Sunday round-up 5 July 2026

Birthdays for Cecil Rhodes, Sir Paul Smith, Róisin Murphy and Robbie Robertson, while Britons go to the polls in 1945 after a gap of nearly 10 years

Waiting for gifts and champagne today are former tennis player, coach and sportscaster Mark Cox (83), fashion designer Sir Paul Smith (80), singer-songwriter, actor and Patrick Bateman favourite Huey Lewis (76), former Aerosmith lead guitarist and ubiquitous session musician Jimmy Crespo (72), singer-songwriter and keyboard player Marc Cohn (67), actress Edie Falco (63), actress, director and playwright Susannah Doyle (60), footballer and coach Gianfranco Zola (60), photographer and couturier Hedi Slimane (58), novelist Gary Shteyngart (54), The Cardigans drummer Bengt Lagerberg (53), singer-songwriter, producer and former Moloko frontwoman Róisin Murphy (53), footballer and coach Hernán Crespo (51), Westlife component unit Shane Filan (47) and singer-songwriter, guitarist and one-third of Lady A (formerly Lady Antebellum) Dave Heywood (44).

Birthday boys and girls of time past include condottiero and Lucrezia Borgia’s first husband Giovanni Sforza (1466), early patron of Caravaggio and Dean of the College of Cardinals Francesco Maria Cardinal del Monte (1549), 100th Doge of Venice Carlo Contarini (1580), Congregationalist minister, advocate of universal Christian suffrage and “Father of Connecticut” Thomas Hooker (1586), colonial official, author and founder of Singapore Sir Stamford Raffles (1781), United States Navy’s first flag officer Admiral David Farragut (1801), businessman and circus owner and operator Phineas T. Barnum (1810), businessman, adventurer and former Prime Minister of Cape Colony Cecil Rhodes (1853), novelist, poet and playwright Jean Cocteau (1889), Republican Senator for Massachusetts, US Permanent Representative to the United Nations and US Ambassador to South Vietnam and West Germany Henry Cabot Lodge Jr (1902), scholar, author, aesthete and Bright Young Thing Sir Harold Acton (1904), President of the French Republic Georges Pompidou (1911), editor and socialite Babe Paley (1915), singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer, actor and The Band member Robbie Robertson (1943), investigative journalist Veronica Guerin (1958) and racing driver and most recent Le Mans 24 Hours fatality Allen Simonsen (1978).

The people have spoken, the bastards: the general election of 1945

I sometimes think about the general elections that were widely expected but never took place and in retrospect disappear from the public consciousness. It is a frequent activity for nit-picking constitutional literalists like me—even though I’m certain I’m guilty of it myself—to groan inwardly and raise a finger in correction when people talk about Prime Ministers having “terms” of office, with the implication that they are set periods of time. Of course, as you will all know, and as I wrote in City A.M. recently, the Prime Minister serves in theory at pleasure of the King and no longer than that but in practice the sovereign will appoint whomever can most convincingly claim to command a majority in the House of Commons. Stripped to its essentials that is the mechanism and the measure, that is it. There is no fixed term of office, and at either end of the list of our 58 Prime Ministers—soon to be 59—the longest period in the role was Sir Robert Walpole (1721-42) at 20 years 314 days, while the shortest was Liz Truss (2022) who managed just 49 days in office before resigning.

Nor are our parliaments of a fixed duration, except for the brief period during which the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 was in force. That act set the length of parliament, a general election was automatically held on the first Thursday in May of the fifth year after the previous general election, or the fourth year if the date of the previous election was before the first Thursday in May, though there were provisions for elections to be earlier if, for example, the government lost a vote of confidence. The first general election to be held under the regular arrangements in the act was that on 7 May 2015; but it was only the last and only one. The election of 8 June 2017 was held early under the act’s powers to shorten the five-year term generally set out, the election of 12 December 2019 was held under the authority of a specific law, the Early Parliamentary General Election Act 2019, and the original act was then repealed by the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022.

