Sunday round-up 29 June 2025

A big day for Romans as it is the Feast of SS Peter and Paul; candles for Gary Busey and Amanda Donohoe; a black day for (Sir) Roger Casement

Marking their natal days in their own unique styles today are prolific romantic novelist and screenwriter the Hon Charlotte Bingham (83), Academy Award-nominated actor Gary Busey (81), Capuchin friar and former Archbishop of Boston Seán Patrick Cardinal O’Malley (81), former President of Sri Lanka Chandrika Kumaratunga (80), Deep Purple founding member and drummer Ian Paice (77), first Chair of the Judicial Appointments Commission Baroness Prashar (77), Men at Work lead vocalist Colin Hay (72), actress, singer and former Miss Venezuela María Conchita Alonso (70), former Prodrive managing director and Mercedes-Benz Formula 1 team boss Nick Fry (69), dentist, Chairman of the People’s Council of Turkmenistan and National Leader of the Turkmen People Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow (68), Golden Globe-winning actress and former Adam Ant main squeeze Amanda Donohoe (63), violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter (62), singer, songwriter, dancer, actress and Pussycat Dolls alumna Nicole Scherzinger (47), mezzo-soprano, actress and gin peddler Katherine Jenkins (45) and England and Real Madrid midfielder Jude Bellingham (22).

Remembered now only in the crumbs of yesteryear’s cake are high-profile casualty of the Battle of Kosovo and Ottoman büyük peynir Sultan Murad I (1326), Standard Bearer of England and Constable of Calais Sir Anthony Browne (1443), humanist scholar and Martin Luther devotee Peter Agricola (1525), leading Dutch naval commander and killed-by-a-cannonball-to-the-chest Rear Admiral Willem van der Zaan (1621), forester and inventor of the propeller Josef Ressel (1793), wartime King of Serbia Peter I (1844), first Prime Minister of Russia Count Sergei Witte (1849), military engineer and first Governor of the Panama Canal Zone Brigadier General George Washington Goethals (1858), co-founder of the eponymous medical clinic Dr William James Mayo (1861), former Chief of the General Staff of the German Army and intended regent of a post-Adolf Hitler government Generaloberst Ludwig Beck (1880), two-time Prime Minister of France and author of the declaration in favour of European integration Robert Schuman (1886), writer, poet and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900), singer and actor Nelson Eddy (1901), radar pioneer Alan Blumlein (1903), long-serving Dutch consort, co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund and the Bilderberg Group and carnation enthusiast Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands (1911), actor and rodeo performer Slim Pickens (1919), legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen (1920), television producer, author and châtelaine of Woburn Abbey Nicole, Duchess of Bedford (1920), stalwart stage and screen actor Ian Bannen (1928), iconic Hollywood producer Robert Evans (1930), former Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and David Kelly inquiry chair Lord Hutton (1932) and singer and Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s babysitter Little Eva (1943).

The old order changeth

Today in 1509, at Cheyneygates, the residence of the Abbot of Westminster, a 66-year-old aristocratic woman died. She had been ailing for some months, but it was recorded at the time that she “took her infirmity with eating of a cygnet” at a banquet a few days previously. She had been married four times over a long life, but had given birth to only one child. Her son was born when she was only 13, yet already a widow of four months, and the labour was arduous because she was so young; that she never had more children suggests she may have suffered some traumatic birth injury. Her only child would, however, have a profound effect on the course of English history: due to the death of his father while he was still in utero, the infant Henry was already 2nd Earl of Richmond when he was born, but more important was his surname, Tudor, and his later regnal style and number, Henry VII.

Margaret was Dowager Countess of Richmond and Derby by the time of her death in 1509, but was referred to as “My Lady the King’s Mother”, a style she may have coined herself. In protocol terms, she had been outranked by Elizabeth Woodville, the widow of Edward IV, who had been afforded the dignity of Queen Dowager after the repeal in 1485 of the statute Titulus Regius of 1484; the Queen Dowager died in 1492, but Margaret was also trumped by protocol after 1486 by her daughter-in-law the Queen, Elizabeth of York. Queen Elizabeth died in 1503 of a postpartum infection, aged only 37, but Henry did not remarry, despite several brides being considered. It may, however, he significant that his mother signed herself “Margaret R”. The “R” may have stood for “Richmond”, as she was Dowager Countess of Richmond, but monarchs as far back as Henry I in the 12th century had used the letter as part of the royal sign-manual to stand for Rex, and it is not at all impossible that Margaret was at least relaxed about her use of it being taken to stand for Regina, though she was never actually a queen.

She is generally remembered by the style “Lady Margaret Beaufort”, derived from the status of her father, John Beaufort, 1st Duke of Somerset. His father, also John Beaufort, 1st Earl of Somerset, was the eldest of the four illegitimate children of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, by his mistress Katherine Swynford; the children were legitimised by royal decree when John and Katherine later married in 1397. The name “Beaufort” was taken from Montmorency-Beaufort, an estate of John of Gaunt’s in Champagne which had been part of the inheritance of his first wife, Blanche of Lancaster, from her father Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster. This rather rickety connection to the monarchy—John of Gaunt was the fourth son of Edward III—would become a central plank of the House of Tudor’s claim to the throne.

But it was bolstered, if only slightly, by a patrilineal claim: Henry VII’s father and Margaret’s second husband (yes, she gave birth at 13 shortly after the death of her second husband) was Edmund Tudor, son of a Welsh courtier from a prominent Anglesey family, Sir Owen Tudor (Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur), who had married the widow of Henry V, the Queen Dowager Catherine of Valois. Neither of Henry VII’s lineage claims—descent from a widowed royal spouse and a retrospectively legitimised bastard branch—was a slam-dunk, but in the chaotic and bloody world of 15th century England they were at least table stakes.

Lady Margaret Beaufort is one of the overlooked figures of the endlessly scrutinised and fetished House of Tudor, but she was crucial to its establishment on the throne of England. She was a remarkable woman; as her father’s sole heir before the age of one when he died in 1444, she inherited susbtantial estates and a claim to the throne, both of which made her a valuable but powerless pawn in the Wars of the Roses. The Duke of Somerset had died on campaign in France, but before he departed he had agreed with the King, Henry VI, that in the event of his death, only his wife, also Margaret, would have the rights to his daughter’s wardship and marriage. On Margaret’s first birthday, the King set aside his agreement with Somerset and granted her wardship to one of his favourites, William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk.

