strand to our campaigning.

We were the people who stood up for the unfashionable end of town. We were the people who stood up for the voters against council ruling groups and senior officers.

I remember doing a survey on council house repairs here in Harborough and being told the next day that the council offices were thronged with people we had encouraged to make complaints. I was proud of that.

Somewhere along the way we have lost much of that spirit. As Peter Sloman reminded us in 2017:

If the party’s sociological heartland is middle-class and cosmopolitan, its geographical heartland lies in the windswept constituencies of the Celtic fringe. It was here that Nonconformist farmers and shopkeepers stuck with the party through the 1940s and 50s, and that the party found it easiest to turn votes into seats during the 1970s and 80s. 

Jo Grimond spent most of the 1959 campaign holed up in his Orkney and Shetland constituency; fifteen years later, Jeremy Thorpe had a cable installed so that he could address press conferences at the National Liberal Club from his seat in Barnstaple. 

From the 1970s onwards, 'community politics' campaigners also established the party as the main challengers to Labour in a string of northern towns and cities hit hard by deindustrialisation. By 2010, the Liberal Democrats ran the council in Liverpool, Sheffield and Hull and had MPs in Bradford, Burnley and Redcar.

I have too much personal nostalgia for the Liberal Party of the 1970s and 80s to be an objective judge, but I do think we need to rediscover what Peter Sloman calls the Liberalism of the left-behind.

Peter asked me on Twitter yesterday whether I thought the gains made in the West Country by the Lib Dems in May's local election were a sign that we were beginning to win back the support of our former 'left behind' voters.

If they were, Thursdays results there suggest we still have a long way to go.

Five thoughts on The Independent Group and the Lib Dems

One
Something had to happen and I am glad that it did. The two main parties have both been captured by groups of extremists that have more in common with each other than they do with the political mainstream.

You only have to see the happy faces of The Independent Group MPs to see what a strain it has been to fight for mainstream values in the Conservative and Labour Parties.

The response from Corbyn loyalists, at least, has shown how broken our political system now is.

I have no idea what will happen next, but I have a feeling it will be more fun than the last few years have been,

Two
Tim Farron rushed to offer us as an army to help the TIGgers to power. But, pleased as I am by the turn events have taken, I believe we Liberal Democrats need to be more wary than that.

No doubt there have been talks between us and the new group, but are we certain that they wish us well? Already Anna Soubry has urged Lib Dems to join her instead.

Remembering the endless hours expended on seat negotiations by the Liberal Party and the SDP, I would be tempted to pursue a selfish strategy if I were in charge of TIG and it had grown into a national party

I would give the Lib Dems a clear run in the seats they hold and in another dozen where they had realistic chances of winning. After that, I would stand a candidate in every seat in the country and let the Lib Dems stand against me if they dared.

So low is the present Lib Dem support across much of the country, I would reason, that if we can’t supplant then we TIGgers have no future as a party anyway.

Three
Another worry about TIG is that it will all be a little vague. How could it be otherwise when they had to begin by attracting both Labour and Conservative MPs?

The question for TIG is whether it can move on from its launch Statement and become the driver of the reforms Britain needs.

Just for starters, we need to rebuild local democracy and our public services, reform our democracy and put the environment at the heart of our politics.

Is this really the group do it?

Four
So what should the Liberal Democrats do next?

Richard Kemp offers some characteristically sensible advice: we must concentrate on the May local elections and gain as many seats as possible and leave grand strategy on the back burner for a while.

The better we do in those elections, the stronger the hand we will have to play in whatever happens next.

Five
If we doubt that TIG has the coherence or intellectual heft to put forward the reforms Britain needs, then we Lib Dems are going to have to do some of the work.

Commentators used to accuse the Liberal Party of living off the intellectual capital of the Grimond years. Sometimes I wonder if the Lib Dems have any intellectual capital at all.

If that sounds harsh, think of how quickly we moved from being a party that wanted better-funded public services to one that supported George Osborne’s austerity.