However, for centuries there have been maximum periods of time for parliaments, or rather maximum intervals between general elections. The Triennial Act 1640 laid down the relatively modest requirement that Parliament should meet for a 50-day session at least once every three years; this requirement was restated in the Triennial Parliaments Act 1664, though without any enforcement mechanism, which allowed it to be straightforwardly ignored as Charles II by calling no parliament in the last four years of his reign. The Meeting of Parliament Act 1694 raised the stakes considerably, requiring that Parliament should meet at least once a year and general election held every three years. This imposed too frenetic a pace on political life and was superseded by the Septennial Act 1715, which extended the maximum period between general elections from three to seven years. Section 7 of the Parliament Act 1911 amended the period from seven to five years, and that is now broadly the status quo.

These maximum periods mean that, while you cannot predict the date of a general election, you can pinpoint the last available day on which an election will be held. On two occasions in the 20th century, however, that did not happen. With the amendment of the Septennial Act by the Parliament Act, the Parliament which had first met after the December 1910 general election (it was opened by a Royal Commission on 31 January 1911) should at the outside have been dissolved early in 1916, but that was during the First World War. The election was delayed by the Parliament and Registration Act 1916, the Parliament and Local Elections Act 1916, the Parliament and Local Elections Act 1917, the Parliament and Local Elections (No. 2) Act 1917 and the Parliament and Local Elections Act 1918. Eventually, the general election was held on 14 December 1918, almost exactly eight years after the previous general election.

The second deferral of a general election came during the Second World War. The National government of Stanley Baldwin had won a crushing victory on 14 November 1935: it was dominated by 387 Conservative MPs but also took in 33 Members from the Liberal National Party, eight National Labour MPs and two “National” Membera, Ivor Guest, later 2nd Viscount Wimborne, who was elected in Brecon and Radnorshire, and Austin Hopkinson, returned for Mossley. Another general election was due no later than the end of 1940, and indeed planning within the parties began for the contest, but the United Kingdom declared war on Germany over its invasion of Poland on 3 September 1939 and thereby entered the Second World War. The required election was delayed by the Prolongation of Parliament Act 1940, the Prolongation of Parliament Act 1941, the Prolongation of Parliament Act 1942, the Prolongation of Parliament Act 1943, the Prolongation of Parliament Act 1944 and the Postponement of Polling Day Act 1945.

It is worth thinking about that postponed election of 1940 for a moment. It was probably only a year or so away when the Second World War broke out, a conflict that many hoped and some expected could be averted, or at least British participation avoided, so the election would have been on people’s minds and featuring in their planning. The National government which had been formed by Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin in response to the financial crisis in 1931 had met the electorate’s mood almost perfectly, it seemed, winning an unbelievable 554 seats out of 615 in the House of Commons in 1931 and a hardly-shabby 429 seats in 1935. The Labour Party had split between those few who adhered to MacDonald and supported the National government, and the majority who thought their Prime Minister had betrayed the working classes by introducing swingeing spending cuts, and the 1931 election had been devastating: Labour had lost 235 seats, including Burnley, the constituency of Arthur Henderson who had been pressed into taking the leadership when MacDonald was expelled. When the new Parliament met, there were only 52 Labour MPs.

It was not obvious that Labour would survive. A month before the general election in 1935, the party leader, 76-year-old George Lansbury, resigned and was replaced ad interim by his deputy, Major Clement Attlee, 52, a sharp, diligent, shrewd but undemonstrative man who had been Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster then Postmaster General in the 1929-31 Labour administration; in 1927-30 he had been one of two Labour members of the Simon Commission on Indian self-government. As Deputy Leader of the Labour Party throughout the 1931 Parliament, he had shouldered much of the burden of keeping the party alive and functioning under Henderson and Lansbury. With an undistinguished parliamentary party of 52 it had not been easy, but something seemed to have clicked. In 1935, Labour rallied modestly, gaining 102 seats to climb to 154 in total and winning 38 per cent of the vote, its largest share ever. The party was still on the ropes, but Attlee’s stewardship looked like it had kept Labour in the fight.

The National government remained dominant. In 1937, his departure delayed by the previous year’s abdication crisis, Stanley Baldwin had retired after his third stint as Prime Minister. He was a few months shy of 70 but had spent 17 of the previous 20 years in ministerial office. In terms of his successor, there was very little choice: if Lord Curzon being passed over for Baldwin himself in 1923 was partly a decision that the Prime Minister must now in practice be in the House of Commons, that convention ruled out Viscount Halifax, the grave, lanky Leader of the House of Lords, and the Lord Chancellor, Viscount Hailsham, whose health was in any case deteriotating. Sir Samuel Hoare was being rehabilitated after his resignation over the secret Hoare-Laval Pact with France but was still on the via dolorosa, while his successor as Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, was felt to be still too young and lacking in heft. Baldwin gave King George V the only advice he could, to send for the man who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer for nearly six years.