When Margaret was six, she was married to Suffolk’s eldest son John, with a papal dispensation following a few months later to surmount the fact that Margaret and her new husband were great-grandchildren of sisters, Katherine Swynford and Philippa Chaucer, wife of the poet. The marriage was annulled three years later, probably on grounds of lack of consummation (as the bride turned 10 that year), but in adulthood Margaret never recognised its legitimacy, and under canon law she was not bound by it as she had been under 12 when she entered into the marriage contract. After the annulment, the King granted Margaret’s wardship to his half-brothers, Edmund and Jasper Tudor, with the intention that she should eventually marry Edmund.

She did, aged 12, on 1 November 1455 at Bletsloe Castle in Bedfordshire, and became Countess of Richmond. But it was a short match: the marriage must have been consummated quickly (Henry VII was born on 28 January 1457), but Edmund was then called away to lead an army putting down a rebellion in Wales led by Gruffudd ap Nicolas. The campaign was easy enough, but in Edmund’s absence there was a power struggle at court. The King had suffered some kind of mental or emotional breakdown in 1453, becoming completely unresponsive and utterly unable to govern, and the Council, after trying to manage what they hoped would be a short indisposition, realised it was an impossible way of managing the affairs of state. Richard, Duke of York, a powerful magnate with his own contestable claim to the throne, had been named Protector of the Realm in March 1454, but at the end of that year, the King had started to recover, and Richard was deprived of his office in February 1455. He resumed the role in November 1455 after defeating and taking physical custody of the King at the Battle of St Albans, which was more a lairy scrap in a field than a pitched battle, with fewer than 50 deaths.

The Duke of York assumed the offices of Constable of England and Lieutenant of Ireland in addition to Protector of the Realm, and as the King’s captor was clearly in control of the government, but he still had to manage opposition in the Council led by the Queen, Margaret of Anjou. The King had taken ill again during 1455, but in February the following year he recovered again, and Richard was removed as Protector. It was in response to this that one of Richard’s supporters, William Herbert, took an army of 2,000 men to seize control of south and west Wales, and in August Herbert took Carmarthen Castle and Edmund Tudor became his prisoner. At the beginning of November 1456, Edmund contracted bubonic plague and died at the age of 26.

Or did he? The direct contemporary evidence of plague is insubstantial; some have suggested he died from injuries sustained during the capture of the castle in August. But there has for centuries persisted a suspicion that he was murdered by his Yorkist captors. After all, he was the half-brother of the King, who was suffering bouts if incapacity, and he had recently married a rich heiress who was now bearing his child. An inquiry into his death was convened in Hereford in April 1457, and 57 individuals, including the King and Queen, William Herbert and Edmund’s brother Jasper Tudor, were questioned, but no conclusive verdict was reached.

This left Margaret, in the first months of 1457, mother to an infant son and widow of a major political player. And, remember, 13. She had been taken under the care of her brother-in-law Jasper, who as Earl of Pembroke had a seat at Pembroke Castle, and it was there that she had given birth to Henry. He had been created Earl of Pembroke in 1452, the earldom having being forfeited in 1450 by Margaret’s first father-in-law, William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk. Because of her youth and vulnerability, it was deemed essential to find her a new husband, and on 3 January 1458, at the age of 14, Margaret married for the third time at Maxstoke Castle in Warwickshire. Jasper had helped arrange a match with Sir Henry Stafford, second son of the Duke of Buckingham, Lord High Constable of England. Stafford was in his early thirties, and another papal dispensation was required for the marriage, as both Margaret and Henry were great-grandchildren of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford. While her son remained at Pembroke Castle with his uncle Jasper, the newly-wed couple were granted Woking Palace by the Crown, and it was a home to which Margaret would often return throughout her life.

The Yorkist ascendancy after the Battle of Towton in March 1461 meant hard times for Margaret as a leading member of the House of Lancaster. Her father-in-law, the Duke of Buckingham, had been killed at the Battle of Northampton the previous year, while Jasper Tudor had fought on the losing side at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross in February 1461. Sir Owen Tudor had been captured and beheaded but Jasper escaped first to Ireland and then to Scotland, though he was subject to an act of attainder by Edward IV’s first Parliament in November 1461; this meant losing his lands and titles and being declared a traitor. He was welcomed at the court of Louis XI of France from 1462 to 1468 before returning quietly to north Wales.

Margaret was forced simply to endure. Her son Henry was given as a ward to Lord Herbert, previously the jailer (and murderer?) of her husband Edmund, who also received Pembroke Castle when it was taken from Jasper, though she was permitted to visit the boy from time to time. The estates Henry had inherited from her were given to the King’s youngest brother, George, Duke of Clarence (who would according to legend end his days in a butt of Malmsey). Henry VI was briefly restored to the throne in 1470 but it would only be for a matter of months: Edward IV defeated a Lancastrian army at the Battle of Barnet in April 1471 in which Margaret’s husband, Sir Henry Stafford was wounded fighting on the Yorkist side. He never recovered and died six months later, leaving Margaret a widow again. She was 28. Jasper Tudor once again went into exile, this time, at Margaret’s request, taking the 14-year-old Henry with him.

By this stage, Margaret was very obviously dedicated to a life of survival, adjustment and opportunity. In 1472, she married for the fourth and last time, to Thomas, Lord Stanley, a wealthy landowner whose power in the North West was virtually unchallenged and who was also the last ruler to use the style “King of Mann” (his successors ruling the island downgraded to the less provocative “Lord of Mann”). The Stanleys had a genius for being on the right side at the right time. Thomas had supported Henry VI during his brief restoration to power but was quickly forgiven, and was appointed Lord Steward of the Household the year before he married Margaret. He led military forces to France and Scotland during the latter years of Edward IV’s reign and even managed to navigate his way through the deposition of Edward V and the accession of Richard III not only unscathed (at least politically) but promoted to Lord High Constable after a failed rebellion by the 2nd Duke of Buckingham (Margaret’s former nephew by marriage).

