Fanciful February Flotsam

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Some notes on three recent topics which I did not deem worthy of full-length articles in their own right:

Andrew’s Arrest

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was yesterday arrested at his home on the Sandringham estate and taken for police questioning, being released later the same day. He is suspected of misconduct in public office.

The King put out a statement acknowledging the situation and essentially declaring that he would not interfere with the process of law. Of course, even if Charles is going to personally recuse himself, his position as incumbent sovereign means that his name will be frequently invoked during any legal proceedings, as any prosecution would formally be “The King against…” (written as “R -v-…”), the barristers arguing for both for and against Andrew would likely be King’s Counsel and if the former prince is incarcerated it would be in one of His Majesty’s Prisons, “at His Majesty’s Pleasure”. Also, of course, the royal arms will be used on a great many letterheads in the process.

Something similar happened with the Duke of Sussex’s lawsuits regarding his security provision: As a judicial review case it was formally “The King on the application of…” and the defendant was one His Majesty’s Principal Secretary’s of State. The case was, furthermore, heard in The King’s Bench Division. As reported in The Telegraph, this was

the infelicitous situation where the King’s son is suing the King’s ministers in the King’s courts. That is pulling the King in three directions.

The government is also apparently considering legislation to remove Andrew from the line of succession to the throne. Given that he is now eighth in line with the first seven all being at least twenty-three years younger than him, the effect of this will be more symbolic than practical. The need to coordinate any legal changes with the governments of the other Commonwealth Realms add further political friction. There have also been calls to formally remove his eligibility to serve as a Counsellor of State. His removal from the line of succession would do this automatically, but otherwise it could be done by a relatively simple Act of Parliament. This status only applies to Britain so the other Realms would not need to be consulted.

A principle that has been invoked many times during these events is that “No-one is above the law.” while it doesn’t help his brother, the phrase is not strictly true: The King himself is immune to arrest in all cases due to the principle of sovereign immunity which applies to varying degrees to lots of heads of state both monarchical and republican.

Bishopric Gets Bishop Rick

Yes, I am including this one solely for the pun. Richard “Rick” Simpson has been announced as the next Bishop of Durham. The diocesan office, one of the five ost senior bishops in the Church of England, has been vacant for nearly two years since the retirement of Paul Butler. In the interim the role has been delegated to Sarah Clark, Suffragan Bishop of Jarrow, who herself was recently chosen to become the next Diocesan Bishop of Ely. It should also be noted that Sarah Mullally, having had her election confirmed on 28th January, took her seat in the House of Lords two weeks ago, but will still not be installed at Canterbury Cathedral for another month.

Chagos Chaos

Donald Trump has flip-flopped yet again on the British agreement with Mauritius to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands. Recently a group of four Chagossians, led by Misley Mandarin, staged a landing on the islands themselves in protest at the attempted handover. The British government ordered their eviction but that has been temporarily blocked by a court order. There has been yet another “pause” of the passage of the relevant legislation through the House of Lords where scrutiny has been very strenuous and embarrassing for the executive.

More Publications, More Podcasts

Dominic Sandbrook, whom I count among the notable people with whom I’ve communicated, is mostly famous now as the co-host of The Rest is History, an enormously successful podcast. He has recently launched another podcast, The Book Club, which he co-hosts with Tabitha Syrett. Their first episode is on Wuthering Heights. Having not read it yet, I must try very hard to avoid repeating lines from the climax of Peep Show episode 39, clips of which I now very frustratingly cannot find. Twenty-five minutes in there is a discussion of the poems and songs in The Lord of the Rings, with Syrett saying she skips over them and Sandbrook saying they’re the best bit. When I read the trilogy aloud to my mother in 2020-21 I included all of them, turning to amateur channels such as Clamavi de Profundis for musical guidance. I have learned a great many of them by heart and practice them while walking the dog along the river bank.

Sandbrook’s idea for a podcast based on books is, of course, far from original. I have already blogged about two different book-related podcasts in the last few years and searching BBC Sounds for “book club” reveals quite a long list. The idea that literacy is essential to civilisation, and that the widely-recorded decline in reading over recent years represents a serious threat thereto, is gaining traction in intellectual circles. Times columnist James Marriott, whom I’ve had on my directory page since last summer, is fast emerging as the the leader of the movement. His own book, The New Dark Ages, is already gaining critical acclaim despite the fact that it isn’t due to be published for another few months.

Secretarial Succession

Dame Antonia Romeo has indeed been appointed Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service, a few days after the resignation of Sir Mark Wormald. Allegations against her have apparently failed to amount to anything.