Neville Chamberlain was only 18 months younger than Baldwin, and, like Baldwin, he had come to politics relatively late in life, but had made up for lost time with a vengeance. First elected to the House of Commons in 1918, by 1923 he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Baldwin’s first government; in 1924, he declined a return to the Treasury—leading Baldwin to astonish many by appointing Winston Churchill—and instead was a transformative Minister of Health for five years, expanding pension provision, making considerable (but still insufficient) progress on housing construction and development, improving public sanitation and health and simplifying the rating and valuation system; and at the formation of the National government in 1931, he became Chancellor again, and while at first he maintained the harsh reductions in public expenditure, by 1934 he was able to report a budget surplus and restore some of the cuts to welfare which had been made over the previous years. After 1935, he also began to increase defence spending substantially after the armed forces had borne a heavy burden of cost savings in the early 1930s.

Chamberlain was the obvious heir to Baldwin, and fought hard to defend that position, but he was keenly aware of his age and of the danger of being overtaken by younger colleagues. In fact it was an overabundance of caution: even though Baldwin’s retirement was delayed by the Prime Minister’s need to manage the accession and then abdication of Edward VIII through 1936, there was no-one with Chamberlain’s stature to challenge him. Nor did they need to. Younger colleagues with ambition could reassure themselves that Chamberlain’s age meant he would probably be almost a caretaker, leading the government into the next general election but unlikely to see out the whole Parliament.

What to make of Chamberlain was a difficult question for many, including domestic and foreign journalists, the electorate and some of his colleagues. TIME noted on his succession to the premiership that he was “no dyed-in-the-wool Tory”, which was perhaps more true that the author knew. Chamberlain was by origin and instinct not a Conservative at all; the father whom he and , even more, his half-brother Austen revered, Joseph Chamberlain, had begun his career as a radical Liberal Mayor of Birmingham (1873-76), had broken with Gladstone and the party to form the Liberal Unionist Party in 1886, thereafter going into a partnership with the Conservatives under the Marquess of Salisbury, and became a passionate imperialist.

Likewise Neville Chamberlain made speeches in favour of Liberal Unionist candidates in the 1900 general election, and it was under that label that he was elected to Birmingham City Council in 1911 (the Liberal Unionists and the Conservatives formally merged the following year). As Lord Mayor of Birmingham from 1915 to 1916, he undertook social reforms which were not characteristically Conservative. In his personal life, at a time when the Church of England was dismissed by suffragist Maude Royden as “the Conservative Party at prayer”, the Chamberlain family had habitually been Unitarians, Neville rejected even that; he had no interest in organised religion, disliked attending religious services and described himself as “a reverent agnostic”.

Politically he was a puzzle. As Lord Mayor of Birmingham and then Minister of Health he had been regarded as a social reformer—up to a point—and TIME described him as “more liberal than his predecessor”. That was quite a statement, as Baldwin was hardly a right-wing ideologue and had called the Conservative MPs elected in the 1918 general election “a lot of hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war”. Chamberlain had been superficially conciliatory during the General Strike of 1926, but his relations with Labour MPs were consistently poor and antagonstic, a bird that would come home to roost when his premiership was under pressure in 1940.

As for his age, it was true that he had turned 68 two months before he became Prime Minister, and was increasingly noticeable for retaining the wing collar and swallow-tailed morning coat which was falling out of fashion for everyday dress. But he was lean and fit-looking, relatively tall—5’10”—and had a brisk energy about him which belied his age.

The 1940 general election would therefore be fought between Chamberlain at the head of the National government and Attlee leading a Labour Party in recovery from a near-extinction event. There was a trend running against the Conservatives and its coalition partners and in favour of Labour at by-elections in 1937, 1938 and 1939, which suggests that Attlee would have continued to rally his party, but this can be overstated. Only nine seats actually switched from government to opposition between Chamberlain’s accession and the outbreak of war, from a total of 54 by-elections. Even famous showdowns like the Oxford by-election of October 1938 were less than met the eye; all the opposition parties stood aside to allow the Master of Balliol College, Oxford, Professor A.D. Lindsay, to run as an “independent progressive” opposed to the recently signed Munich Agreement, and the Conservative vote fell by 6.7 per cent on the 1935 general election, but the party’s official candidate, 31-year-old barrister the Hon Quintin Hogg (later Viscount Hailsham and Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone), still won with a majority of 3,434 compared to his predecessor’s 6,645, hardly a calamitous defeat.