Margaret became a lady in waiting to Queen Anne, carrying her train at the coronation, which cannot have been an easy thing to do. But that autumn she erred: she was involved in, if not a driving force behind, Buckingham’s rebellion, and when it failed she was subject to an act of attainder in 1484, although there was one small mitigation in that her estates were not confiscated but transferred to her husband. Her son was also attainted in his absence.

Henry’s landing in Pembrokeshire in 1485, accompanied by his uncle Jasper and a small Scottish and French force paid for by the King of France, Charles VIII, changed everything. Henry’s force met Richard III’s army on 22 August 1485 at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire, and this encounter which now seems so decisive could really have gone either way. The King’s army outnumbered Henry’s, perhaps by as much as half again, and took up a position along the ridge overlooking the field, but there was a wild card: Lord Stanley, Margaret’s husband, was off to the south with his brother, Sir William Stanley, and a force of somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 men, watching events unfold. Richard by now knew that the Stanleys were unreliable, with enough soldiers to be decisive, but held as a hostage Stanley’s son and heir, George, Lord Strange. The King sent a message to Stanley, demanding he commit his troops against Henry, or Strange would be executed. The reply came back, “Sire, I have other sons”.

The hesitation of the Stanleys and Richard III’s impatience to end the encounter decisively by seeking out his enemy in single combat changed the course of English history. The King killed Henry’s standard bearer, Sir William Brandon, and got within a sword’s length of his challenger before he was brought down by multiple blows from Sir William Stanley’s men. His circlet was found and presented to Henry on Crown Hill in the village of Stoke Golding, being placed on the new King’s head by Lord Stanley. He was 28 years old, and proclaimed himself king by right of conquest retroactively from the day before the Battle of Bosworth, thereby making the leading Yorkists guilty of treason for waging war on the sovereign.

Margaret was still only 42, but her son’s assumption of the crown was her apotheosis. The act of attainder against her was repealed by Henry’s first Parliament, and she was declared a feme sole, allowing her to own property separately from her husband, and to bring her own suits in law, as if she were unmarried. She was to be known as “My Lady the King’s Mother”, was permitted to wear robes of the same quality of the queen consort and was required to walk only half a pace behind the queen. Lord Stanley was created Earl of Derby and would stand as godfather to Henry VII’s eldest son, Arthur. The privileges awarded to his mother by the new King were not merely to her advantage but a clever piece of realpolitik, as allowing her to act independently did not unduly strengthen the hand of the Stanley family at court.

The relationship between the King and his mother was close and collaborative, despite the fact that they had spent 14 years apart before Bosworth. Particularly in his early reign, Henry sought Margaret’s advice on a wide range of matters, and she generally travelled with the King and Queen when they left London. She and Queen Elizabeth, the daughter of Edward IV, cooperated on the raising of children in the royal household and on potential marriage alliances for Henry’s children. After Elizabeth’s death in 1503, Margaret was the most prominent female figure at Henry’s court.

She had spent less and less time with her husband, and in 1499, with Derby’s permission, she had taken a vow of chastity and made her country seat at Collyweston on Northamptonshire. From there she was given a commission to exercise justice in the King’s name in the Midlands and North, and did so frequently. Margaret also seems to have been closely involved in Henry’s gradual reshaping of the royal household and the principal instruments of governance, and in appointments to senior positions at court.

Lady Margaret Beaufort’s most enduring legacy is in education: in 1502, she endowed a readership in divinity at the University of Cambridge which evolved into the still-extant Lady Margaret’s Professorship of Divinity; and in 1505, she enlarged and refounded God’s House, a college established in 1437 by William Byngham, as Christ’s College and secured a new royal charter. Her estate also funded the foundation of St Joh’s College, Cambridge, in 1511, and in 1540 funds were made available for a lectureship in divinity at the University of Oxford, which became the Lady Margaret Professorship of Divinity, held concurrently with a position as canon of Christ Church.

Married at six, widowed and a new mother at 13, attainted, restored: Margaret Beaufort’s life was hard and intense, much of it spent seeking to stay in royal favour, or at least out of disfavour. She nurtured the potential claim of her son to the throne of England even when it must have looked an impossibly unlikely turn of events. Not only did she live to see him take the throne and be crowned King, she lived to see him die and her grandson Henry VIII crowned, the first straightforward father-to-son transition in nearly a century. As the matriarch of the Tudor dynasty, she deserves to be remembered rather more than she is.

Traitor, rebel or patriot?

Today in 1916 saw the fourth and final day of an extraordinary criminal trial at the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, better known as the Old Bailey. It involved some of the most famous political, legal and artistic figures of the day, a bitterly divisive matter of nationhood and identity, an ancient statute and the place of a comma.

Roger Casement was born in Sandycove, to the south of Dublin, on 1 September 1864. It was barely a dozen years since the terrible famine of 1845-51—an Gorta Mór, the “Great Hunger”—had ravaged the island of Ireland, with devastating effect: records from the period are incomplete, but the 1841 census counted a population of 8,175,124, while the 1851 edition found only 6,552,385 men, women and children. At the expected rate of growth, Ireland’s population in 1851 should have been around nine million; rough estimates of the death toll range from one million to 1.5 million. Casement’s father, also Roger, had been a cavalry officer in the British Army who had volunteered to fight in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 but arrived after the conflict had ended; his mother, Anne Jephson, supposedly had her child secretly baptised as a Roman Catholic at the age of three, though, like his siblings, he was raised in the Anglican Church of Ireland.

(The Church of Ireland was disestablished by the Irish Church Act 1869 when Casement was only seven years old. Anglicans represented around 12 per cent of the population, though were disproportionately wealthy and powerful, Presbyterians made up perhaps nine per cent and the remaining 79 per cent were overwhelmingly Roman Catholic and overwhelmingly poor and largely disenfranchised.)

After being educated at the Diocesan School in Ballymena, Country Antrim (now Ballymena Academy), at the age of 16 Casement found a job as a clerk at Elder Dempster and Company, a Liverpool shipping company. Four years later he became purser on one of the company’s ships sailing to West Africa, and he would spend the next 20 years of his life in Africa: he worked for the International African Association in the Congo, at that point the personal and brutally administered personal fiefdom of King Leopold II of the Belgians, and in 1890 he met the Polish-born novelist and essayist whose experience in the Congo would inspire his great work Heart of Darkness (1899). At the turn of the century, he joined the British Colonial Service, before switching to the Foreign Office in 1901 as British consul in the west of French Congo.

