The 16-year-old who was sent to prison for refusing to wear shorts

Further proof that the past is a foreign country comes in the shape of a story from the Wolverhampton Star and Express for 26 January 1973:

Shorts penalty for 6½ft boy

Social services officials are investigating the case of a 16-year-old, 6ft. 6in. boy who was told to wear short trousers as a punishment in a remand home.

An inquiry was demanded by the boy’s solicitor, Mr Peter Marron, who told the juvenile court at Leicester on Tuesday that his client was “ humiliated and degraded” by the experience.

Mr Marron claimed that the punishment led to another incident at the home in which an officer said he was assaulted. For this the boy was certified as "unruly" and spent seven days on remand in Leicester prison. 

The Daily Express, which is the only other paper I can find covering the story, adds some details. The boy ("a West Indian") was punished for leaving the remand home without permission to see his solicitor.

When I came across this story, I dragged up vague memories of the incarceration of boys in adult prisons being a cause for concern - the sort of thing they made editions of World in Action about.

And I was right. Here's a Commons debate from October 1975 in which a new clause was added to the Children Bill at its second reading.

Step forward health minister Dr David Owen:

The House knows that the number of remands to Prison Department establishments of juveniles charged with a criminal offence and certified to be of so unruly a character that they cannot safely be committed to the care of the local authority, has risen steeply in recent years. 

The number of receptions to prisons of boys aged 14 to 16 rose from under 2,000 in 1971 to more than 3,500 in 1974. The number of certificates issued in respect of girls rose from under 100 in 1971 to nearly 250 in 1974.

The sending of these young people to Prison Department establishments and in particular in the case of girls and some boys to establishments in which adult prisoners are held has rightly attracted growing and widespread criticism.

The pipeline from the care system to the prison system was certainly working well 50 years ago.

Then there was Owen's shadow, Norman Fowler:

A year ago I went to Wormwood Scrubs prison, which some hon. Members may remember is a special security prison with extra security precautions.

However, another wing of Wormwood Scrubs housed the borstal allocation unit for the southern part of England. The boys who were sent there stayed three or four weeks whilst it was decided what borstal they should be sent to. 

Many of them went not to a closed borstal but to an open borstal. Although the boys were obviously kept separate from the adult prisoners, it could have hardly have failed to get around that they were being kept in prison. Twenty-five per cent. of them slept three to a cell.

It is a scandal that children should be kept in prison. It is even worse if they are kept in prison when they are awaiting trial or sentence, because we are dealing with children whose guilt has not been determined or whose eventual sentence will not necessarily be a custodial one.

And the first Labour backbencher to speak? - he referred to Fowler's "very fair and welcome comments". That was Robert Kilroy-Silk.

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

I've just sent off another column to the JCPCP, so it's time to post another of my earlier ones.

The idea that Noel Coward had a role in wartime intelligence has been taken seriously by recent biographers - something else to read up on. And whatever the truth of that, he had upset the Nazis enough to appear on the list of people to be executed after the invasion.

When this list was revealed after the German surrender, Rebecca West, who also appeared on it, sent Coward a telegram: "My dear, the people we should have been seen dead with."

Spychology

The only spy I have known is the one I wrote jokes for. 

Back in the 1990s, I had friends at Liberal Democrat court and could send in lines and ideas for Paddy Ashdown’s speeches. The 1997 general election campaign was, I think, the last at which BBC Radio 4 broadcast a daily late-evening round up of speeches from the hustings, and I sometimes heard my work used. At the following election, a programme satirising the election was broadcast in that slot. It was Peter Cook who said, back in the 1960s, that “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea.”

When Paddy Ashdown first surfaced in the old Liberal Party, it did not take the press long to notice his intriguing background. A former special forces officer who joined the diplomatic service and was appointed first secretary to the United Kingdom mission to the United Nations in Geneva? How obvious can it be? It was from Geneva that our agents behind the Iron Curtain were run.

There were those in the party who worried that Ashdown had been planted on us by the deep state, but as he was so much more appealing than anyone we had come up with ourselves, most were happy to welcome him. Besides, given our sometimes fractious relations with our partners in the SDP/Liberal Alliance, it was comforting to know we had someone who could strangle Dr David Owen with his bare hands if it came to that.