The National government was bound to decline from its commanding position of 1931 and 1935. The economy was still suffering from the effects of the Great Depression but there were clear signs of improvement: economic growth was around four per cent a year between 1934 and 1939; unemployment, which in 1932 had been a terrifying 20 per cent, fell to eight per cent by 1936 (although it remained more severe in poorer areas of heavy industry); and low interest rates helped housebuilding and the development of new industries. Chamberlain, having been Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1931 to 1937, could claim much of the credit for this, and his reformist instincts were reflected in the preparatory work the Conservative Research Department was doing; the party’s manifesto for 1940 would likely have included family allowances and the inclusion of dependents of insured persons in health cover.

It seems likely to me that the National government would have seen its majority decline again in 1940 and the Labour Party recover further, Attlee having proved an able and resourceful leader, albeit one who was positively miserly with words. But the government could afford to lose another 100 seats as it had done in 1935 and would still have had a working majority. But there would have been a changing of the guard thereafter. Chamberlain turned 71 in 1940; Sir John Simon, Leader of the Liberal National Party, would be 67; Viscount Hailsham would turn 68 but was anyway incapacitated by a serious stroke in 1938; Sir John Anderson, the former Permanent Secretary at the Home Office who was elected an MP in early 1938, joined the Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal later that year, but without the effective nationalisation of politics which the Second World War brought, he would never have acquired party political weight; and without the war, the career of former Chancellor and Home Secretary Winston Churchill, 66 in 1940, would have been a bust.

Of course, the war did happen.

Winston Churchill, having been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty at the beginning of hostilies—28 years after his first appointment to that office—replaced Chamberlain as Prime Minister in May 1940 and created an all-party coalition which included Labour. By the early months of 1945, as Nazi Germany collapsed in its death throes, there was a consensus that victory for the Allies was a matter of when, no longer of if, though the potential butcher’s bill for an invasion of the Japanese home islands was still terrifying (American estimates ran from around 250,000 to over a million Allied dead, while the toll of Japanese dead, both military and civilian, was anticipated to be as high as 20 million)

After Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945, Churchill proposed to Attlee that the coalition government should remain in office until Japan was defeated: not quite an open-ended commitment but perhaps as much as another year. The Labour Party was more impatient, flexing its politicians’ partisan habits, and when Churchill met Home Secretary Herbert Morrison and Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour and National Service, on 11 May, the best they could offer from their National Executive Committee was until an extension until October. Once that counter-proposal was in play, Churchill’s colleagues began to suggest holding a poll as quickly as possible, partly as a way of capitalising on what they regarded as Churchill’s popularly dramatic and bellicose personality

Attlee himself would have been content with waiting until Japan was defeated,, but he could feel the party’s determination. On 20 May, the NEC refused to accepy any continuation of the coalition beyond October, and on 23 May Churchill met King George VI and resigned as head of the coalition before being reappointed as Prime Minister of a caretaker government. Parliament would be dissolved on 15 June, five months shy of the 10th anniversary of the 1935 Parliament first meeting on 25 November 1935, and the election would take place on this day, 5 July, the votes from around the world being counted and the result announced on 26 July.

5 July 1945 would surprise many people, because the first time in history, there would be a Labour government with a working majority. But that is another story.

Ora pro nobis

It is the feast of St Zoe of Rome (d AD 286), a noblewoman and wife of Nicostratus, a senior public official in Rome, who was unable to speak for six years until St Sebastian made the sign of the cross over her, whereupon she asked to be baptised, sang the praises of Christ and was arrested praying at the tomb of St Peter, hung over a fire until she died of smoke inhalation then thrown into the River Tiber; of St Martha (d AD 551), the mother of St Simeon Stylites the Younger, who experienced visions of angels carrying candles, attended to the sick, the poor and orphans and dedicated much of her time to prayer; and of St Anthony Zaccaria (1502-39), born to a well-connected family in Cremona, who trained in medicine before being ordained a priest, ministered to the poor and sick, founded the Clerics Regular of St Paul, better known as the Barnabites, and lived a very ascetic life before contracting a fever and dying aged 36.