In 1903, Casement was British Consul in Boma in the Congo Free State, when the government asked him to investigate and report on rumours of dreadful and inhuman atrocities and breaches of human rights being perpetrated. He threw himself into the task, travelling for weeks to the Upper Congo and interviewing workers and supervisors on the rubber plantations and the mercenaries of various kinds who were drawn to Congo’s laissez-faire attitude. Casement found plentiful evidence of atrocities, including extortionate taxes, mutilation, murder and depopulation; in February 1904, the government published a bowdlerised text of his report as a Command paper which ran to 40 pages of text and another 20 pages of written testimony. It detailed casual extrajudicial killings and mutilations, torture, dismemberment and beatings of men, women and children; the unredacted volume would not be released until 1985.

Although those with a vested interest in the exploitation of the Congo initially denied and undermined Casement’s findings, an independent Belgian inquiry the following year endorsed his report and eventually, in 1908, the King was forced to cede the Congo Free State to the government of Belgium and it was reorganised with greater rigour and propriety as the Belgian Congo.

From 1904, Casement had become increasingly involved in another cause, the independence of Ireland. He joined the Gaelic League and then, in 1905, Sinn Féin, a new party which at that point rejected the administrative devolution offered by Home Ruleand proposed instead an almost wholly separate Irish state, the only remaining link to be a Habsburg-style dual monarchy with Britain. His support for Irish independence mixed with his outrage at the consequences of unfettered imperialism he had seen in the Congo and revulsion at the brutal treatment of Boer civilians by the British authorities during the Second Boer War (1899-1902). Although still formally a member of the Consular Service, Casement was beginning to involve himself actively in the independence movement.

Through his sister Nina, who lived in Portrush in County Antrim, and through London connections including the writers Robert Lynd and Sylvia Dryhurst, Casement was introduced to Francis Joseph Bigger, a solicitor, antiquarian and author who championed a revival of Irish literature, music and culture. He also became increasingly focused on challenging the Unionist organisations trying to prevent Home Rule, and moved closer to the orbit of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In July 1914, with Europe sliding towards a general war, Casement helped arrange the smuggling of 1,500 Mauser M1871 rifles for the Irish Volunteers from Germany to the harbour at Howth, just outside Dublin.

The following month, after Britain and Germany had formally gone to war, he went to New York and met Germany’s Ambassador to the United States, Johann Graf von Bernstorff. Casement proposed a straightforward deal: if Germany would supply weapons, ammunition and military leaders for the Volunteers, they would rebel against the British, diverting attention and resources away from the Western Front and weakening the British forces on the continent. There was enthusiasm on several parts for this idea and it was agreed to take the project further. Casement now spent his time principally in Germany, and at the end of 1914 signed an agreement with the German Foreign Office to renounce his British titles (he had been awarded a CMG in 1905 and knighted in 1911).

On 21 April 1916, three days in advance of the Easter Rising in Dublin, Casement was put ashore in Tralee Bay in County Kerry by a German submarine. But he was struck by a bout of the malaria that afflicted him from time to time, and, too weak to be a fugitive, he was arrested by a sergeant of the Royal Irish Constabulary and three pistols were discovered hidden nearby. It was enough to charge him with bringing weapons into the country illegally, but eventually he would stand trial for high treason, sabotage and espionage against the Crown. He would undergo trial at bar, that is, by a panel of judges, a procedure often employed for treason cases.

Casement’s trial began at the Old Bailey on 26 June 1916. The senior judges were the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Reading; the austere and unforgiving Mr Justice Avory, well known as a hanging judge; and former Liberal MP who had won fame by defeating the former Prime Minister A.J. Balfour in his Manchester East constituency in 1906, Mr Justice Horridge.

Initially, the prosecution struggled with its case: the Treason Act 1351 defined the offence as being “adherent to the King’s enemies in his Realm, giving to them aid and comfort, in the Realm, or elsewhere”. Casement did not deny that his overall political aim could be construed within those terms, but as he had been arrested shortly after landing in Ireland and had not engaged in violence or disorder within the borders of the Empire. The judges were open to a more expansive interpretation, reading a comma into the unpunctuated Norman French preamble to understand treason committed “in the realm or elsewhere” as applying to where the acts were carried out, not just where the King’s enemies happened to be. That was the difference for Casement and the interpretation which more or less sealed his fate. He wrote afterwards that he was to be “hanged by a comma”.

The prosecution was led by the Attorney General, Sir F.E. Smith, who had admired Casement’s humanitarian work as a British consul, assisted by the Solicitor General, Sir George Cave; Casement was represented by A.M. Sullivan, the last barrister in England or Ireland to hold the ancient rank of Serjeant-at-Law (SL), a seniority which far predated that of King’s Counsel. British intelligence had transcripts of Casement’s alleged journals, the so-called “Black Diaries”, which revealed details of his private life. That Casement was homosexual, had a preference for younger men and, according to the diaries, sometimes paid for sex was unconnected to his work and had no bearing on his guilt or innocence. But Smith informally suggested to Sullivan that the prosecution and the defence should jointly offer the transcript of the diaries as evidence, assuming that Sullivan might seek a verdict of “guilty but insane” under the Trial of Lunatics Act 1883, whereby a defendant could be found guilty and detained thereafter as a “criminal lunatic” but would not face the death penalty.

Sullivan refused to cooperate and the trial went ahead. There was no serious prospect of the court accepting the idea that because Casement had not acted illegally during his brief stay on Irish soil he could therefore be acquitted of any actions while abroad. As the Lord Chief Justice observed:

The argument is that this Court must construe the words of the statute of 1351 and must pay no regard to any commentary that may have been made by learned authors, however distinguished, when arriving at the meaning of the words. That we must interpret the words of the statute is beyond question. That we should not be entitled to do violence to the words of the statute may, I think, also be assumed. But if the words of the statute are not clear, and if it be possible to construe the statute in two different ways, then the comments of great lawyers, masters of the common law, during the last three or four centuries cannot be allowed by this Court to pass without the greatest regard and consideration… I have no hesitation myself in stating that if a man adhere to the King’s enemies without the realm he is committing the offence of treason; and that he is committing the offence of treason at common law, notwithstanding that the offence is committed without the realm.