We need some good internal rows over policy. We need to be a bit less of a family and a bit more of a political party.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Keep the box around Shetland

Today the old boy gives us an interesting piece of Scottish Liberal history that has hitherto escaped publication.

Tuesday

A recent issue of The Shetland Times has been drawn to my attention. In it our own Tavish Scott celebrates the fact that those islands will no longer be shown on weather maps and the like in a box.

All I can say is that he must be a singularly unobservant fellow, as that box is not figment of a cartographer’s imagination but a thing of bricks and mortar.

It was Jo Grimond who ordered it to be built: he wanted to protect Shetland’s fishing grounds, discourage Viking raids and keep out canvassers from other parties. Much of the donkey work was undertaken by his wife Laura, with the young Jim Wallace making the tea.

I sincerely hope Scott does not intend to undo Jo’s work by having the Shetland Box taken down. What will be next? Adrian Sanders’ wall?

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

Liberal Democrats will compromise and do want national power

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

I was struck by this passage:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later. Miranda has kindly replied:

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

— Miranda Green (@greenmiranda) January 1, 2016

Say it ain't so, Jo

Tom Mangold writes about his attempts to investigate Jeremy Thorpe for the BBC:

I had been on the story for less than two weeks when I got a phone call from Jo Grimond, one of Thorpe’s predecessors as Liberal leader. ‘What you are doing is outrageous!’ he barked down the line. ‘Unless you stop at once, I’ll have you dismissed within hours by the [BBC’s] Director General, who I happen to know extremely well.’

It's always sad to learn that one of your heroes has feet of clay.

Still, this incident does give me an excuse for reposting one of my favourite videos from Youtube.

This song was written and first recorded by Murray (older brother of Anthony) Head and is here performed by, amongst others, three-quarters of The Who.

Jeremy Thorpe remembered

#79658659 / gettyimages.com

The fall of Jeremy Thorpe had already taken place by the time I joined the Liberal Party, but he was its leader when it won the by-election victories in the early 1970s that helped get me interested in politics.

In his pomp Thorpe was a dazzling figure - though without the intellectual appeal of Jo Grimond - and Jonathan Fryer was from just the generation to be dazzled by him:

I first met Jeremy when I was Secretary of the Oxford University Liberal Club about 1971 and he came to speak at the Oxford Union, as Liberal Leader. He was funny and gracious, a scintillating speaker and at heart a great showman. Which other party leader in those days would have dreamt of conducting an election tour by hovercraft?

As Jonathan goes on to say, Thorpe  nearly destroyed the Liberal Party by his "feasting with panthers". Legend has it that some Young Liberals were so alarmed by the company he was keeping and the risks he was running that they went to the chief whip.

There were others who disliked Thorpe because of the way he ran the party and its finances, though the details of those arguments are probably lost in time by now.

Then came the court case at the Old Bailey where he was tried for conspiracy to murder and acquitted. Thorpe's Telegraph obituary has the basics of this, though several books were written about the case and Thorpe's wider career.

Thorpe's career was very much an act, and that act was a little too blatantly Eton and Oxford Union for my tastes - though if you read that obituary you will find his background was a little more complicated than he made it appear.

Auberon Waugh, who enlivened the 1979 contest in North Devon by standing for the Dog Lovers' Party, once said he disliked Thorpe because he dressed exactly like the bucks at his own public school.

Let's leave the last words with Nick Harvey, the current MP for the constituency:

In North Devon he was a greatly loved champion of the community and is remembered with huge affection to this day. 

It would be wrong to recall only the tragedy of his downfall - where in hindsight he can be seen largely as a casualty of the era in which he lived. Instead we should celebrate a towering force in shaping the political landscape of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

George Grimes Watson 1927-2013

[Later. More on George Watson here.]

I learn from Mark Pack that the Liberal Party thinker George Watson died last year. I am sorry that I missed his death at the time

Watson was part of the party's intellectual renaissance under Jo Grimond. Mark links to a tribute by Julian Huppert:

“George Grimes Watson was a great thinker, an English don and a life-long liberal. 