Westminster Woes

Political power-couple Richard Marc Johnson and Lee David Evans, speaking on their own podcast (yes, yet another one), discuss the state of the Palace of Westminster (as I brought up last week). They also concur with the idea of putting Charles III in charge on the grounds that the royal family clearly has a much stronger track record with this than MPs, peers and civil servants do.

Country Life on the BBC

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I don’t think I’ve ever personally read Country Life magazine. I thought I’d seen some copies of it stacked under my mother’s bed but, on closer examination, those were actually the unrelated Country Living. It was mentioned in the first couplet of the song “Middle Class is Magical” on the puppet series Mongrels. I’ve probably encountered references in many other places along the way without paying much attention.

Even so, I was fascinated to find on the BBC Archive channel a documentary from late 1996 commemorating the magazine’s centenary, which would come on 8th January 1997.

The film introduces an eccentric cast of characters: Among the magazine’s own staff are Professor Clive Aslet, the editor; Annie Tempest, the cartoonist; Caroline Featherstonhaugh*, the editor’s assistant; Clive Boursnell, the garden photographer; Jennifer Guerrini-Maraldi, the fashion editor and John Swannell, another photographer. Among the selected readers are Anne Heseltine (Michael’s wife?), former Liberal Party leader Sir David Steel, fashion designer Sir Hardy Amies, novelist Auberon Waigh, botanist Dr David Bellamy, drummer Roger Taylor and old married couple Harold & Norma Smith (“Look at this man with an enormous onion!”).

We get some insights into the production of the magazine: Tempest explains the background of her cartoon character Annie Tottering, based largely on herself. Boursnell goes on an excursion to a country house and parks his camper van in the grounds overnight, explaining that he must decline offers to stay in the houses themselves because he wouldn’t be able to find his way out at 03:30 when he needs to get shots of the summer sunrise. We then see him rushing about to find flags and filters. Guerini-Maraldi sets up a photoshoot involving her dogs, which is undeterred by rain.

Readers and staff both describe why they think the publication has enduring appeal: Waugh says it is “still exploring the almost-inexhaustible richness of England… you feel you’re more in touch with England through reading Country Life than any other publication.”; Vicki Naish says “It’s just lovely, it’s like Radio 4, it’s like The Archers, it’s really part of life.”

There is some discussion of the property section, in which country houses are advertised for sale. Steel says “This must be the only magazine where people read the advertisements before they read any of the content… you think, gosh, fancy these houses, they always seem to look absolutely spic and span.” while the Smiths comment that while they often love perusing the property section, they are thankful rarely to find anything so good it makes them want to leave their own home behind. Aslet is grateful for the photographs the sellers supply as it does much of the work for him in terms of the magazine’s visual appeal.

There is also some analysis of the nature of CL’s readership, which is perhaps more revealing:

  • Aslet says they “really are wonderful people”. He also says “It’s a magazine which is about quality, and I suppose anyone who really seeks quality probably wants to find the means to achieve it as well so that means they need to find a away of paying for it”.
  • Feathersonhaugh says “I think it’s a magazine for people who appreciate quality things in life who have a certain standard of living.”. When asked whose taste is represented she says “Any decent person’s taste, really.”
  • Amies is asked if it is a magazine for snobs, and replies “Oh yes, thank God! It’s an upper-class magazine.”
  • Guerini-Maraldi says “Our readers are A1, they can afford all sorts of clothes.”

When discussion turns to the frontispieces or “Country Life Girls”, Aslet rather sheepishly says they “are in their own way a kind of national institution. It gives a lot of people a degree of pleasure and I wouldn’t want to deprive them of that.” whereas Steel is more direct, calling the phenomenon “a sort of glossy, upmarket Page 3”, by which he refers to the notorious Page 3 of that notably downmarket paper The Sun. It all feels like a self-aware, affectionate parody of the magazine’s own audience. Certainly it’s a contrast to A Remembered Land, which skews much more towards the lower end of the rural class spectrum.

The most interesting part of the documentary is that is was filmed in late 1996, not far out from the general election that would see New Labour sweep to power. Tony Blair, then Leader of the Opposition, has a substantial appearance as Aslet seeks to interview him.

He notes that getting photographs of Blair in an agricultural setting at all was a rarity at that point. We see the Labour leader at a rally saying “Country Life, that’s very New Labour nowadays.” and then, after some laughter from the audience, “A recent poll said 95% said they were voting Labour. That’s rubbish I’m afraid but we’re working on it nonetheless.” which elicits more chuckles. When they sit down together Aslet brings up John Major’s famous “long shadows on county grounds” speech and asks what is Blair’s impression of rural Britain. Blair replies

Walking in the Scottish Highlands, out in Weardale, the country streams and hills and the beautiful villages there, the lovely countryside that I saw, it was really quite moving.