The trial lasted four days. Reading’s summing up to the jury was sober but balanced, and he stressed that Casement’s lawyers had acted quite properly in seeking to offer the best defence possible.

There are some persons who, perhaps a little thoughtlessly, are inclined to rebel against the notion that a member of the English bar, or members of it, should be found to defend a prisoner on a charge of treason against the British State. I need not tell you I am sure, gentlemen, that if any one has those thoughts in his mind he has but a poor conception of the high obligation and responsibility of the bar of England. It is the proud privilege of the bar of England that it is ready to come into Court and to defend a person accused, however grave the charge may be.

He then reviewed the evidence, observing that “the defence in this case does not really dispute the main facts of the case”. At 2.53 pm on 29 June, the jury retired to consider its verdict. It needed only 55 minutes, and returned to the courtroom at 3.48 pm to deliver the inevitable verdict: guilty of high treason.

As inevitable as the verdict was the sentence. After Casement had been allowed to make some final remarks, the Lord Chief Justice passed sentence.

Sir Roger David Casement, you have been found guilty of treason, the gravest crime known to the Jaw, and upon evidence which in our opinion is conclusive of guilt. Your crime was that of assisting the King’s enemies, that is the Empire of Germany, during the terrible war in which we are engaged. The duty now devolves upon me of passing sentence upon you, and it is that you be taken hence to a lawful prison, and thence to a place of execution, and that you be there hanged by the neck until you be dead. And the Sheriffs of the Counties of London and Middlesex are, and each of them is, hereby charged with the execution of this judgment, and may the Lord have mercy on your soul.

Casement was formally deprived of his knighthood the same day. There were pleas for clemency from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, W.B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, as well as from the United States Senate, but on 3 August, Roger Casement, then at Pentonville Prison, was received into the Catholic Church and executed by hanging. He was 51 years old.

(There is a dramatisation of the trial available on the BFI website with the late Peter Wyngarde as Casement.)

I have to praise you like I should

For those of a hagiographical bent, and indeed for others, today is the feast of SS Peter (1 BC-AD 64/68) and Paul (AD 5-AD 64/65), a solemnity and holy day of obligation; of St Mary, mother of John Mark (St Mark the Evangelist), who is only mentioned once in the Bible, in Acts 12:12; of St Cassius of Narni (d AD 558), a Bishop of Narni praised by St Gregory the Great and noted for his charity; and of St Hemma of Gurk (AD 995-1045), a Carinthian aristocrat raised at the imperial court at Bamberg, whose husband and two sons were murdered and who founded a number of churches and monasteries and is invoked for safe childbirth and against diseases of the eye.

In the Netherlands, it is Veteranendag (Veterans’ Day), which since 2005 has been held on the birthday of Prince Bernhard (see above). In India, it is the perhaps-less-immediately-alluring National Statistics Day, held today since 2006 to mark the birth in 1893 of Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, statistician, graduate of the University of Calcutta and King’s College, Cambridge, inaugural member of India’s Planning Committee and founder of the Indian Statistical Institute.

Factoids

1. Bletchingley had been represented as a borough in Parliament since the Model Parliament of 1295 and returned two MPs to Westminster until the sweeping changes of the Representation of the People Act 1832. However, it had been a “rotten borough” for centuries, with a population of only 513 by the time of its abolition. Charles Tennyson, uncle of the Victorian poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, represented Bletchingley for only five years, from 1826 to 1832, but in that time he shared the two-Member constituency with six others, four of whom were all called William: William Russell (1826-27), the Hon. William Lamb (later Viscount Melbourne and Prime Minister) (1827-28), William Ewart (1828-30) and Sir William Horne (February-April 1831). A fifth was Robert William Mills (1830-31). Tennyson was succeeded as MP for Bletchingley for its last year of existence by another future Prime Minister, Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, at that point Foreign Secretary for the first of three periods in office.

2. Charles Tennyson represented three other constituencies in the House of Commons: Great Grimsby (1818-26), Stamford (1831-32) and Lambeth (1832-52). This kind of parliamentary peregrination was far from unusual not only before the Representation of the People Act 1832 but through till the early 20th century at least. Of the 54 Prime Ministers (from a total of 58) who sat in the House of Commons at some point, only 18 of them represented a single constituency which did not even change its name during their tenure. A special mention to David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor, who not only represented a single seat, Carnarvon Boroughs, but did so for nearly 55 years, from April 1890 to February 1945 and was Father of the House of Commons from May 1929. Perhaps in that one regard he had a sense of loyalty.

3. Some people in public life have a fleeting brush with fame but remain on the margins. Chic Brodie (1944-2022) was a Scottish National Party MSP on the regional list for South Scotland for a single term, from 2011 to 2016, during which period he was Deputy Convener of the Public Petitions Committee, but until the 2000s he was a Liberal Democrat, and before that had been a Liberal. He stood unsuccessfully for Parliament in October 1974 (Dundee East), 1979 (Dundee East), 1983 (Ayr), 1987 (North West Surrey), 1992 (Glasgow Garscadden), 1997 (Perth) and 2001 (Greenock and Inverclyde), then was the SNP’s candidate for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock at the 2010 general election. However, his role in national events came in 1982. Brodie had been selected as the Liberal Party candidate for Glasgow Hillhead, the last remaining Conservative seat in Scotland’s second city, but on 2 January 1982, the incumbent Member of Parliament, Sir Tam Galbraith, died suddenly at the age of 64. This necessitated a by-election, but the Liberal Party had formed an electoral pact with the recently established Social Democratic Party (SDP), which meant that they would run single candidates in all constituencies. Denis Sullivan, the SDP’s Chairman in Scotland, quickly announced that his party wanted to propose a candidate for the Glasgow Hillhead by-election, and that there was strong support for that candidate being one of the SDP’s four co-founders, Roy Jenkins. The former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary had resigned from Parliament in January 1977 to become President of the European Commission (1977-81), but now wanted to return to the House of Commons, and had run Labour’s Doug Hoyle close in the Warrington by-election in July 1981. Galbraith’s majority in 1979 had only been 2,002, but over Labour; nevertheless, Hillhead, a well-educated, largely middle-class constituency which included much of the University of Glasgow, seemed potentially fertile ground for the SDP/Liberal Alliance. Eventually, and magnanimously, Brodie stood aside, Jenkins was the SDP candidate and beat young Conservative Gerry Malone by 2,038 to return to Westminster after just over five years away.