Ashdown’s memoirs told us inevitably little about his MI6 years, though his friend the former Labour minister Denis MacShane suggested after his death that he had been involved with Operation Gladio, which set up arms and supplies caches all over Western Europe for the Resistance to use if Soviet tanks ever rolled in.

Admirers of John le Carré were not surprised by what Ashdown did say about the organisation:

When I first joined, our headquarters was in an anonymous multi-storey tower block south of the Thames whose existence was never supposed to be made public. Indeed, we were all instructed to approach it with discretion, taking appropriate precautions.

But even George Smiley must have winced at this:

The game was, however, rather given away by the conductors of the London buses that passed our door at regular intervals: they delighted in announcing the local bus stop with a cheery (and usually very loud) shout of, "Lambeth Tube Station. All spies alight 'ere."

******

Ian Fleming’s first choice to play James Bond was Noel Coward, but The Master sent a telegram in reply to the offer: ‘DR NO? NO. NO. NO.’ Coward, it is true, had played a spy in Our Man in Havana, but that was a deskbound one with no licence to kill.

What doesn’t work on the screen, however, can work in real life. The Carry On actor Peter Butterworth, for instance, was one of the vaulters who helped in the Wooden Horse escape from a World War II German prisoner of war camp in, but when he auditioned for a part in the film he was told he ‘didn't look convincingly heroic or athletic enough’.

And so it was with Coward, though quite what he did in the war is not clear. Some sources say he was a member of a network of rich travellers who gathered information from across Europe just before hostilities broke out: others that he worked in black propaganda in the same unit as Guy Burgess and Kim Philby.

What seems more certain is that he ran the British propaganda office in Paris, telling his superiors: "If the policy of His Majesty's Government is to bore the Germans to death, I don't think we have time." He later used his showbiz fame to help persuade the American public and government that they should enter the war.

Coward and Fleming were near neighbours in Jamaica, where much of Dr No was filmed, and both members of the slightly disreputable international elite that had flocked to the newly independent island – there was nothing slightly about another of its members, Errol Flynn. A young Chris Blackwell, who came from a family in that set, helped find locations for the film and was offered a job by Harry Salzman, who produced it alongside Cubby Broccoli.

Blackwell was tempted, but decided to remain in the music business. He moved to London and imported Jamaican records to sell to the expatriate community there, then founded his own production company. He discovered first Millie Small (‘My Boy Lollipop’) and then Steve Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group, and with them on board, Island Records took off. 

In 1976 Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye estate on Jamaica came on the market, twelve years after his death. Blackwell bought it, but only after he had failed to persuade another Island artist to do so. Bob Marley could be stubborn.

******

When the BBC showed Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective at Christmas I found it had curdled since I saw it in 1986, but their adaption of John Le Carré’s spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy from 1979 never disappoints. I know its seven episodes so well that I had to steel myself before seeing the 2011 film of the book and then steel myself not to walk out of the cinema. It was all wrong. Really, it was just different, though two hours was not enough time to do justice to the book’s intricate plot.

If the TV series, like Fawlty Towers, gets a bit more Seventies every time you see it, that’s only to its advantage. Much of the publicity about the film concerned its efforts to recreate the look of that decade, but the television series didn’t have to try at all.

Someone working on it for the BBC asked a contact if he could be smuggled into the MI6 building - the spooks had moved since Paddy Ashdown’s day - to see what it was like. "There’s no need," he was told. "It’s exactly like Broadcasting House."

Lord Bonkers on the retirement of Lord Owen

"It was when his candidate barely succeeded in defeating Dr David Owen's hilarious "Continuing SDP Party" at the first Bootle by-election of 1990 that my old friend Lord Sutch decided to step back from the front line of politics."

Henry Hardy, David Owen and Simon Callow on Bryan Magee

Bryan Magee – philosopher, writer, broadcaster, politician – died on 26 July at the age of eighty-nine. 

