Marion Mould jumps The Sound of Music on Monty Python

The other day I used Bluesky to pass on some of Lord Bonkers' table talk:

Lord Bonkers writes: What all this nonsense about Katy Perry and "the first all-female space crew"? I well recall that a British rocket took off from Woomera 56 years ago almost to the day. Its crew? Marguerite Patten Helen Shapiro Pat Coombs Marion Mould on Stroller

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— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers.bsky.social) 14 April 2025 at 17:13

Think of this as a sort of free extra from the old boy - a Patreon you don't have to pay for. (That is unless I'm short of inspiration for his next diary, when it will appear there too.)

But who, I hear you ask, were Marion Mould and Stroller?

Marion Mould won the silver medal in the individual show jumping at the Mexico Oympics of 1968. I remember her as Marion Mould, though she must have been Marion Coakes at the time, as she did not marry until the following year.

And Stroller was her horse, or rather her pony. It was rare for ponies to compete in top-level show jumping, but he and Marion won 61 international competitions together.

Oddly, I don't remember hearing much of Marion Mould in the early Seventies, when show jumping (it seems so unlikely now) was a huge television sport. My memory may be at fault, or perhaps she did fade from the scene.

But you can see her above in the third episode of the fourth and final season of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

My memory of that fourth series (the one made without John Cleese) is of watching it each week, willing it to be funny, but being disappointed every time.

Watching this episode today it doesn't seem so bad to me - if you like Python then you will like this. Perhaps the individual sketches are allowed to run on too long, but it's not as weak as I remember it.

And this little selection featuring Marion Mould is certainly funny. Show jumping obstacles did get overblown like this when the sport was at the height of its popularity.

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Bobby Dean, the new Liberal Democrat MP for Carshalton and Wallington, argues that a return to austerity will not solve Britain's problems: "Starmer says he wants to end the politics of easy answers – and I agree. But on the exam question of 'how to fix Britain', he sidesteps complex answers in favour of a simple one that we have all heard before: we must tighten our belts."

To keep his government on track, Keir Starmer needs to restore the clout of the cabinet secretary and stamp out Downing Street factionalism, says Alex Thomas.

Adam Kucharski offers a guide to the bad-faith arguments people use on social media and how to defeat them.

"I go down there to get away from everything. And it’s a place you can time travel. You get this sense of the past that’s been locked away in the mud, sometimes for thousands of years." Harriet Sherwood on the growth in popularity of mudlarking on the Thames foreshore.

Rose Staveley-Wadham tells the story of all 34 British medallists from the 1924 Paris Olympics using local press cuttings: "Remaining in the sphere of athletics, there was another gold medal winner for Britain at the 1924 Paris Olympics in the shape of Douglas Lowe. His win, on the same day as Harold Abrahams’s, garnered less attention. For example, a small paragraph in the Halifax Evening Courier on 11 July 1924 noted how ‘the winner of the Olympic Games 800 metres race, Douglas Gordon Arthur Lowe, is an old Manchester Grammar School boy, who left the school when his family removed to London in 1917."

The scariest sound in film? Adam Scovell looks back on Jerzy Skolimowski's "visionary British horror oddity" The Shout.

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Alistair Carmichael argues that 'popular Conservatives' are killing their party: "It takes a special sort of intelligence to see an election in which you have lost hundreds of seats to liberal and centre-left parties, including 61 in Tory heartlands to the Liberal Democrats, and interpret that as a mandate to run screaming to the Reform-lite fringe."

"If we sit by and shrug at what happened to Andrew Malkinson we accept that the CCRC is part of the disease and not part of the cure." Maximilian Hardy lays bare the failings of the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

"New Civil Engineer recently revealed that National Highways does not know when the majority of attenuation ponds collecting runoff from around the M25 were last cleaned, meaning they could be full of hazardous waste that could join watercourses." Tom Pashby on the catastrophic damage caused by water running off roads.

Arash Abizadeh is doing something about the lucrative scam of academic journal publishing: "Not only do these publishers not pay us for our work; they then sell access to these journals to the very same universities and institutions that fund the research and editorial labour in the first place."

Luke McLaughlin describes how Great Britain won the Cricket gold medal at the 1900 Paris Olympics.