4. The formation of the SDP and the creation of the Alliance with the Liberal Party remains one of the biggest chimaeras in British political history. With Labour tacking left under its new leader Michael Foot after December 1980, and the Thatcher government deeply unpopular because of the poor economic conditions in 1980-82, it seemed like a new third force might break through. After its formation in June 1981, the Alliance began to outpoll the Conservatives, then from the autumn of 1981 it pulled ahead of Labour too. In December 1981, it peaked at an astonishing 50.5 per cent and stayed ahead in the first months of 1982, until Margaret Thatcher’s resolution and leadership in liberating the Falkland Islands after Argentina’s invasion put the Conservatives in a poll lead they would not lose all the way to the general election of June 1983. Even then, the Alliance finished a very close third, only 676,000 votes adrift of Labour, but the electoral system was its undoing. The election result was: Conservatives 397, Labour 209, SDP/Liberal Alliance 23. Two of the SDP’s founders, Bill Rodgers (Stockton North) and Shirley Williams (Crosby) were defeated at the polls, along with 21 other SDP colleagues. The Liberals and the SDP would never come so close to power again. Roy Jenkins was defeated in Hillhead at the 1987 general election by loathsome Labour firebrand George Galloway and was ennobled, becoming leader of the Liberal Democrat peers when the SDP and the Liberal Party merged in 1988. David Owen, who opposed the merger, remained in the Commons until 1992 then stood down and became a life peer.

5. The last living general officer of the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces between 1935 to 1945, died less than 20 years ago. Heinrich Trettner (1907-2006) joined the Reichsheer, the army of the Weimar Republic, in 1925, and transferred to the Luftwaffe when it was officially established in February 1935. He then served in the Condor Legion, the German military force which fought for Franco’s Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War, acting as Adjutant IIa (personnel) to Generalmajor Hugo Sperrle, commander of the Condor Legion, and his chief of staff, Oberstleutnant Wolfram von Richthofen, before becoming Staffelkapitän of I Gruppe, Kampfgeschwader 88, a bomber unit. In 1938, he moved to a staff position with a parachute division and rose to be commanding officer of the 4th Parachute Division 1943-45. He had been promoted to generalleutnant, equivalent to a modern three-star rank, a month before he surrendered to United States forces in May 1945; but he joined the army (Heer) of the new Bundeswehr in 1956, a year after its creation, as a generalmajor, a rung below his old rank. Trettner served as head of logistics at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) until 1959 then commanded I Korps of the Bundeswehr in Münster 1960-63 and was promoted back to generalleutnant. At the beginning of 1964, he was promoted to full general and appointed Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, the highest-ranking military officer in the post-war German armed forces, before retiring in August 1966. He died on 18 September 2006 in Mönchengladbach, a day short of his 99th birthday. Trettner had been awarded honours by Nationalist Spain, Nazi Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Kingdom of Greece, the Italian Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany and the French Republic, and was the last surviving general officer of the Wehrmacht.

6. The last surviving general officer of the SS is believed to have been Otto Kümm, promoted to SS-Brigadeführer und Generalmajor der Waffen-SS in November 1944, who ended the Second World War as commanding officer of 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler. After the war he was one of the founders of the Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit der Angehörigen der ehemaligen Waffen-SS (HIAG), a lobby group and denialist organisation for former members of the Waffen-SS. Kümm died on 23 March 2004, aged 94.

7. Seventy years ago today, on 29 June 1955, the first operational Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, RB-52B-15-BO 52-8711, was delivered to the 93rd Bombardment Wing, Heavy, at Castle Air Force Base in Merced, central California. The B-52 had first flown in April 1952, a subsonic jet-powered strategic bomber designed to carry nuclear weapons to targets at enormous distances (its combat range was just under 9,000 miles). It was the replacement for the Convair B-32 Peacemaker, the largest mass-produced piston-engined aircraft in history, initially conceived as a platform to carry out bombing operations on Japan from Hawaii. In total, 744 B-52s were built between 1952 and 1962, and as well as being the lynchpin of US Strategic Air Command’s Cold War deterrence, they have participated in the Vietnam War, the First Gulf War, the bombing of Yugoslavia, the war in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq (Second Gulf War), operations against ISIL and the Syrian Civil War. No B-52 has ever dropped a nuclear weapon in combat. The United States Air Force retains 76 B-52s: 58 in active service with the 3rd Wing (Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska) and 5th Bomb Wing (Minot AFB, North Dakota) and 18 operated by the 307th Bomb Wing (Barksdale AFB, Louisiana) of the Air Reserve Component; in addition, about a dozen aircraft are in long-term storage at Davis-Monthan AFB in Arizona. Those still flying are expected to remain in service until the 2050s, potentially marking the type’s centenary with the US Air Force.

8. The least-spoken language in the world is (by some reckoning; it is impossible to be definitive) Lemerig, an Oceanic language spoken on the island of Vanua Lava in Vanuatu. It has 11 phonemic vowels (/i ɪ ɛ æ a œ ø ɒ̝ ɔ ʊ u/) but only distinguishes between four number categories, singular, dual, trial and plural. It is believed to have two remaining speakers who live on the northern coast of Vanua Lava, though they reportedly now use Mwotlap or Vera’a, two fractionally more widely spoken Oceanic languages, in preference to Lemerig. Here is Isso, one of the two speakers.

9. On 22 July 2022, golfing legend and three-times Open Championship winner Jack Nicklaus was awarded honorary citizenship of St Andrews by the Community Council. This is said to be the equivalent of the former distinction of being awarded the freedom of the Royal Burgh of St Andrews. If we take those two honours as comparable, only three United States citizens have been so recognised: Nicklaus, fellow golfer and co-founder of the Masters Tournament Bobby Jones in 1958, and Benjamin Franklin in 1759. Franklin’s award described him merely as a virum valde generosum, a “very eminent gentleman”; he was 56 years old, his only formal education being attendance at Boston Latin School between the ages of eight and ten, but he was a voracious reader and an autodidactic polymath. He became publisher of The Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729, founded the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731 and in 1749 founded and became Provost of the Academy of Pennsylvania, chartered six years later as the College of Philadelphia and recognised in 1791 as the University of Pennsylvania.