“He stood for Parliament in 1959 in Cheltenham, unsuccessfully, and then became a Fellow at St John’s College Cambridge, where he became a noted scholar in literature, literary criticism and liberal political thought, including being a key member of the unservile state group, rethinking liberalism and welfare. 

“His 1959 campaign literature shows how little has changed, with one section saying 'Liberals made them get rid of identity-cards – but the State Still has far too much power in our lives’, ‘The Home Secretary thinks the police ought to tap private phone-calls’ and 'We need the European Common Market – Tory policy closes the door of Europe in our faces.' 

“He was a deep thinker and a great liberal, and is much missed.”

As Julian's tribute was posted today, I fear I may not be the only person to have missed George Watson's death.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Watson was taught by C.S. Lewis and went on to teach Douglas Adams himself.

I have read Watson's The English Ideology, which was subtitled "Studies in the Language of Victorian Politics".

As I recall, it is more interesting than that may make it sound, Watson argues that the English ideology is representative government and that the writers who described and championed it, such as Disraeli and Trollope, deserve more attention than its flashier critics such as Ruskin and Carlyle.

The reason for Mark's post today is that the Electoral Commission’s table of party donations for the third quarter of 2014 reveals that George Watson left almost a million pounds to the Liberal Democrats in his will.

I hope we spend it wisely.

Karl Popper on human knowledge

I heard Karl Popper give a lecture at York while I was an undergraduate there. I think it was the inaugural lecture of a series sponsored by some variety of Rowntree money and I remember that Jo Grimond was present.

Here is Popper speaking some years after that. He took part in three programmes under the title Uncertain Truth - you can find the others on Youtube if you search - but this one on knowledge gets to the heart of his philosophy. You can watch part 2 of it too.

If you want to know more about Popper and his philosophy - he has some claim to be the most important liberal thinker of the 20th century - then I recommend the short introduction by Bryan Magee.

Why Nick Clegg is like the Duke of Wellington

Could the political climate be changing? Because we are starting to see opinion pieces praising the Liberal Democrats in the newspapers again.

The other day it was Jane Merrick in the Independent. Today it was Allan Massie in The Scotsman.

Massie praises us for entering the Coalition in the first place - and makes an implicit comparison I that had not occurred to me:

In politics, the Duke of Wellington did not match his achievements in war, but he held to one sound and important principle: the Queen’s government must be carried on. This means that you must have an administration that commands a majority in the Commons and is capable of governing. 

In 2010, this was absolutely essential, given the dire state of both the British and the world economy. By agreeing to the coalition, Clegg and those around him acted in the interest of the country. They exchanged the pleasures of easy opposition for the responsibility of a share in the government. And they have had the courage to persist in government and not to run away from the duty they had assumed.

He also endorses the party in May's European elections:

If there was no other reason to vote Liberal Democrat, the party’s commitment to the EU, and to the principles of its founding fathers, would be an adequate one. Given the rise of Ukip, and the aims and character of that party, anyone who believes in the value of the European Union should certainly think of voting Liberal Democrat at the election for the European Parliament in May – and, indeed, do more than think about it.

I also like his observation on the strange alchemy of political popularity:

Jo Grimond once said he had supported two causes throughout his career: the EU and Home Rule for Scotland. Asked to vote on these matters in referendums, his constituents in Orkney and Shetland voted No to both – but they continued to return Jo to parliament.

Jo Grimond and the Soviet invasion of Shetland

Chris Glew on Estonian World tells the story of Erich Teayn, a crewman on a Soviet factory ship who, on the night of 25 June 1958, commandeered a motor boat and made his bid for freedom in the West by landing on Shetland:

He had realised that his journey wouldn’t be easy and might even be dangerous, but he hadn’t counted on 30 of his Russian crew-mates giving chase, hoping to foil his escape. In choosing a faster boat, he managed to land slightly ahead of his pursuers, on the ragged coast near the small village of Walls, West Shetland. 