After his death, the three main broadsheets swiftly printed the oven-ready obituaries they had on file. But the BBC, where Magee’s reputation was cemented in the later decades of the twentieth century, failed even to mention his death, let alone look back at his life and work. What were Front Row and Last Word thinking of? Not the tiniest clip from the rich Magee broadcasting archive were we offered. 

Magee was (and still is) a household name among the chattering classes, rightly, and this was an astonishing failure of cultural memory on Auntie’s part. He was a consummate interviewer, and one of the most articulate and engaging expositors, especially of philosophy, who ever lived. The silence on the air waves at the end of his life was shameful.

Henry Hardy begins a piece for The Oldie with this complaint about the BBC's ignoring of Bryan Magee's death.

He goes on to give his own memories of him and is followed by David Owen (Magee was a Labour and then an SDP MP) and the actor Simon Callow.

I have my own reasons for being grateful to Magee.

His television series Men of Ideas, featuring interviews with many of the great philosophers of the day, was screened at the start of 1978 when I was being interviewed by universities because I hoped to study philosophy there.

And his superb short book on Karl Popper was a strong influence on my own thinking,

I respect him too as a man who knew the back streets of Market Harborough.

Book review: Winning Here by Chris Rennard

This is my review of Chris Rennard's memoirs from the current issue of Liberator. Since you ask, you can subscribe to the magazine via its website.

Winning Here - My Campaigning Life: Memoirs Volume 1
Chris Rennard
Biteback Publishing, 2018, £25

When Phil Reilly left his job as the Liberal Democrats’ director of communications last November, he announced the decision in a post on Lib Dem Voice. Writing of the first leaders’ debate in the 2010 general election, he said:

That night changed the course of our party’s fortunes, but it also changed my life. I had joined the press office of a party that hadn’t been in national government for decades, with no expectation that would be changing any time soon. A few short years later I would be working in 10 Downing Street.

After it was published I saw tweets from national political journalists congratulating Phil on the article, which suggests that his may become the official version of Lib Dem history.

The truth, however, is rather different. Cleggmania lasted only a few days and the party lost five seats at the election. We did end up in government, not because of the peculiar brilliance of Clegg or Reilly, but because the election produced a hung parliament, an outcome that will always be a fluke result.

A more accurate account of Liberal Democrat history was given in an earlier Lib Dem Voice post by Nigel Lindsay:

Liberal Democrats were arguably more effective as a party of government before Nick Clegg became leader. [In] the decade from 2000 to 2010, Liberal Democrats were coalition partners in the governments of both Scotland and Wales.  The achievements of Liberal Democrat Ministers in those governments were far-reaching and radical …. Liberal Democrats also controlled major local authorities in most parts of Britain during those years.

Chris Rennard’s ‘Winning Here’, which is billed as volume 1 of his memoirs, tells the story of how he helped the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats reached this position of comparative strength, ending with the defenestration of Charles Kennedy and then Willie Rennie’s victory in the Dunfermline and West Fife by-election in February 2006.

This has the effect of ending the story before the emergence of the allegations of sexual harassment against him that have sometimes threatened to split the party along a generational divide. Chris does mention them in his introduction, but a full discussion will presumably have to wait until the appearance of the slightly improbable volume 2.

Chris’s father, a veteran of the First World War who lost a leg on the Western Front, was 71 when Chris was born. He was to die three years later, leaving Chris’s mother with three children and a complicated financial situation. The help she received in gaining a widow’s pension had historic consequences for the Liberal Party and Liberal Democrats.

One day Cyril Carr, the leading figure in Liverpool Liberals, called at the Rennards’ house, listened to their problems and made the call that secured the pension from their own phone. So Chris joined the Liberals.

Carr was one of the pioneers of community politics in the party and Chis became his protégé. This was an era when the party twice ran the city council (1974-6 and 1978-0) and contained nationally important figures like David Alton and Trevor Jones, but Chris was to become the leading Liberal agent in the city. Alton was to win the Edge Hill constituency, which was wonderfully compact for campaigners but already identified as for the chop by the Boundary Commissioners, at a by-election in 1979.