Aslet asks what landscape painting he would give to President Clinton. Blair’s response: “Everyone thinks of the traditional constable landscape. For me, I would give something a bit more rugged, I think.”

Before we actually see Blair, Aslet explains the rationale for including him:

Country Life is a Tory magazine, of course it is, but being Tory these days I think doesn’t necessarily mean that you support everything the Conservative Party does. Equally, of course, if the Labour Party was in power we would want to know what they think and I think it’s important to find out.

Given the political situation that exists today, it would be interesting to see whether the CL set are still with the Conservative Party. Have they jumped ship and, if so, in which direction? Do the owners of large homes in the countryside still have a natural home in politics? Only time will tell…

*Her name isn’t spoken during the film, but I presume it’s pronounced “fan shaw”.

Paws, Peers and Poor Processes

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The Chief Mouser

Tomorrow will be a significant anniversary in British politics: It will be fifteen years since Larry, the cat pictured above, was appointed Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. If he makes it another three years he will be the hold the record in that office. Already he is on a record six Prime Ministers and will soon greet his sixth Cabinet Secretary as well (see next paragraph). Actually, it would be interesting to do a census of the human officials currently working in Downing Street to see how many predate him. Larry, who was adopted by the Camerons just as the government’s modern web presence was being established, is the first to officially hold the title, but culturally it goes back just over a century to Rufus (or Treasury Bill), who performed the role during the premiership of Ramsay MacDonald. Larry is now well-established as an international celebrity in his own right, to the point that the government is rumoured to have made special plans for the announcement of his eventual death (he’s 19 years old). Despite this, there have also been reports that he is rather lazy and incompetent in his actual job of killing vermin. Yesterday Larry’s own Twitter account acknowledged the passing of his former colleague Palmerston, who was Chief Mouser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office from 2016 to 2020.

The Cabinet Secretary

Sir Chris Wormald succeeded Simon Case as Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service fourteen months ago, having previously been Permanent Secretary at the Department of Health & Social Care since 2016. Whereas his tenure in that job was on the long side, his time as Cabinet Secretary is the shortest in the history of that post. Last summer there were already leaks from Number 10 suggesting that the government regretted his appointment and wanted him out. Two days ago it was announced that he would step down “by mutual consent”. Before the announcement had even been made there was speculation in the press that Sir Keir Starmer intended to choose Dame Antonia Romeo as his replacement. Romeo has spent the last ten months as Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, and for four years before that she was at the Ministry of Justice, where she concurrently held the ancient office of Clerk of the Crown in Chancery which among other perks gave her a prominent seat at the coronation. While she is a favourite among constitutional scholars (such as Elijah Granet of Legal Style Blog), there were also briefings against her by some former colleagues. So far, Starmer has not named a successor to Wormald, but has said that Romeo will form a troika with Catherine Little and James Bowler while the position lies vacant.

The Lord Doyle

Matthew Doyle is, like Peter Mandelson, a figure from the Blair years brought back to help Starmer’s government only to quickly bring the regime into serious disrepute (and for very similar yet unrelated reasons). Doyle was appointed Downing Street Director of Communications (a role created in 2000 for Alastair Campbell and later satirised with the fictional Malcolm Tucker) after the 2024 general election and stayed until 28th March last year. On 10th December it was announced that he had been nominated for a life peerage. He was created Baron Doyle on 8th January and took his seat in the upper house four days later. Four weeks after that he was suspended from the Labour Party. Given that the government was already embroiled in the Mandelson scandal, this was particularly embarrassing for Starmer. Conservative backbencher Lord Harper pointed out that Doyle’s letters patent were not sealed until after the revelations came out and thus it would have been possible for the Prime Minister to postpone or withdraw his ennoblement. This was confirmed by House of Lords authorities.

Discussing this on the Parliament Matters podcast, Mark D’Arcy made an observation that I have long held:

Even though the House of Lords is half of the legislative process in Parliament, it’s remarkable how little most people in the House of Commons actually know about how it works. It’s another country from whose bourne no traveller returns as far as the Commons is concerned. Not quite true actually. A couple of them have. But it is this very strange feature of Westminster life that there is so much ignorance in the Commons about the workings of the Lords and very little inclination to learn much about it either.