Teayn spent five hours trekking through bare and treeless terrain in the late daylight with the Russian crew scouring the area, looking for any trace of their former colleague. He eventually stumbled upon the cottage of a local crofter, David Fraser and his son.

The Soviets searched the island seeking Teayn and passed within 50 yards of the cottage where he was hiding:

he two police sergeants arrested Teayn under the Aliens Act (he was an illegal immigrant, after all) and took him back to Lerwick, where he was placed in custody. 

The next day, the three senior Russian commanders of the fishing fleet landed in Lerwick to demand Teayn’s transfer to their custody. The Provost and senior police officer were both on leave and despite their apparent politeness and friendly manner, the police refused them all access to Teayn.

The affair was raised in the Commons by Jo Grimond, the local MP and leader of the Liberal Party. And Erich Teayn was last heard of living with an Estonian family in Shipley and looking for work.

When did the Liberal revival begin?

When Jo Grimond became leader in 1956? When Mark Bonham-Carter won the Torrington by-election in 1958?

Neither, says Dr Alun Wyburn-Powell, an honorary research fellow at the University of Leicester, on his blog. He dates the start of the Liberal revival to a deeply obscure by-election held in 1954:

The step change was the Inverness by-election of 21 December 1954 – neither famous nor a victory. The Liberals’ share of the vote at 36% gave them a very close second place to the winning Conservative candidate in this previously-Conservative held seat. The result was therefore not a dramatic upset. It took place in Scotland in the middle of winter and the results came out on Christmas Eve. Hardly surprisingly, not many people noticed. However, it was the Liberals’ highest share of the vote in a three-way by-election since 1932 and the improvement was sustained. In the 19 by-elections fought by all three major parties since the war leading up to Inverness the Liberals had averaged only 9.3% share of the vote, but in the 19 by-elections from Inverness onwards the Liberals averaged 25.2%. 

Clement Davies, ageing and alcoholic party leader, had had a torrid time leading the Liberals through their darkest years, but in the last two years of his leadership the party averaged 26.5% in by-elections, but when Jo Grimond succeeded, the comparable figure for his first two years was slightly lower at 24.7%.

Dr Wyburn-Powell specialises in Liberal history, so his blog is well worth following if you have an interest in that area.

Six of the Best 285

"This by election came about most unexpectedly and the local party needed someone to stand here. The party were aware that although I didn't live in Corby, I had spent six years in the area working with unemployed people, and helping pre-release prisoners to get into self-employment." The Backbencher talks to Jill Hope, Liberal Democrat candidate in the Corby by-election.

Gareth Epps looks at Jo Grimond's approach to employee ownership.

"We have got to get out of this ludicrous role we have been in for the past 20 years, where charities love to be called professional because they think somehow volunteers are amateur, are second-rate. In doing that, we have actually removed the lifeblood and energy that meant those generations of the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s wanted to give and get involved." Rory Stewart questioned the professionalisation of the charity sector during a fringe meeting at the Conservative Conference, reports Third Sector.

Could Eton run a state school? Dan Wilson thinks not.

The Week presents 13 punctuation marks that failed to catch on.

"“I was 13 and they needn't have bothered. It was obviously very, very heavily stage managed to impress a schoolgirl. But as I say I’d had it drummed into me by my father so it was really a bit of a rain dance." Wyn Hymer is interviewed by the Milton Keynes Citizen about growing up at Bletchley Park and being made to sign the Official Secrets Act.

Vince Cable would make a good Liberal Democrat leader

There may be some truth in Lord Bonkers' theory that Nick's upcoming 'hair shirt' tour:

is intended by the clever children in his office to make it clear whether he has a chance of appealing to voters at the next general election

But there is no vacancy for leader of the Liberal Democrats. Nick Clegg is determined to lead the party into the next election and will do so unless it becomes clear that the voters will not stand for the idea.