"She’s an orphan, her family is bankrupt, the estate is in ruins, and she’s spent her whole life alone, raised amidst the faded grandeur of her family’s past by a cruel Governess. Then one day, while exploring the wild grounds, Maria stumbles upon an amazing discovery: a lost colony of Lilliputians! Kidnapped and brought to England as carnival performers in the 18th century, these tiny humans long ago escaped and built a new homeland on her family’s ancestral lands." Nathan Goldwag celebrates Mistress Masham's Repose by T.H. White.

Little Bowden Police Station and Magistrates Court - and my political career

This attractive building stands in Northampton Road, Market Harborough, and the Prison History site gives you its early history:

In the Northampton Mercury of Saturday 5th September 1863 was an advertisement for builders to submit tenders for the building of a new Police Station and Magistrates Room at Little Bowden, with separate tenders needed for both. 

In the Northampton Mercury of Saturday 22nd October 1864 it was stated that the Chief Constable had taken possession of the station and placed an inspector and constable there. In the Northampton Mercury of Saturday 7th January 1865 it was reported that the Magistrates took possession of the Magistrates Room on 13th December 1864. 

Little Bowden Police Station on Northampton Road, Market Harborough is still standing and, I believe, is now used for private offices.

The building was used for private offices until recently, but was then put on the market. I'm not sure if it found a buyer.

The Chief Constable who took possession of the police station here in 1864 was the head of the Northamptonshire Constabulary, because the boundary between that county and Leicestershire followed the River Welland through Market Harborough until the 1890s. So a fair percentage of the town's population and offenders lived in Northants.

At some point after that boundary change the police station closed and became the offices of Market Harborough Urban District Council. I'm told there are still cells beneath it.

Little Bowden Magistrates Court continued to sit until about 1960, hearing cases from the Northamptonshire villages south of the town. It also served as the UDC's council chamber until the authority was abolished in 1974.

When, in 1984. I returned from working in Birmingham and London, the building was occupied by a sports club, The Olympian. It took its name from its owner, Brian Kilby, who had finished fourth in the Marathon at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. By some reckonings, he also held the world Marathon record for over a year in 1963-4.

In 1984 Brian Kilby was a Conservative member of Harborough District Council, but we noticed that he had stopped attending meetings - I believe he was having business problems - and selected a candidate for a possible by-election in his ward. That candidate was me.

I forget whether Kilby was disqualified as a councillor or decided to resign, but the by-election duly took place in May 1986 and I gained the seat for the Liberal Party, appearing as 'Liberal Alliance' on the ballot paper.

My memory may be faulty on some of these points, local readers, so please let me know if I've got anything wrong.

Ana Savage Gunn wins Name of the Day - and will be the Lib Dem candidate if there's a Wellingborough by-election

Congratulations to Ana Savage Gunn. Not only has she won this blog's rarely presented Name of the Day Award, she's been selected as the Liberal Democrat candidate in the event of a Wellingborough by-election.

This will take place if the recall petition for Peter Bone receives the necessary 7940 signatures.

North Northamptonshire Lib Dems tell us all about Ana:

Ana was born and raised in Northamptonshire, and brings a wealth of experience in public service and care with her. 

She joined Northamptonshire Police in 1985 and rose to the rank of Inspector, serving across the county - including in Wellingborough - and she supervised the tactical firearms team. 

In 1994, Ana helped run security at the Atlanta Olympics and a couple of years after this became a law enforcement consultant in the US before her return to the UK and Northamptonshire. 

When COVID-19 broke out Ana retrained as a Health Care Assistant and worked in her mother’s care home before becoming a COVID clinic coordinator in the county. 

Ana continues to work at the care home, and is a trustee of Northamptonshire Carers, located in Wellingborough.

The Queen, James Bond and Paddington Bear

Embed from Getty Images

Frank Cotterell-Boyce has a lovely piece in the Observer on his experience of working with the Queen on her two late ventures into acting: the James Bond section of the London 2012 opening ceremony and her Platinum Jubilee sketch with Paddington.

There was originally no intention that she should appear in the Bond sketch, but when the creative team went to the Palace to discuss it they were told that she wanted to take part. And when they came to film it she said she wanted a line to say.

And appearing in the Paddington sketch must have taken some skill - remember, he was not there when the Queen spoke her lines.

Cotterell-Boyce writes of the significance of that sketch:

It used to be said that millions of people had dreams in which they had tea with the Queen. Even our dream life is going to have to change. Watching her have tea with Paddington will have to do instead. It’s easy to see why that was so powerful. In retrospect, it was valedictory. A woman waving a happy goodbye to her grandchildren and great grandchildren, an image of love and a happy death.