He had earlier brought up a speech made in the Commons by Darren Jones, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, about proposed legislation to allow disgraced peers to be deprived of their baronies. I’m a little surprised D’Arcy didn’t highlight what the minister actually said, because at one point while bringing up the Titles Deprivation Act 1917 he managed to get World War One and World War Two confused. Worse still, nobody else in the chamber at the time pointed this out.

The Next State Visit

Nothing about Their Majesties’ outbound diplomacy has yet been confirmed for this year, but already we have one inbound state visit on the cards: The President & First Lady of Nigeria will be coming to Windsor Castle on 18th March. This is unusually early in the year for such an event (as they normally don’t start until the autumn) and is only the second time in the present reign that a Commonwealth president has been received in such a way. President Tinubu last had a royal audience in September 2024, and before that was visited in his home country by James Cleverly in 2023.

The Palace of Westminster

It has been over six years since the Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration & Renewal) Act was passed, yet progress on the actual restoration has been negligible. The House of Commons and House of Lords Commissions recently put out a joint report predicting that the work could take up to sixty-one years and cost up to £39 billion. This naturally has caused widespread outrage and been held up as the perfect symbol of the British state’s incapability of getting anything done in the modern age.

The R&R Programme in its current state was savaged in The Critic by Nicholas Boys Smith, Founding Director of Create Streets. Smith’s article seems to have been taken up by Parliamentarians themselves, with Lord Hannan of Kingsclere in particular claiming

Rarely have I seen an article taken up by politicians as swiftly and as thoroughly as this one. Every MP and peer is talking about it.

although of course that will be hard to objectively verify. Although Smith himself does not mention it directly (despite the article name), I have seen a few commentators bring up the possibility of Charles III personally taking charge of the project. While that may seem outlandish by the conventions of modern politics, there is a logic to it: Charles has been dedicated to the cause of traditional architecture for many decades, and has arranged the construction of two entire towns (Poundbury and Nansledan) in less time than the Westminster restoration is expected to take. Given that the Palace is technically a royal residence, it is also worth bringing up restoration works on other royal residences which the royal family still occupy: The rebuilding of Windsor Castle after the 1992 fire was completed in five years without a government grant, and the refurbishment of Buckingham Palace is expected to be completed next year with relatively little disruption along the way. It may solve a different problem, too: It has been known for a long time that the royals themselves are not all that keen on Buck House and have long wished to shift the emphasis to Windsor as the main residence. Elizabeth II & Philip Mountbatten were happily embedded at Clarence House before the death of George VI and would have continued living there had Churchill not insisted they move. As the 2020 pandemic seized the nation, the late sovereign decamped to Windsor for the duration of the lockdown, and as restrictions eased she decided not to move back. Charles & Camilla are likewise still at Clarence House, even continuing to use it for their private social functions and all the charities they founded as Duke & Duchess of Cornwall. The refurbishment has given them the perfect excuse not to move, as well as to redirect state visits to Windsor. As the building returns to an available state next year it could be a canny strategic move for him to graciously offer it to MPs and peers while he takes back control of Westminster. Caroline Shenton’s book Mr Barry’s War details the reconstruction of the Palace in the nineteenth century following the great fire. It mentions that Parliament turned down an offer from William IV to move to Buckingham Palace. This time around it may prove harder to refuse. Furthermore, a lot of the delay in the current project is due to some MPs’ and peers’ reluctance to commit to a full decamp, understandably fearful that once they take their foot out of the door they may never get it back in again, or that by the time they do their old home will have changed beyond all recognition. The King’s own hand at the tiller may be just the reassurance they need.

UPDATE (15th February)

Professor Norton has put out an article on the matter of peerage nominations and their opportunities for withdrawal.

The Return of Mock the Week

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By the time it was decommissioned by the BBC in 2022 (the last series kicking off just as Elizabeth II died), Mock the Week had been around for seventeen years. It started after Tony Blair’s re-election for a third term in 2005 and ended just as Rishi Sunak was about to take over from Liz Truss. It had become a mainstay of British political comedy, and no true successor emerged in its absence in 2023, -4 and -5.

Last month it was revealed with little notice or fanfare that the series had been recommissioned, but not on the BBC this time. Instead it now airs on the multinational but lesser-known TLC, as part of a major relaunch of that channel’s British offerings. There is also a small change of recording venue, from the BBC Elstree Centre to Elstree Studios a few hundred metres away.

At time of writing, two episodes of the revived series have been aired, with perhaps another five scheduled.

By and large, the new episodes are the same as the old with no changes to the fundamentals of the formula, so the segments and rounds are all familiar to those who saw the original. Notably the latest series features a revival of the “Between the Lines” which the BBC series dropped a long time ago.