So I think Liberal Democrat Voice was wrong to allow itself to be wound up by Tim Montgomerie to the extent that it blogged this earlier today:

Vince Cable is an excellent Business Secretary and would make an excellent Chancellor. But he simply isn’t leadership material. “Twinkle toes” is deluding himself. He doesn’t have the charisma. Having interviewed both Clegg and Cable with other bloggers, Vince Cable is a sort of straight-laced (sic) university lecturer type. He doesn’t set the room alight, like Nick Clegg does.

Nick Clegg does not quite set the room alight for me, but that is not the most important point here.

What Lib Dem Voice is appealing to here is the idea that a leader has to be young, dynamic and, above all, charismatic.

The best leaders do have charisma as well as solidity, as Jo Grimond and Paddy Ashdown have shown Liberals in my lifetime. Conservatives would say this of Margaret Thatcher: I am genuinely unsure whom Labour activists would point to - many of them seem to dislike Tony Blair as much as I do.

But the danger is that charisma - or the belief among the leader's acolytes that their man has charisma - becomes the most important or the only factor. And maybe that has already happened.

It does not take too jaundiced a view of British politics to see Nick Clegg trying to be like David Cameron, and David Cameron trying to be like Tony Blair, and all of them trying ultimately to be like John F, Kennedy, whose victory gave birth to this silly view of political leadership.

As I said, there is unlikely to be a vacancy for leadership of the Liberal Democrats. But if there were to be, I can see Vince Cable doing a very good job.

I, for one, would welcome having a grown up in charge.

Book Review: A Guide to the Works of Art of the National Liberal Club

You can find this review in today's Liberal Democrat News.


A Guide to the Works of Art of the National Liberal Club, London (second edition)
Michael Meadowcroft
National Liberal Club, 2011

Designed by the great Victorian architect Alfred Waterhouse and opened in 1887, the National Liberal Club is a work of art in itself. Gothic towers and pinnacles pierce the Whitehall sky: its wine cellar is formed from the remains of an attempt to build a railway under the Thames to Waterloo.

Between them are to be found portraits, busts and engravings that tell the story of the Club, of the Liberal Party and of British political radicalism in general. This elegant illustrated booklet by Michael Meadowcroft, the Club’s honorary librarian and a former MP for Leeds West, makes a fitting celebration of this collection. It is an expanded edition of one written by Veronica Herrington in 1997, and its indexes of artists and sitters make it easy to use. My only criticism is that the illustrations are not captioned.

Meadowcroft tells us that the art collection dates from the Club’s earliest days, when it was regularly offered busts and portraits (“more often than not of Mr Gladstone”). The result is a collection that is home to the Grand Old Man and to almost every prominent Liberal since. They range from wing-collared grandees of the party’s heyday to Paddy Ashdown, whose portrait is the only one to depict its subject in informal dress. (Among other recent Liberal leaders, Jo Grimond wears an academic gown over a suit and Sir David Steel appears to have chosen to be painted in the uniform of a Peruvian admiral.)

But the collection is not confined to Liberal leaders or even to Liberal members. There are portraits of radicals, such as William Cobbett and George Holyoake, who were never part of mainstream Liberalism but with whom the Club and its members were clearly in sympathy.

Perhaps high portraiture is less to modern taste, and in many ways the best painting in the book is a less formal study of Charles Bradlaugh, the atheist MP for Northampton, by Walter Sickert. Paul Temple’s recent painting of Sir Cyril Smith gets beyond its subject’s bulk to find his character and there is a stunning portrait of the young Violet Bonham-Carter by Sir William Orpen, though this turns out to be a modern copy.

Meadowcroft does not record what became of Orpen’s original, but a significant number of works have been lost since the collection’s apogeé in 1940. One reason is the 1941 air raid that destroyed the Club’s famous staircase, though fortunately the finest paintings had been sent for safekeeping to the home of the Cornish Liberal Isaac Foot. (A portrait of Asquith was less fortunate in 1910: suffragettes scrawled ‘Votes for Women’ across it in purple ink.)