But Paddington is an evacuee, a refugee, one-time prisoner, pretty much every category of need that is mentioned in Matthew 25. Here, he is being welcomed with tea and good manners. This is a strong statement of a set of values that are not uncontested in the corridors of power. To have them exemplified so joyfully at such a moment meant something.

And I shall use this brilliant quotation from Milne myself, possibly quite often:

We're going to be seeing a lot of that flag in the next few days. I don't know how I’m going to feel about this. A flag carefully placed in the background of a cabinet minister’s Zoom room makes me think of AA Milne’s definition of a patriot as "someone who hates everything about the country apart from its flag".

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Russia’s war in Ukraine is a genocide. It's not just a land grab but a bid to expunge a nation, argues Kristina Hook.

Giles Wilkes finds himself increasingly uncertain about the desirability of economic growth: "What is the right approach to value, for example, all the incomes that were generated in the ecosystem around a busted cryptocurrency? It now turns out it was just a few thousand fools throwing real or fake money at one another, consulting, meeting, emailing, writing software, and now it is all bust. Was it real GDP at the time, and now not? Never real in the first place?"

"This was Britain as a rich, diverse, multicultural, imaginative, inventive nation comfortable with its identity and capable of reconciling its contradictions. We were traditional yet modern. We were powerful yet caring. We were orderly yet anarchic. We had a vast back catalogue of world-changing culture from which to draw. We knew how to put on a good show. And we had a sense of humour." Steve Rose asks if the 2012 Olympics the last gasp of liberal Britain.

Terry Eagleton plays with the word "character" and considers Boris Johnson as a character in literary fiction: "It helps to be a character to scramble into power, but you need to have character to stay there."

"It’s not just the case that if Mady Villiers had gone to pretty much any other state school in Essex, she would never have played for England. It’s that more than likely she wouldn’t have played at all." Phil Walker investigates whether cricket is becoming even more elitist.

"When footbridges and underpasses cease to be cared for, when the gardens become overgrown, and the concrete sickens, the shine can go off a new town pretty fast." Ray Newman looks at how post-war British new towns have been depicted on film.

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Otto English takes a look at the record of the 62 Conservative MPs who signed the European Research Group letter to Theresa May.

"The frenzied desire to ‘give the Jews a good kicking’ led the room to reject local MP Tulip Siddiq’s alternative offer of a report on her parliamentary activities instead. Apparently, as we seek a full-on return to the Dark Ages, the ritual ‘humiliation of the Jews’ must come before any competing business." Philip Rosenberg on the institutional racism in his local Labour Party.

"The idea that black people only inhabit urban areas, and that the English countryside has always been white, is a myth. Yes, many black and brown people who came to the UK settled in our larger cities, but not exclusively – there are a multitude of rural histories which are yet to be heard." Louisa Adjoa Parker uncovers some of them, from slavery to African American WW2 GIs.

Barney Ronay says Britain is choking on a toxic obsession with Winter Olympic medals

"During his stint, Orwell enjoyed a spectacular fall out with the editor which saw him nearly quit... and moaned about his rates of pay (although his weekly wages of 8 guineas - the equivalent of £220 today - would be a fortune with today's tight budgets)." Yakub Qureshi discovers George Orwell's three years on the Manchester Evening News.

Tim Worthington remembers Chris Morris's Blue Jam.

Dr William Penny Brookes celebrated in Much Wenlock

I wrote many columns for the New Statesman website, but got only one piece into the printed magazine.

That was about Much Wenlock's Olympian Games and their founder Dr William Penny Brookes.

Visit Much Wenlock today and you will find him celebrated. The waymarked Olympian trail through the town takes in both the house where he was born, lived and died and his resting place across the road in the churchyard.

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"Admittedly, she will be able to rely on unlimited assistance from Labour, but will that be enough?" Bruce Anderson weighs Theresa May's prospects of creating an era of Tory hegemony.

Stephen Crossley and Michael Lambert outline the historical precedents for the government's Troubled Families Programme and argue that, by not learning from past mistakes, it is doomed to repeat them.

Eighty years ago, in Berlin, Stella Walsh won her second Olympic medal. Decades later, her murder and subsequent autopsy threw the legacy of track’s first female superstar into turmoil. Read a fascinating long article by Rob Tannenbaum.