After the 1984 Liverpool council elections, which Chris suggests were swung by personation for the Militant-led Labour Party, he left the city to become the Liberal Party’s regional agent for the East Midland, and this is what he found:

The East Midlands Regional Party was considered to be one of the most viable in England because it owned a (near-derelict) house in Loughborough. The house did not even had a functioning loo and visitors had to rely on the facilities at the nearby railway station. This was the regional office and home for the administrative secretary, a man called Maurice Bennett, who also hailed from Liverpool. 

Maurice made sure that the Regional Executive … Regional Finance and General Purposes Subcommittee and Regional Council all met regularly and he tried to raise funds to cover his modest salary and the costs of the house by selling a weird assortment of pens, key fobs and party memorabilia, as well as organising draws and sponsored walks. 

The operation required the limited number of constituency associations to pay into the regional party £200 per year, unless they could plead great poverty. For this fee, they appeared only to have the benefit of being able to buy the key fobs and to send representatives to regional party meetings.

It was at this house, which was in Burder Street, Loughborough, that I first met Chris. We talked upstairs among stacked boxes of leaflets that must have challenged the joists while Maurice Bennett watched the racing on television downstairs.

Chris had an enormous influence on the party in the region. He brought community campaigning techniques from Liverpool that enabled Rob Renold to win Crown Hills, an inner Leicester ward on the county council with a largely Muslim population in 1985. He also put together a team of activists, based at a Liberal safe house in Kimberley Road, Leicester, who helped across the region. They ran the committee room at an important Harborough by-election, leaving us local activists free to knock up all day.

For some readers, the book will be too much of a catalogue of long-forgotten by-elections, but for me, at least in these years, it is riveting because I remember them all. I drove down with Chris to the Brecon and Radnor by-election in 1985 and was on the front line there in Ystradgynlais.

‘Winning Here’ sweeps on through the Alliance years, giving an inside view of the seat negotiations between the Liberal Party and the SDP and showing how poorly the two Davids worked together. It was not just a lack of personal chemistry, but a lack of organisation: when they arrived for a joint appearance they had never discussed who would say that.

Then we come to the period after the two parties merged. This is chiefly remembered as an era in which we argued over the party’s name – at one time we were going to be “the Democrats” – but Chris reveals how precarious the financial position was, with the party reliant for its continued existence at one point upon a major donor who insisted upon keeping his identity a secret.

The drama that dominates the latter part of the book is the fall of Charles Kennedy. It had been rumoured for years that Charles had a serious drink problem, but whenever you asked an insider you were told that, yes, Charles used to have a problem, but he has sorted himself out. Sadly he never did.

Chris reveals more instances of cancelled meetings and campaign trips than I remember reading about before and pays tribute to the people like Tim Razzall who kept Charles going for as long as he did. He also gives Donnachadh McCarthy his due as the man who pushed the Lib Dems into opposing the war in Iraq.

I suppose it was the lifestyle of politics that did for poor Charles, and Chris himself did not find it healthy either. Living in what was in effect a permanent by-election campaign for 30 years left him with diabetes and depression when he stood down as the Lib Dems’ chief executive in 2009.

In recent years, in part perhaps because of the allegations against Chris, it has been fashionable to decry ‘Rennardism’. Yet this style of politics did not come just from him and Liverpool: it was originated independently across the country by forgotten figures like Wallace Lawler in Birmingham and Stanley Rundle in Kew. It was solidified into a technique for winning seats by the Association for Liberal Councillors in the late 1970s, and Chris was the strongest influence on its development in the years after that.

And, though it is true that the ruthless targeting and playing up of local grievances can grate, it has never been clear what people propose putting in place of Rennardism. Nick Clegg’s charisma, which was based on a single attractive television performance, did not last a week as the centrepiece of our campaign.

When the history of the Liberal Democrats comes to be written, Chris will have a central place in it and this book, which already feels like a monument to a forgotten era, will be a valuable source. It’s just that you fear the historians may decide they have more important things to do.

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

Embed from Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we owe to Charles Kennedy

View image | gettyimages.com

When David Penhaligon died so suddenly in 1986 the grief was widespread, reaching far beyond the Liberal Party. You hoped David had sensed how widely he was loved and respected.

I feel the same about Charles Kennedy today.