It is Independence Day in Venezuela (from Spain in 1811), Algeria (from France in 1962) and unexpected World Cup stars Cape Verde (from Portugal in 1975).

Factoids

1. Today in 1841 saw the first ever package tour, an almost unbearably glamorous outing from Leicester to Loughborough. Thomas Cook was a 32-year-old wood turner from Melbourne in Derbyshire who lived in Market Harborough in Leicestershire; in 1836, he and his wife signed the pledge and became active in the temperance movement. In June 1841, he was walking from his home to a temperance meeting in Leicester, a distance of some 15 miles. “A thought flashed through my brain—what a glorious thing it would be if the newly developed powers of railways and locomotion could be made subservient to the promotion of temperance.” Within weeks, he had negotiated the hire of a train from the Midland Counties Railway and laid on an excursion on Monday 5 July 1841 for 485 members of the Leicester Temperance Society to travel by train from Leicester Campbell Street Railway Station to a temperance meeting in Loughborough and back. He charged them a shilling each to cover the cost of hiring the train. Cook moved to Leicester later that year, and in 1845 began organising his first profit-making ventures; in 1851, he arranged excursions to the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park for 165,000 visitors. He established the travel agency Thomas Cook & Son with his child John Mason Andrew Cook in 1872 with a purpose-built headquarters at Ludgate House, 107-111 Fleet Street. In 1884, the agency provided transport for British Army up the Nile to Khartoum in an attempt to relieve the besieged General Charles Gordon. Extraordinarily, Thomas Cook was nationalised by the Labour government in 1948, only to be sold to a consortium of Trust House Forte, the Midland Bank and the Automobile Association in 1972. In 2001, it was bought by C&N Touristic AG and became Thomas Cook AG, then in 2007 merged with MyTravel and became Thomas Cook Group, which then went into compulsory liquidation in 2019.

2. Between September 1777 and June 1778, Philadelphia, then the capital of the United States, was held by British forces. Consequently, the provisional government, the Continental Congress, had to sit elsewhere: perhaps inspired by the Wars of the Roses, it convened in the Court House in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on 27 September, then reassmbled three days later at the Court House in York, Pennsylvania. On 27 June 1778, it adjourned and met again on 2 July in Philadelphia, initially at College Hall before moving to the State House (now Independence Hall).

3. Queen Victoria died on 22 January 1901 aged 81, having been on the throne for nearly 64 years. The last acts of Parliament to which she indicated Royal Assent were the Supplemental War Loan (No. 2) Act 1900 and the Appropriation Act 1900 (Session 2). The first act authorised the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, to raise an additional £11 million by issuing further war stock or bonds under the initial War Loan Act 1900, Treasury Bills or Exchequer bonds. There had already been a Supplemental War Loan Act 1900: the money was to defray some of the costs of the ongoing South African War (often referred to as the Second Boer War) which had begun in October 1899 and had not proved the swift victory which the British government had anticipated (it would come to an end in May 1902). The second act was a standard appropriation act, legislation which authorises HM Treasury to issue money from the Consolidated Fund, the government’s account at the Bank of England, to specified government departments and Crown bodies. In this case, it covered a sum of £16 million for the Army (Supplementary) Estimate 1900-1901 which consisted of £5.3. million for transport and remounts, £4.25 million for provisions, forage and other supplies, £750,000 for clothing establishments and services, £4.7 million for the gloriously vague “warlike and other stores” and £1 million for the cost of works &c. including staff for engineer services. It was another reflection of the growing and unexpected cost and intensity of the conflict in South Africa.