The shadowy figure of David Litvinoff is part of the mythology of Swinging London. Colin MacCabe reviews a new biography of him.

James Alexander Cameron lists his Top 10 "bits of guff you will see spouted by church guidebooks that you should be very cautious in believing".

Tetramesh takes us on a tour of disused passages, complete with 1960s posters, at Euston tube station.

Parents of Olympic medalist Adam Peaty fly to Rio after washing machine breaks down

Headline of the Day has an Olympic theme. Congratulations to ITV News.

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Photo of Taylor Swift by
Jana Zills

Neil Barnett sets out to discover who funded Brexit - features an appearance by Mike Hancock.

Jeremy Corbyn does point to real economic problems facing Britain, but his solutions are based largely on wishful thinking argues John Van Reenen.

"Walk between the glassy offices and tucked-away churches of the City of London, along the thundering roads down by the Thames, and you can occasionally find staircases embedded in the sides of buildings. It’s not always clear that they’re public, but if you follow one upwards they sometimes take you to wide, deserted corridors leading along the flanks of buildings, crossing streets, and more often than not ending in truncated bridges or closed off dead ends." Douglas Murphy on the demise of streets in the sky.

Meg Neal takes us on a tour of the derelict remains of previous Olympic venues.

"The churchyard at Heptonstall actually houses two separate churches. One, a ruin that began decaying after a major gale in 1847 and a new church built to replace the one that was all but destroyed by the weather." Helen Cox visits Sylvia Plath's grave.

What's so bad about Taylor Swift and Pokemon Go? asks Mark Valladares.

The Rio Olympics should be postponed or moved

Yesterday the papers were full of the news that the World Health Organization had been sent an open letter signed by 150 health experts calling for this summer's Olympics to be moved from Rio de Janeiro or postponed.

The experts fear the virus could spread more rapidly around the world because of the influx of Olympic visitors to the Brazilian city, which has a high incidence of the disease Zika.

Today, as I expected, the great and good are telling us not to worry our little heads.

BBC News reports:

Senior WHO official Bruce Aylward told the BBC that risk assessment plans were in place, and reiterated that there was no need to delay the Games. 

The mayor of Rio said disease-carrying mosquitoes were being eradicated.

I expected it because I have seen Jaws (and Peter Benchley had obviously seen An Enemy of the People).

It all sounds very dangerous to me. Just take a look at the opening titles of the original Survivors series above.

Public Image Ltd get it together in the country

"Well, punk was really a reaction against people like me, wasn’t it?" as Steve Winwood once said.

So there is a delicious irony to the fact that John Lydon's Public Image Ltd now record their albums at his Cotswold studio.

See them there in this video, and read a little more about that irony in John Lydon, Steve Winwood and the taming of punk.

The fact that punk was happily absorbed into the opening ceremony for the London Olympics a few months after I wrote that post suggests I was on to something.

Celebrating Britishness before it's too late

My keyboard is misbehaving today - when I try to type i I get ik7, - but I can cut and paste. So hear is some great comment on the referendum debate.

First, Ian Jack (one of my favourite journalists) mourns the possible end of Britishness:

In the SNP’s big-change but no-change version of independence, nobody’s identity is at risk. If people want to think of themselves as British as well as Scottish, then they can keep calm and carry on. 

As Salmond wrote, soothingly, in the same document: “Much of what Scotland will be like the day after independence will be similar to the day before: people will go to work, pensions and benefits will be collected, children will go out to play and life will be as normal.” 

And of course it will. But gradually British identity will wither. If it survives at all, it will become narrow, eccentric, strident and romantic, like so many other national identities that have been deprived of their states and institutions. I value it too much to want that. 

Gordon Brown erred when, as prime minister, he attempted to enunciate his list of “British values” – which turned out to be the values of most civilised nations. He would have been wiser to have written, as Orwell did, about its characteristics rather than what he imagined to be its longstanding moral beliefs. 

The markers of Britishness for me include empiricism, irony, the ad hoc approach, pluralism, and a critical awareness of its own rich and sometimes appalling history. It’s sceptical, too: it has seen a thing or two and knows nothing lasts. 

But perhaps what recommends it most is the frail senescence that makes it an undemanding kind of belonging, and unexpectedly fits it for the modern world. 