Despite his popularity and public persona of ‘chatshow Charlie’, I agree with David Boyle that Charles was a shy man. I wonder if this “the gap between appearance and reality” David identifies contributed in some way to his problems with drink.

Charles’s greatest service to the Liberal Democrats may have been his very first.

When the party was formed from the debris of David Steel’s grand strategy it was by no means certain that David Owen’s Continuing SDP would melt away so quickly. It was largely Charles’s decision to join the Lib Dems that made the difference.

Much of today’s media commentary on Charles’s life has dwelt on his opposition to the Iraq War, but it has not told the whole story.

He did not lead the party against Iraq: he was bounced into that position by the wider party. James Graham told some of this story in a post written in 2008 (five years after the events it describes).

But once he embraced opposition to the war Charles showed real political courage in holding to this position. It is worth remembering that, in the Commons, the Conservatives were even more hostile to him than Labour.

Quite what Charles believed in was always a bit of a mystery to me, even though I was on the party’s Federal Policy Committee when he chaired it as leader.

As I wrote for the Guardian when he resigned the leadership:

When Kennedy stood for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats in 1999, the West Highland Free Press - a radical newspaper published in his own constituency - remarked that people in London were beginning to ask what they had been asking for 15 years: what exactly does Charles Kennedy stand for? 

Though he won that contest and went on to lead the party for nearly seven years, we never really found out. 

But maybe what you saw with Charles was all there was to get. He held a range of sensible, moderate opinions – pro Europe, pro political reform – and held on to them.

The lesson may be that you don’t have to be a wild-eyed visionary or have a young family and look improbably youthful to win the public’s affection.

Charles's basic decency, leavened with that Highland charm we English are such suckers for, was enough.

The SDP: From Cold War warriors to placating Putin

#495245019 / gettyimages.com

Back in the 1980s, one of the dividing lines between the Liberal Party and the SDP was defence.

While the Liberal Party had many unilateral disarmers and was generally keen to reduce Britain's nuclear arsenal, the SDP was convinced for the need for strong nuclear defence against the Soviet threat.

That debate has a period charm now, because what neither side realised was that the Soviet Union was just a few years from dissolution.

The only person in Alliance circles who seemed to have grasped this was an academic called Brian May (not the rock guitarist turned badger campaigner), who argued that the idea that the Soviets still dreamt of invading Western Europe was mistaken. But he was a marginal figure who soon disappeared from the debate.

Time has moved on and now we have a Russian leader who does invade other countries - Georgia and Ukraine - and threaten others, such as Estonia. His allies in Eastern Ukraine brought down a passenger jet and killed British citizens.

So are the founders of the SDP warning us of the need to stop Putin?

Not a bit of it. Just look at the Lords' debate on Russia earlier this week.

Here is David Owen:

It is very hard to see Ukraine, with all the financial difficulties that it has had and its considerable and long record of corruption, achieving the economic growth and prosperity that it deserves without co-operation, first, heading towards membership of the European Union, and secondly, retaining good, strong working relations with the Russian Federation. There is no escape from that, and some of the language that we have heard in the past few months, seeming to think that a solid division between Ukraine and Russia is in the interests of Europe, let alone the world, is a great mistake.

And here, more remarkably, is Shirley Williams:

I very much agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said: the Ukrainians did not start very sensibly by trying to rule out Russian as the second language of Ukraine. The blame is not entirely distributed on one side. 

The noble Lord was also absolutely right to say that we do not sufficiently consider the history of Russia. The history of Russia is a history of one invasion after another, one occupation after another, and growing fear within Russia herself which has led to security being the overwhelming consideration for those who vote. ... 

Of course we should accept the independence of Georgia and Ukraine, but it is unwise to talk as widely as we do about the possibility of both joining NATO. Ukraine has long been the buffer for Russia against the attacks of other countries. The thought that she might roll NATO’s power right up to the border of Russia itself is not timely.