Many of the panellists are also carried over, including late-stage regulars Angela Barnes, Sarah Pascoe and Rhys James; perennial recurring guests Ed Byrne and Milton Jones; and late-stage semi-regular Ahir Shah. The only brand new guest so far is Lou Sanders. Dara Ó Briain of course returns to host. There was no return of Frankie Boyle despite much public clamouring, though the premiere did feature a one-off comeback by early-regular Russell Howard, who acknowledged that it had been more than fifteen years since he last appeared on the old show. This is all important for establishing a sense of continuity. The one glaring absence is Hugh Dennis, who was a constant presence on the original series but had scheduling conflicts for the first two episodes of the revival.

As I have written before, a lot of British comedy panel shows are now experienced primarily as a series of online compilations of short segments, often many years removed from the context of their original air dates. This works even if, as is the case here, the jokes and commentary are in direct response to weekly events and thus in theory should be locked in time. Because so many years are mashed together like this, one’s mental cache of what the programme was like can become a vague blend which averages at somewhere about a decade ago. This is also true of the appearances of the panellists, and thus seeing them in new recordings can be quite a shock to the system as they seem to age a great amount very suddenly. I found this to be especially true in Howard’s case.

This still the main photograph on Howard’s Wikipedia page. I screenshotted it from a promotional video he did in 2017.

Also, I found that something was… slightly off about the set. It almost looked the same as the old one but a few little details had changed, the most obvious being that the main desk looked smaller and tighter than before. The font on the SWLTS topics looked different too. It was as if the old set had been recreated by sight, or even from memory, without access to the blueprints.

The overall effect of the sum of these little details was to make the first episode feel like something of a fever dream. I had to check online the next morning to reassure myself that the experience was real and not just something my brain had extrapolated out of desperation. Luckily it is real, and it looks set to be around for some time to come (although actually finding TLC to watch it at the correct time is difficult as the panellists themselves acknowledge).

The only major and deliberate departure from the old format is the increased runtime: Each episode is now three quarters of an hour long (padded to a full hour with commercial breaks) instead of half. Ó Briain says this is not a case of filming more material than before but rather of cutting less of it out before broadcast. While it is difficult to turn down the chance to see more material from the team, especially after a drought of three years, I was conscious sometimes that the lack of tight editing occasionally caused a segment to drag on too long and lose momentum, and that the panellists were sauntering back-and-forth too many times between the main desk and the performance area. Still, these issues are very minor and hopefully will be sorted as the series progresses. 

The Dark Lord Falls

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He won’t be smiling much anymore.

Peter Mandelson is no stranger to scandal-induced resignations: He resigned from Blair’s cabinet twice in the space of three years and lately he resigned as Britain’s Ambassador to the United States after a tenure of just seven months. He was dismissed from the ceremonial office of High Sheriff of Hull at the same time.

Today he announced his intention to retire from the House of Lords, having already taken leave of absence on Saturday. He additionally resigned from the Labour Party on Sunday, meaning he briefly had the designation of non-affiliated peer.

His departure from the upper house will not make much practical difference as he had long ceased to be a regular contributor to proceedings — he spoke in the House just five times in the past five years and thirteen times in the five years before that. In a break from normal procedure, the Lord Speaker announced Mandelson’s gave advanced notice of his retirement, “given the public interest”. This, incidentally, was the first retirement announcement of Michael Forsyth’s speakership, which only began yesterday. On the woolsack he must obviously remain studiously neutral in such matters, but I can’t help wondering what his personal feelings are, given that he lost his seat in the House of Commons in the 1997 New Labour landslide in which Mandelson played such an important role.

The retirement is obviously a case of jumping before he was pushed, as many of his political enemies (always a sizeable group, now an enormous one) had been threatening that if he did not leave of his own accord then they would take measures to force him out.

The House of Lords Reform Act 2014 (by which he retired) allows peers to be expelled if sentenced to prison terms of at least one year while the House of Lords (Expulsion and Suspension) Act 2015 allows the House to evict members who breach the code of conduct, but the necessary investigations — both by Parliament itself and by the Metropolitan Police — would have taken too long to satisfy the public’s bloodlust. In any case the former act only applies to convictions for crimes committed after its own commencement, whereas most of Mandelson’s alleged offences are from well before.

Even after this announcement, there are still some calling for him to lose his title. As with the former Prince Andrew (and for many of the same reasons), this could most quickly achieved by him writing to the Lord Chancellor to request his name by omitted from the Roll of the Peerage. This may not satisfy his opponents, some of whom are explicitly calling for an Act of Parliament to formally revoke the letters patent of 2008 by which his peerage was created. Perhaps the old-fashioned Bill of Attainder will come back into fashion after all.