The untangling of the institutions – military, administrative, academic, ambassadorial, commercial, cultural – that have sustained this identity can’t but be painfully destructive. The past 300 years have not been about nothing.

Next, Paul Mason attends #LetsStayTogether in Trafalgar Square:

I’ve been thinking about what was different to the vibe last night and, say, the Olympic opening ceremony designed by Danny Boyle. Boyle’s spectacle was brash, drew on a Brits-via-Hollywood meme, and placed heavy stress on working class culture (Abide With Me) and the folk traditions of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. 

The Dan Snow/Bob Geldof version drew much more on poetry, the non-national and even laid claim to internationalism (The Night Mail, by gay, communist conscientious objector WH Auden was read out.) 

So maybe, if you want a Britishness that exists at a higher level than medleys of regional folk songs, this is what you have to accept. 

There was no mention of royalty, or Dunkirk. Nobody shouted “British jobs for British workers”, as Gordon Brown did to the Labour party conference once. You can have strident English nationalism of the EDL and generations of far right football hooligans. 

You can have the progressive English nationalism we saw around Euro 96. You can have the sturm und drang available to both sides in Northern Ireland, or the soaring, class-based patriotism that transports rugby crowds at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium.

But maybe you can’t have a strident *British* nationalism. Maybe that’s the subtextual mistake all those lectern-banging politicians have been making. Maybe it has to be something quiet.

Then Isabel Hardman dissects "The Vow" made by the three party leaders:

It doesn’t matter how many front pages you sign next to your new promise to Scottish voters, you’ve still only unveiled this offer in the last two weeks. If you had it planned for ages, then why wait until the point that it’s so late you appear desperate? Or if you’ve only cobbled together this promise in the last few weeks, then is it really a good idea.

Finally, Nick Cohen shows that Scottish nationalism is as pernicious as any other variety:

Nationalists build walls to keep their people in and the rest out. They create ‘us’ and ‘them’. Friends and enemies. If you disagree, if you say they have no right to speak for you because not all Scots/Serbs/Germans/Russians/Israelis think the same or recognise their lines of the map, you become a traitor to the collective. The fashionable phrase ‘the other’ is one of the few pieces of sociological jargon that enriches thought. All enforcers of political, religious and nationalist taboos need an ‘other’ to define themselves against, and keep the tribe in line. 

The process of separation and vilification is depressing to watch but familiar enough. Scottish nationalists are preparing a rarer trick, last seen in the dying days of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. They are trying to break up an existing multi-national state and turn neighbours into foreigners. They want people, who have lived together, worked together, loved each other, had children together, moved into each other countries and out again, to be packaged and bound up in hermetically sealed boxes labelled ‘Scots’ and ‘English’.

The notion that Scottish nationalism is always cosy and ‘civic’ has flourished without challenge. Alex Salmond’s greatest propaganda success has been to limit debate. If you are outside Scotland, and disagree with him, you have no right to comment on its internal affairs. If you are inside, you are ‘talking down Scotland’; showing yourself to be a self-hating Scot unfit to serve on its ‘Team’. 

The nationalists have bullied too many into silence. People who know better have not spelt out the costs of separatism, or said clearly that progressive forces will suffer most. 

How can they not? Nationalism will allow capital to remain global, while forcing arbitrary local divisions on labour. Brian Souter and Rupert Murdoch have flirted with Salmond because they can sniff a small state coming that must, whatever its currency turns out to be, run surpluses and build reserves to please the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and, above all, a market that will punish the tiniest step away from neo-liberal orthodoxy. 

The currency question has no answer except deeper and wider austerity. That people who think of themselves as left wing can brush it aside and pretend that working and middle-class Scots won’t suffer is a self-deception so extreme it borders on religious fantasy.

Keyboard latest: the backspace is working again.

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Caron's Musings introduces us to an unsavoury blog being promoted by supporters of Scottish independence.

The education debate tends to underplay the importance of resources and overplay the role of management, argues Stumbling and Mumbling.

"It is possible to see a way forward to slay the CAP beast, bringing together an unlikely alliance of Eurosceptics, free marketeers, libertarians, agrarians and environmentalists." A New Nature Blog on the case for reform of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy.

Freethinking Economist considers the strange phenomenon that is economic confidence - "We've won the long jump, so let's buy a fridge."