Through all these vicissitudes the National Liberal Club remained more than an art gallery: it functioned as an important hub for Liberalism when the party was at its lowest ebb. In 1948 Sir John Simon, an eminent National Liberal and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, was asked to resign after speaking for the Conservative candidate in a by-election.

A further reminder of those days comes in the form of an illuminated address presented by the Club to Harry Willcock. Willcock, a Liberal parliamentary candidate, had refused to produce his identity card when stopped by the police in 1950. His actions led to abolition of identity cards two years later.

This address may be the least important item in the collection from an artistic point of view, but it is priceless from a political one.

It's Shetland's oil!

From the Guardian's Scotland Blog:

Scotland's path to independence could become far rockier and more complicated than Alex Salmond might like, if the equally independent-spirited northern isles of Shetland and Orkney get their way. 

That, at least, is the view of their respective Lib Dem MSPs Tavish Scott and Liam McArthur. In a paper submitted to the UK government's consultation on the independence referendum, the pair have provocatively suggested that the two island groups' willingness to stay within an independent Scotland cannot be taken as given. 

Nor, if it comes to that, does ownership of "their" oil, which, by one measure, includes a quarter of the oil and gas wealth being claimed as Scottish by Salmond's nationalist government.

The post goes on to point out, the notion that the former Viking earldoms of Shetland and Orkney have their own, distinct views on self-determination and identity is a long-standing one. Many islanders don't regard themselves as Scots at all and are openly hostile to Edinburgh rule.

And it quotes the words of the former Liberal leader and Orkney & Shetland MP Jo Grimond:

"The last thing the Northern Isles want is to be ruled by Glasgow trade unionists and Edinburgh lawyers."

When I interviewed Tavish Scott, who was then the leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, during the Lib Dem bloggers' unconference in Edinburgh in November 2009, I was struck by his "contempt of Scottish Nationalism in general and Alex Salmond in particular".

Clearly, Scottish identity is a more complex matter than Salmond likes to pretend.

Emlyn Hooson 1925-2012

Lord Hooson, who died yesterday, was leader of the Welsh Liberal Party from its inception in 1966 until 1979, and MP for Montgomery from 1962 to 1979.

He won the seat at a by-election following the death of the former Liberal leader Clement Davies and retained it through five general elections. The Shropshire Star has a photograph of him being carried through the streets of Welshpool after the constituency's result was declared in October 1974 election.

As his Daily Telegraph obituary makes clear, he was not afraid of controversy:

After Liberal losses in the 1970 election, Hooson told the Liberal Assembly that the public wanted a middle-of-the-road party, blaming Jo Grimond and Jeremy Thorpe for trying to take it Leftward. When the Liberals merged with the SDP in 1988, he backed Alan Beith for the leadership against the less cautious Paddy Ashdown. 

Hooson attracted abuse from party activists, particularly the Young Liberals who at one conference waved sticks of rhubarb at him when he opposed sanctions on South Africa. Yet they were allies in opposing the Vietnam War, and the Young Liberals’ leader, Peter Hain, relied on Hooson’s advice when forced to apologise to Edward Short, Leader of the Commons, for suggesting he was implicated in the Poulson affair. 

Hooson opposed both Grimond’s readiness to keep the 1964 Labour government in power, and the Lib-Lab Pact concluded with James Callaghan by Steel. But the leader he trusted least was Jeremy Thorpe. When Grimond retired in 1967, Hooson stood against Thorpe partly on policy grounds but also because of a deep and, as events would prove, shrewd distrust of Thorpe’s character.

He also enjoyed a distinguished legal career. The Telegraph says:

Hooson also enjoyed a distinguished legal career At the Bar, Hooson earned a reputation as a cool, clear thinker and lucid advocate. In 1960, at 35, he became the youngest Silk for many years.

Hooson defended Ian Brady in the Moors Murder trial and, so Disgruntled Radical always tells me, prosecuted Alan Turing when he was tried for 'indecency'.