UPDATE (4th February)

Mandelson’s retirement was announced properly today. I note that the words “On behalf of the House, I should like to thank the noble Lord for his valued service to the House.” which normally accompany such announcements were omitted on this occasion.

It was also reported today that the Prime Minister wishes to remove him from the Privy Council. It appears he came to this decision just after yesterday’s meeting as nothing to that effect is listed in the agenda or the minutes. Either the enactment of Mandelson’s expulsion will wait until next month’s meeting or a special session will shortly be convened for this purpose.

The New Lord Speaker

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Following the slightly-expedited retirement of the Lord McFall of Alcluith, the Lord Forsyth of Drumlean today sat on the woolsack for the first time as Lord Speaker.

Michael Forsyth’s political career began with a five-year stint (beginning 1978) on Westminster City Council, followed by a fourteen year tenure as Member of Parliament for Stirling, where he was unseated in 1997. In the 1990s he served in a rapid succession of Minister of State roles before peaking at Secretary of State for Scotland in 1995.

He spent two years out of Parliament before receiving a life peerage in 1990. He never returned to ministerial office but did serve in a lot of important (if unglamorous) committees. He was declared Lord Speaker-elect on 12th January, having beaten the crossbencher Baroness Bull (former creative director of the Royal Opera House) by 383 votes to 297. His royal confirmation was notified to the chamber by the Lord Chamberlain of the Household, Lord Benyon. A hustings for the election was filmed by the Hansard Society in December.

Now that the office of Lord Speaker is nearing its twentieth anniversary and is on its fifth holder, it may be prudent to review some statistics:

  • The office has been held by two Ladies (Hayman and D’Souza) and three Lords (Fowler, McFall and Forsyth).
  • Three were born and raised in England (Hayman, D’Souza, Fowler) and two in Scotland (McFall, Forsyth).
  • Two came from the Conservative party (Fowler, Forsyth), two from Labour (Hayman, McFall*) and one the Crossbenches (D’Souza).
  • Hayman and Fowler attended Cambridge (Newnham and Trinity Hall respectively), D’Souza UCL and then Oxford (Lady Margaret Hall), McFall Paisley College of Technology, then the Open University, then the University of Strathclyde; Forsyth the University of St Andrews.
  • The five have had varying levels of prior political experience: Fowler spent thirty-one years in the Commons, eleven of them as Secretary of State; Forsyth had fourteen years, of which two as Secretary of State and five as Minister of State; McFall twenty-three years, of which two-and-a-half as a very junior minister then nine as a very senior committee chair; Hayman spent under five years as an MP (all on the backbenches) but then had four years of ministerial experience in the Lords, of which two in cabinet. D’Souza is the only one never to have been a minister nor a member of the Commons.
  • D’Souza was a peer for seven years before becoming Speaker, Hayman ten, McFall eleven, Fowler fifteen, Forsyth twenty-six.
  • Hayman took office aged 57, D’Souza 67, Forsyth 71, McFall 76 and Fowler 78.

As I have mentioned before, no armorial bearings are known for the first four Lord Speakers (despite Hayman having been on Flags & Heraldry group). Forsyth breaks this trend, as I found his blazon on page 470 of Debrett’s Peerage 2015. The illustration below is by Cakelot1.

  • Escutcheon: Argent a chevronnel engrailed Gules between in chief two griffins respectant Azure armed and membered Gules crowned Or and supporting a square block of roughly dressed sandstone Proper with a ring at each end Sable and in base a hurt charged with a mascle Argent.
  • Crest: A griffin sergeant Azure armed and membered Gules crowned Or and charged on the shoulder with a mascle Argent.
  • Supporters: Two griffins Azure armed and membered Sable crowned Or and each charged on the shoulder with a mascle Argent.
  • Motto: Learn From The Past

It is worth noting also that McFall interviewed Forsyth on the Lord Speaker’s Corner podcast in December 2023. Last week, in the final episode before the handover, McFall was himself interviewed by the Baroness Hazarika (incidentally he interviewed her almost exactly a year before).

*Although McFall had left the Labour group and sat as unaffiliated from 2016.

Reformare vel Florere

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Photograph from 9th July 2024 in the House of Commons Chamber

It has been widely reported in the past few months that Reform UK has experienced significant growth in Parliamentary representation. In July 2024 its caucus in the House of Commons had five members:

  • Lee Ashfield (Ashfield)
  • Nigel Farage (Clacton)
  • Rupert Lowe (Great Yarmouth)
  • James McMurdock (South Basildon & East Thurrock)
  • Richard Tice (Boston & Skegness)

(Anderson is not included in the photograph above because it was an event for new MPs and he had already served since 2019. More on that later.)