"If you went through everyone's phone and computer, a significant proportion of people would be ripe for similar charges." Bristling Badger looks at the prosecution of a police officer.

David Hepworth says "We're not a great football country. We're a great football market."

A dapper young Ming Campbell

#77332272 / gettyimages.com

Mary Rand and Menzies show off the uniforms for the British team at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

Ming took part in the 200m, winning his first round heat but going out in the second, while Mary Rand won three medals: gold in the long jump, silver in the pentathlon and bronze as part of the 100m relay team.

What's wrong with W1A?

When I eventually became weary of writing about Westminster for Liberal Democrat News - goodness only knows how my readers felt - I briefly wrote a television column for the party newspaper.

One of the programmes I reviewed in March 2011 was Twenty Twelve - or 2012, as I called it:

2012 (Channel 4) is another attempt at satire, this time dealing with the London Olympics, and it ought to have been celebrating. Its first episode was concerned with a ridiculously complex clock that was designed to count down the hours until the Games begin. A few days later the real Olympic clock that had just been set up in Trafalgar Square broke down. 

A victory for satire? Not quite. While fun, 2012 is far too polite to bite anybody. So much so that Sebastian Coe was willing to appear in it. In allowing this it made itself the Official Satirist of the London Games. The viewer was reminded of the toe-curling occasion when Mrs Thatcher insisted upon starring in a specially written Yes Minister sketch.

As it turned out, Twenty Twelve did grow on me, but not because it offered biting satire of the London Olympics. I liked it because of the strength of the characters and because I even began to care about them. I really wanted to know how they would get on when Hugh Bonneville was in hospital.

Maybe I will grow to love W1A too, but I feel it is inviting us to laugh with the BBC and not at it. If a second series is commissioned, I suspect that the corporation's bigwigs will be queuing up to appear.

Ming Campbell and Tommie Smith

Here is a young Ming Campbell winning the 220 yards final at the AAA Championships at the White City in 1964.

I have heard it suggested that Ming was not the most talented British sprinter of his generation: he just trained harder and tried harder than anyone else. You get a sense of that effort in this photograph.

It is the same effort that turned the product a humble home in Glasgow to into a member of the Edinburgh legal establishment who later became an MP and the leader of his party.

There is another picture of Ming on the gettyimages site.

It shows him winning the silver in the 200 metres at the World Student Games in Tokyo three years later. And the gold medal winner is Tommie Smith, who staged his famous black power demonstration after winning the Olympic gold in Mexico City the following year.

You can read more about Tommie Smith in a guest post on this blog by Matt Roebuck.

Ten stories from ten years - 24 March

Taking my lead from Caron Lindsay on Liberal Democrat Voice, here are snapshots of 24 March over the years here on Liberal England:

2013 - Marianne Faithfull sang for us while I wrote about her grandfather's libido-liberating Frigidity Machine.

2012 - I visited the Portland Enclave, which lies off the London Road in Leicester. The picture above is taken from this post.

2011 - A guest post by Ruth Kinna offered a beginner's guide to anarchism.

2010 - Rory Stewart had compared Liberal Democrats to the Taliban. I remarked that I would be more outraged at this if I had not once begun a Guardian article as follows: "Fierce, bearded and wedded to an impenetrable ideology. Not a description of the Taliban, but the average commentator's view of the Liberal Democrats."

2009 - On Ada Lovelace day, I paid tribute to the woman herself.

2008 - I congratulated to the pro-Tibet activists who attempted to disrupt the lighting of the Olympic torch in London.

2007 - An amusingly shaped parsnip had made it from the pages of the Shropshire Star to the Guardian.

2006 - As so often in those days, my House Points column dealt with Labour's attempt to give the government more powers against terrorism: "Never mind traditions of local accountability and mistrust of an overmighty state: whisper the word “terrorism” and we are supposed to throwaway everything we believe in. The problem with today’s world is not that terrorists believe in their cause so strongly: it’s that the democracies’ belief in theirs is so weak."

2005 - Responding to reports that Mark Thompson had bit a colleague when working as editor of the Nine O'Clock News, Lord Bonkers said: "I knew Lord Reith well and never saw him bite anybody, but there were persistent reports in the 1960s that Hugh Carleton Greene had eaten a junior researcher."

2004 - "Twitchy local authorities, obsessed with safety and frightened of compensation claims, are turning urban areas into 'fun-free, soulless' spaces," said a campaign launched on this day.