It was left to Kishwer Falkner to speak up for human rights in Russia and the countries it menaces:

Ultranationalism, authoritarianism, xenophobia, predatory capitalism, gross human rights violations and a stealthy expansion of the state at home are there for all of us to see in Russia—a European country. One can add to that list belligerent action against neighbouring states, annexation, the use of hybrid warfare, cyberwarfare, targeted assassinations abroad and disappearances of people—that is the new normal as the projection of Russian power. 

This miscalculation on the part of the West was not just revealed in the morning mist in Crimea this February; for the 140 million ordinary Russians, it has been coming for some time. In fact, it has been building up since 2000, when Vladimir Putin first came to power. It is the people of Russia who have paid the price for their country’s misrule, which looks set to continue well into the 2020s as elections are fixed again and musical chairs reflect choice between President and Prime Minister. 

But now Ukrainians are also paying for Putin’s imperialism. The invasion and occupation of Crimea is already rendering Crimeans poorer as their economy has collapsed along with the region’s tourism. Crimean Tatars are once again dispossessed in their own land. Non-ethnic Russian Ukrainians are displaced or consigned to being non-citizens in their own country.

I believe that Kishwer joined the Liberal Democrats after the two parties had merged, so there are no neat Liberal vs SDP lines to be drawn here.

But it is worth pausing a moment to reflect on how far David Owen, at least, has travelled in 30 years.

David Owen: Tony Blair lied to me

In an interview with The Conversation Lord Owen - Dr David Owen, the former SDP leader - explains his support for the disastrous war in Iraq:

“This guy lied to me. I had two meetings with Blair in identical circumstances. It was in Downing Street, with our wives, the four of us. The second was in June 2002 and it was clear he had decided to go to war. 

I asked him whether in Iraq nuclear weapons were being built and he replied ‘yes’; Chemical weapons? – ‘Yes,’ he told me. No qualification or doubt. I now know what he had been told in intelligence reports in the weeks before he met me and that he should have told me that the intelligence was far from conclusive.”

Join the club, Doc.

Jimmy Savile, Edwina Currie and Broadmoor

One of the strangest aspects of the Savile affair was the influence he was given over Broadmoor special hospital.

And a written statement that Edwina Currie, who appears to have been the minister who appointed him to a role there, only added to the strangeness:

She told Channel 4 News in a statement: "What [Savile] did have, as I know for certain, is information which gave him a hold over staff. That could explain why they said nothing, even with their knowledge or suspicion of his misbehaviour. As a result ministers were never given the information, when we could have barred him from the place."

The video above is of her appearance on RTE's The Saturday Night Show on, er, Saturday night. It helps us understand what went on at Broadmoor, but still does not explain why Savile was apparently allowed to do as he pleased there.

Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph suggests that Savile's original position at Broadmoor - honorary entertainments officer - was agreed by Dr David Owen when he was health minister.

Nick Clegg channels Dr David Owen

There’s a better, more meaningful future waiting for us. Not as the third party, but as one of three parties of government.

said Nick Clegg in his leader's speech to the Liberal Democrat Conference in Brighton yesterday.

I am all in favour of the Lib Dems being a party of government, but I am not sure I follow the logic here.

Because we are the third party and likely to remain so (unless it is in the 2014 Euro elections, when we could finish fourth or even fifth). And that means being in government depends upon our holding the balance of power. And that depends upon the performance of the other two parties, which is not in our control.

We are not in government because we did wonderfully well at the last election under Nick's leadership. In fact our performance was disappointing. We suffered a net loss of seats and, in particular failed to gain the more affluent Labour seats (the Edinburghs and Islingtons) we had been targeted.

We are in government because the Conservatives and Labour did roughly as well as each other. And for the foreseeable future our remaining a party of government is dependent upon that happening at every election.

This may be an obvious point, but it escaped Dr David Owen when he was leading the SDP. He regularly declared that the Alliance's goal should be to hold the balance of power, as though that was within out control. As it turned out, the British public was not convinced by Neil Kinnock at the 1987 general election and the other two parties finished too far apart for our purposes.

I suspect that, to Nick, not being a third party means more than that. It means getting rid of our eccentricities and embracing the Blair/Cameron consensus.

This is not an enticing prospect, and I am worried that, in his speech, Nick was clearer about the voters (and activists) whose support he did not want to attract than those he did.