“The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor.” (P.J. O’Rourke)

1. “The UK is a second-tier power—Starmer has no authority”: Kitty Donaldson, Chief Political Commentator of The i Paper, examines the period from the G7 summit in Canada and taking in the recent US air strikes on Iran to analyse the status of the United Kingdom and our relationship with America. She makes some thought-provoking points, not all of which I necessarily agree with but that’s not the point: she believes Parliament would not have authorised military action against Iran by UK armed forces if it had been consulted (which is a political courtesy, not a constitutional obligation); that the electorate and its representatives have developed a deep aversion to any foreign military entanglements; and that Donald Trump’s MAGA base is fundamentally conflicted on the decision to bomb Iran. I chose the article because it encapsulates several elements of popular discourse, some of which are misleading, unhelpful or distorting. One on which I have no decided view is the continuing influence of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which Donaldson accepts still poisons the well for political leaders seeking to muster support for military intervention; she may be right, but at the same time I can’t help thinking that it was nearly a quarter of a century ago and is (very roughly) the equivalent of the shadow of Suez hanging over the Callaghan government, which I don’t think is true. Another point on which I have not yet satisfied myself is her assertion, which has been proposed by no less than former National Security Adviser Lord Ricketts, that the United States would have required specific and explicit permission to use the base it leases in the British Indian Ocean Territory, Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia, for conducting strikes against Iran. I am reluctant to gainsay such a senior diplomat (and others), but I have still not discovered the source of this requirement, and am fairly sure it is not contained in the initial exchange of letters in 1966. The last thing is the real headline of the article—that Britain is a “second-tier” power. This is often intoned mournfully, as if trying to shock the reader, but, really, does anyone not accept this now? Has anyone refused to accept it for 30, 40, 50 years? You can choose your own pinpoint for Britain’s decline—the financial predations of the Second World War, the independence of India and Pakistan, the Suez crisis, the Nassau Agreement, the IMF loan of 1976—but when could a rational and realistic observer last have called us a “first-tier power” without making the category so broad as to be meaningless? This is the very opposite of surprising or shocking.

2. “A year on, is the Starmer project doomed or can he claw it back?”: as we approach the first anniversary of Labour’s landslide general election win on Friday this week, Patrick Maguire, Chief Political Commentator for The Times and co-author with Gabriel Pogrund of Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer, looks at the Prime Minister’s first year in office and tries to understand what motivates him, what he wants to achieve and how it has gone so badly wrong on so many fronts. All the usual suspects are here—Sue Gray, Morgan McSweeney, Lord Alli, the Southport murders, the rioting, Rachel Reeves—but what strikes me most powerfully, and this is only a personal instinctive reaction, is that when I look at Sir Keir Starmer as head of the British government, I see a strange, eerie, silent void, a gap where there should be purpose or vision or policy. He doesn’t give the appearance of a man who knows why he’s Prime Minister or where he wants to be in five years’ time. What is certainly amazing is the extent of collapse in public support both for him and for the Labour Party. But who knows what is to come? As Alan Clark was fond of saying, anything can happen at backgammon.

3. “The espionage revolution”: in Engelsberg Ideas, former Director of GCHQ, Home Office Permanent Secretary and intelligence guru Sir David Omand examines the ever-present but ever-changing relationship between intelligence-gathering and technology, and notes how slow bureaucratic organisations can be to adopt, or even acknowledge, technological change. A non-espionage example: British Rail built its last steam locomotive, BR Standard Class 9F 92220 Evening Star, at Swindon Works in March 1960. The 9F was a superb design of locomotive, powerful, fast and sophisticated, but it remained a steam locomotive. Evening Star had a service life of just five years before it was withdrawn in 1965, and steam traction on British Rail ended in 1968. Omand joined GCHQ in 1969 and recounts that when he did so, “intelligence was an entirely analogue affair” although that same year the first computer-to-computer connection took place between Stanford and UCLA, the dawn of the digital age. He notes that the newly appointed Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, or ‘C’, Blaise Metreweli, has a tech background. It’s easy to be flabbergasted by the sophistication of technology to which our intelligence agencies have access, and I’m often astounded myself, but we always need to remember that they’re just as busy running to keep up.

4. “America’s Kwantung Army”: in his or her Substack History Does You, the energetic and splenetic Secretary of Defense Rock looks at the increasingly pivotal role of United States Central Command (CENTCOM) since its creation in 1983, covering the Middle East and Egypt, Central and parts of South Asia. It was not envisaged as a prestigious or glorious posting, but then the First Gulf War in 1990-91 turned General Norman Schwarzkopf Jr (1988-91) into a martial celebrity, then 11 September 2001 happened, placing Afghanistan and Iraq squarely at the front rank of national security and geopolitics. Two of its commanders since then, General James Mattis (2010-13) and General Lloyd Austin III (2013-16), have gone on to be Secretary of Defense, while the post has also made major public figures of General Tommy Franks (2000-03) and General David Petraeus (2008-10), and, more controversially, Admiral William Fallon (2007-08). The argument of the article is that. CENTCOM had become distortingly important in American defence policy because of how many deployments its area of responsibility covers, and it is making it harder for successive administrations to look at US posture in global terms.

5. “The Man Between War and Peace”: as a companion archive piece to the above, this 2008 profile of Admiral William “Fox” Fallon in Esquire was a superb and perceptive study by friend-of-this-blog Thomas P.M. Barnett, whom I’m lucky enough to know a little and who is one of the most original and creative thinkers on geopolitics and strategy. But the significance of the article is far greater than simply being a fine study of Fallon, a distinguished naval aviator and senior flag officer: its portrayal of him as effectively the one restraint preventing President George W. Bush from going to war with Iran led directly to his decision, whether freely made or not, to step down as commander of CENTCOM and retire from the US Navy in March 2008. He was already 63 (as Barnett notes, one of the oldest flag officers still in uniform), but I also can’t help wondering if this was the career equivalent of what American law enforcement calls “suicide by cop”. Fallon must have known exactly what he was saying to Barnett, exactly the impression he was. creating and exactly how it might be (and was) interpreted by Washington. Perhaps he was simply done.