Given the history of parties with which Farage has been associated, it should be no surprise that this combination did not last long.

Lowe was the first to go: On 7th March 2025 he was suspended from the party due to bullying allegations. On 30th June that year he launched his own party named Restore Britain. Oddly, on 1st December he then launched a second (though as yet unregistered) local party named Great Yarmouth First. I don’t know of any precedent for the same person leading two self-founded parties simultaneously.

Mc Murdock wasn’t long behind him: On 5th July, the anniversary of his election declaration, he was suspended due to allegations that he fraudulently claimed state loans for his businesses during the pandemic. Three days later he resigned from the party and now sits as an independent.

Losing forty per cent of your original parliamentary party in the first year of that Parliament’s sitting is, to say the least, unfortunate, but the party gained MPs faster than it lost them:

On 1st May 2025 Reform candidate Sarah Pochin narrowly wrought the seat of Runcorn & Helsby in a by-election, following the resignation of disgraced Labour MP Mike Amesbury. On 15th September the shadow junior minister Danny Kruger (East Wiltshire) defected. In January 2026 there were three further defections from the Conservatives to Reform:

  • Robert Jenrick (Newark) on 15th.
  • Andrew Rosindell (Romford) on 18th.
  • Suella Braverman (Fareham & Waterlooville) on 26th.

Rosindell has been mentioned on this blog once before. He is relatively-low profile, being a junior shadow minister under both Cameron and Badenoch (the latter right up until his defection) but missing out on any actual post while his party was in government. Jenrick and Braverman are relative high-flyers, having both been Secretaries of State since 2019 and both contested the Conservative Party leadership at least once.

On 6th December last year, the Lord Offord of Garvel (a junior minister from 2021 to 2024) joined the party, and on 15th January was appointed head of its Scottish branch with the intent to lead the party into the Holyrood elections in May. This gave Reform its first representation in the upper house, but the experience was short-lived because he formally retired on Friday.

Looking at the Reform group in the House of Commons now, this is what we get:

  • Lee Ashfield (original)
  • Suella Braverman (defection)
  • Nigel Farage (original)
  • Robert Jenrick (defection)
  • Danny Kruger (defection)
  • Sarah Pochin (by-election)
  • Andrew Rosindell (defection)
  • Richard Tice (defection)

Nineteen months from the general election, the original group have already become a minority, outnumbered by the newcomers — which feels oddly poignant given how much of the party’s support is based on anxieties about immigration. It’s worth remembering that even among the original group, Ashfield was not new to the House of Commons, having been elected as a Conservative candidate in 2019 and served as that party’s Deputy Chairman as recently as January 2024. It remains to be seen how stable this association will be given that it involves at least two people who only joined the new party after trying and failing to win the crown of the old, and who may not be comfortable for long submitting to the authority of Farage when he has so much less legislative and governmental experience than they do.

As has been pointed out in numerous articles and editorials by now, this illustrates the dilemma facing Reform: They have long leaned on their “outsider”, “anti-establishment” status under their charismatic leader, but now as it looks ever more likely that they could actually win power they obviously need to start acting more like a serious party of government rather than a protest movement, which means getting people on board with experience of how to operate in Whitehall and Westminster. Unfortunately for them, the Conservatives aren’t necessarily sending their best people, so that Farage could end up being forced to present the electorate with a supposedly-revolutionary government composed in no small part of the very same individuals who created the mess against which he’s revolting!

As a counter all this, a new movement has recently emerged called Prosper UK. This is a group within the Conservative Party, rather than a new party in its own right, though ironically the same name was used in 2018-20 for an unrelated (and unsuccessful) minor party under Alan Sked, the original founder of UKIP.

Prosper is predominantly a campaign for the liberal, moderate, “One Nation” (and also Remain-voting) Conservatives who have found themselves increasingly marginalised following the referendum ten years ago.

The Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links, Co-Founder and Co-Chair of Prosper

I found the group’s Wikipedia page with a simple list of the names of its supporters taken directly from its own website. Bit by bit I transformed the simple list into a sortable table with photographs and notes. Unlike the ill-fated Change UK/Independent Group from 2019, Prosper launches with seventy prominent names attached, many of whom have held senior government posts. The downside is that the group looks to be mainly a collection of yesterday’s stars: Among the seventy names in that list I found only three who are currently holding an elected public office (one council leader and two police commissioners). There are no incumbent members of the House of Commons at all, instead the vast majority are former MPs who either stood down or were voted out out some time ago. Fifteen of the former MPs now sit in the House of Lords, as do two of the party’s former leaders in the Scottish and European Parliaments (Davidson and Kirkhope respectively).