6. “The neocons a generation on”: Janan Ganesh in The Financial Times, reliably interesting, looks back almost a quarter of a century to the heyday of neoconservative policy-making in Washington and suggests that some of the approach to the world may seem now more vindicated than it did 10 years ago. I wouldn’t call myself a neoconservative, because I think it’s too often a confession of faith rather than a way of looking at foreign policy, but at the same time I bristle slightly at Ganesh’s implication (or my inference) that his partial rehabilitation of neocon thought is provocative because the inclination of any rational, moral, right-thinking adult will be to reject it completely. I disagree with his dismissal of the idea that the invasion and subsequent governance of Iraq was poorly planned, because it absolutely was, and there were people at the time saying that, and the poor planning, or its simple absence, had a significant effect on the outcome of the whole period. I don’t think it was ab initio impossible to create some form of popularly acceptable representative government in Iraq, but I do think it was as close to impossible as you can get in Afghanistan, and the two cases are often conflated. I also think it is possible to be a rational human being and believe that 1) we should champion and export democracy because it’s the best, most sustainable and prosperous form of government there is, and 2) we cannot expect to impose a democratic template on every country or society in the world. Perhaps—I would need to think about this more—the object lesson of Ukraine v. Russia demonstrates the point neatly. As Ganesh says, though, even neoconservatism’s bitterest enemies would struggle to look at the world today and suggest we’ve found a better thesis. We keep looking, as always.

7. “Pleasing President Trump is poor value for Britain’s £2bn”: in The Observer, now under the stewardship of Tortoise, of course, Sir Bernard Gray, former Chief of Defence Materiel at the Ministry of Defence, is scathing about the rationale for Britain buying a dozen new F-35A Lightning aircraft capable of carrying tactical nuclear weapons. I dealt with this announcement myself in The Spectator this week, and I think it’s a bad idea, but for complementary reasons to Gray. He argues, as I pointed out, that procuring these aircraft gives the UK no new sovereign capability: the tactical nuclear weapons available to NATO are owned by America and cannot be used without the authorisation of the United States, and aircraft from Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey are already earmarked to deliver them. The RAF is merely adding to that capability and doing its bit for burden-sharing, but Gray points out that it is a costly exercise at a time when our conventional forces are tired and our stockpiles of munitions run down. It is certainly expenditure which is open to question, and I noted that the chief author of the Strategic Defence Review, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, who as Defence Secretary on 1998 saw the RAF’s nuclear role come to an end, said as clearly as he could that he did not think it was a good decision.

8. “Not reading or writing would be unthinkable”: James Marriott, one of the best and most interesting columnists at The Times, starts with recent research from MIT which demonstrated that, compared to their classmates who write their own essay, students who use AI to complete assignments “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioural levels”. As Marriott says, “they needed to write in order to think”. More broadly, he argues, it is by reading and writing that we not only acquire knowledge but learn how to develop arguments and frame complex concepts. “Reading and writing are the cornerstones of thought: serious reading, I suspect, is the one habit that unites virtually every man and woman of genius who has ever lived.” I think his point is a crucial one: I’m all in favour of labour-saving devices which are helpful, but the lazy and incurious are sub-contracting out too much to AI and are diminishing themselves in the process. This is a point that the great Rory Sutherland has also made, that virtually no-one re-reads their university essays, but re-reading them is not the point. It is the writing of them, the process, that is essential.

9. “Jennie and the Open University”: on her Advocating for the Ignorant Substack, Sarah Harkness tells the story of the creation of the Open University, an idea seized on by Prime Minister Harold Wilson but delegated to his Minister for the Arts, left-wing, Fife-born Jennie Lee, who was also Aneurin Bevan’s widow. There was a great deal of amused scepticism about a project previously dubbed “the University of the Air”, and it would have been very easy simply to have let the plan lapse. But Lee, determined, fierce and self-assured, became an evangelist for the OU and saw it through its painful birth and infancy. If you’re my age, the very words “Open University” still conjure up very specific images of impenetrable, no-frills lectures and demonstrations, broadcast late at night on the BBC; but, if you take a step back, the OU was an exceptional concept and achievement, ambitious, altruistic, progressive, deeply practical and profoundly innovative. It has more than 200,000 students and is one of the biggest universities in the world (15th or so, and 4th largest in Europe), and I think we overlook how radical it was: some of the so-called innovations made necessary in higher education during the Covid-19 pandemic must have seemed laughably quotidian to those in thee OU’s headquarters in Milton Keynes.

10. “The chat show is dead”: Zak Asgard writing in The Spectator pulls no punches in a condemnation of the contemporary chat show. “Watching a modern-day chat show,” he judges, “is a bit like getting a back tattoo in Ayia Napa: fun when you’re drunk.” For him, the hosts are a roll-call of the unbearable and inconsequential—James Corden, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, Jonathan Ross. He allows that the “exceptions are Graham Norton and David Letterman, though neither of these is particularly contemporary”. The cause of this malaise, in his view, is a combination of incurious, unchallenging, often fawning hosts and a parade of bland, unremarkable, uninteresting guests, but responsibility for the terrible state o’chassis ultimately lies with us, the viewers. Asgard argues that “we, the public, created this rubbish because we can’t get enough of it… we clap and squeal when JoJo Siwa appears to talk about her relationship with Love Island alumnus Chris Hughes”. I have considerable sympathy with this view. A couple of years ago, after the death of Sir Michael Parkinson, I wrote a piece for The Critic entitled “Where are the Parkies of tomorrow?”, lamenting, like Asgard, the state of the modern chat show. I was perhaps a little more generous, and laid the blame on “the deep risk aversion of modern media”. Chat shows are dull and vacuous now because that is easy to achieve and requires little potential sacrifice. I still think the ingredients are there for something which could hold its cultural head much higher—clever, inquisitive presenters, accomplished, eloquent and entertaining guests, a sustainable level of public interest—but it might go wrong or might be a triumph. Easier to take the much lower but virtually guaranteed return.

Jukebox jury

1. “Never Enough”, Loren Allred

2. “Beeswing”, Richard Thompson

3. “Smoke & Strong Whiskey”, Christy Moore

4. “Wouldn’t It Be Good”, Nik Kershaw

5. “Nothing But The Same Old Story”, Paul Brady

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever…

… to quote the Ploughman Poet, ae fareweel, and then forever! Deep in heart-wrung tears I’ll pledge thee, warring sighs and groans I’ll wage thee.