Shortly after the launch, Kemi Badenoch gave a speech explicitly rejecting a return to centrism, which means that their prospects of meaningful influence over the direction of the wider party are likely to be very limited for the foreseeable future. Still, at least this whole exercise helped me to bump my edit count up. Labutnum rank, here I come!

Introducing the Sudrian Armorial

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I realised recently that I had made quite a lot of posts on this blog about heraldry relating to The Railway Series, so much that it almost became a topic in itself. Since this is not a topic which I have seen extensively covered elsewhere, I had the idea of collating all the scattered bits of information into one comprehensive catalogue, which helps me keep track of what I’ve done as well as serving as a template for other fans and researchers, so that we I, and they, do not need to repeatedly crawl through multiple separate articles.

These, by the way, are the posts which are being collated:

This will be a dynamic list as I still expect to find new entries, but updates will continue to be mentioned in blog posts while the page itself will integrate them into what was already there. I’m hoping to eventually cover every example of heraldic description or design in the entirety of both the book and television series, as well as establishing a proper armorial for the Awdry family in real life. Sadly, my research into that particular avenue has not progressed much since my last post on it.

Here it is. I’ve made it as a page rather than a post and elevated it to a direct link in the main menu for ease of visibility. If this works out I may give the same treatment to some of my other projects in the future.

Blog Records for 2025

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My target for the year 2025 was to get a total of five thousand views on this website. Until a relatively late point in the year it looked as if I would fall short, but then I got an unexpected boost from a handful of very busy days which were more than enough to carry me over the line.

I passed last year’s record of 4,664 on 8th November and reached the target of 5,000 on 2nd December. My total for the year was 5,599. I suppose that puts me most of the way to the target I already had in my head for 6,000 views in the year 2026.

My single busiest day ever was 2nd November with 119 views. The two days before were 84 and 96 respectively, making an unusually active trio. I also got 100 exactly on 2nd December. The mean count was 15.3 per day. My target for this year is 16.3. Of course, these few days are highly unrepresentative and their future recurrence is unpredictable.

I have also calculated the percentage growth of the site year on year from the start of this decade.

  • 2021: +008.9
  • 2022: +002.9
  • 2023: -020.2
  • 2024: +102.8
  • 2025: +020.0

Of course 2024’s extraordinary growth throws everything else out of whack, but last year was still fairly respectable. I remind readers again that I am not making a business out of this blog, there is no chasing of eyeballs, nor an ordained timetable and I do not have access to any sophisticated metrics. Posts will continue to be made whenever I have time, knowledge and inspiration.

Public Domain Day 2026

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It’s that time of year again. Here’s a look at some of the stuff which has just gone out of copyright in the United Kingdom (and other countries with a copyright term of author’s life plus 70 years) are novelists Ruby M. Ayres, Beatrice Chase, Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, Constance Holme, Clemence Housman, Roger Mais and Thomas Mann (though in the latter’s case this only applies to his original writings in German, not to subsequent translations by other people); composers Alfredo Cuscinà, Isaak Dunayevsky, George Enescu, Arthur Honegger, Jaime Ovalle, James P. Johnson and Francesco Balilla Pratella; and scientists Albert Einstein and Sir Alexander Fleming; all of whom died in the year 1955.

As usual in recent years, the most intriguing load comes from works made in the United States in the year 1930, expiring under the term of publication plus 95 years. These include the first Betty Boop film Dizzy Dishes, the first Three Stooges film Soup to Nuts and the first major John Wayne film The Big Trail. There are also some works originating outside the United States in that year which now are public domain there but not here, such as Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s film Juno and the Paycock, which will remain under copyright in Britain and most of Europe until 2053. There is also a film adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, which was made in the United States but adapted from a book first published in Germany, whose author lived until 1970.

Conversely, there are some American works first published after 1930 by authors who died in 1955, which thus are public domain here but not in their home country. Most prominent of these is Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936).

There is a further category of works which were already public domain in their home countries but are now entering it in the United States, such Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow by Piet Mondrian of the Netherlands (d. 1944) and Animal Friendship by Paul Klee of Switzerland (d. 1940).

We still have one more year to wait for the expiry of A. A. Milne’s copyright, and ten years for that of Sir Winston Churchill!