4. Last month I noted the connection which the disastrous Dardanelles campaign of 1915-16 had forged between Winston Churchill and his wartime deputy and peacetime opponent Clement Attlee. But while they faced each other at the 1945 general election as Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition, Churchill had another, even odder, relationship to the Leader of the Liberal Party, Sir Archibald Sinclair, who has stood down after more than five years as Secretary of State for Air when the wartime coalition had broken up in May 1945. Sinclair, 54, was the fourth Baronet Sinclair of Ulbster and one of the largets landowners in Britain with 100,000 acres in Caithness in northern Scotland. He had succeeded his grandfather in the baronetcy in 1912, aged only 21 and a young officer in the Life Guards. In those last years before the First World War, he had become friends with Churchill, and was touted as a possible husband for Nellie Hozier, the younger sister of Churchill’s wife Clementine. When Churchill resigned from the government in November 1915 in the aftermath of Gallipoli, he arranged to be posted on active service on the Western Front, initially with 2nd Battalion, The Grenadier Guards, but in January 1916 he was temporarily promoted to lieutenant colonel and appointed commanding officer of 6th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers, near Ploegsteert in Belgium. Sinclair, by then a major in the Guards Machine Gun Regiment, was assigned as his second-in-command until Churchill left the battalion in May 1916. But their master-and-servant relationship was by no means over; when Churchill returned to Cabinet as War Secretary in January 1919, Sinclair served as his Personal Military Secretary, then accompanied him to the Colonial Office as Private Secretary when Churchill became Secretary of State in February 1921. The link was only formally severed when Sinclair was elected Liberal MP for Caithness and Sutherland at the general election of November 1922 while Churchill, still also a Liberal at that point, lost his seat in Dundee. Sinclair became Liberal Chief Whip in 1930, Deputy Leader in 1931 and then Leader of the Liberal Party after Sir Herbert Samuel lost his seat in 1935. He spent a decade as leader, but in 1945 suffered the same fate as Samuel, being defeated in Caithness and Sutherland by the Unionist candidate Eric Gandar Dower.

5. The result of the general election in Caithness and Sutherland in July 1945, in which Sinclair was dislodged after 23 years, was an extraordinary one, the closest ever three-way vote. The constituency had only been created in 1918, and had been held first by Sir Leicester Harmsworth (1918-22), who had previously sat for Caithness (1900-18), and was defeated by Sinclair when he, Harmsworth, supported H.H. Asquith’s faction of the Liberals in 1922 and Sinclair backed David Lloyd George. Caithness was solid Liberal territory, held Liberals, Whig or by independents since the Great Reform Act of 1832 with the one exception of Sinclair’s great-grandfather, Sir George Sinclair, Whig MP for Caithness 1811-12, 1818-20 and 1831-35, after which he joined the “constitutionalists” when broke with the Earl Grey’s government and were eventually absorbed into the Conservative Party. Sutherland, which was another component of the seat created in 1918, was almost equally solid: since 1832, its only non-Whig/Liberal MPs were the Conservative William Howard (1837-40) and Liberal Unionist Frederck Leveson-Gower (1900-06). And the same held true for the third element, the old Wick Burghs constituency, which was consistently Whig or Liberal with the exceptions of two Liberal Unionists, Sir John Pender (1892-96) and Sir Arthur Bignold (1900-10). Sinclair was even unopposed in Caithness and Sutherland in 1923, 1924 and 1931. The constituency was also, by modern standards, very sparsely populated, with total number of votes cast not exceeding 20,000 until 1950. The general election of 1945 was the first time the three main parties all fielded candidates, Labour’s Robert Ian Aonas MacInnes joining Gandar Dower and Sinclair. In the end, with 16,265 votes cast overall, the majority was six, the totals for the three candidates were separated by just 61: Gandar Dower 5,564, MacInnes 5,558 and Sinclair 5,503.

6. Sir Leicester Harmsworth was a Member of Parliament for 22 years and created a baronet, but he had the misfortune to be part of a sibling group which made those achievement seem modest. He was the fourth son of Alfred Harmsworth, an undistinguished barrister and heavy drinker who died of cirrhosis aged 52 but who father 14 children, of whom three died in infancy. These included Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe, co-founder of the Amalgamated Press, The Daily Mail and The Daily Mirror and owner of The Observer, The Times and The Sunday Times; Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, President of the Air Council, co-founder of the Amalgamated Press, The Daily Mail and The Daily Mirror and founder of the Anti-Waste League; Cecil, 1st Lord Harmsworth, Liberal MP (1906-10, 1911-22), Home Office minister, Foreign Office minister and owner of Dr Johnson’s House; Sir Hildebrand Harmsworth, 1st Baronet, unsuccessful parliamentary candidate and publisher of The Globe; and St John Harmsworth, proprietor, promoter and bottle designer of Perrier. Imagine the family dinners.

7. In 1939, there were five women entitled to the style “Lady Harmsworth”: the widow and daughter-in-law of Sir Leicester Harmsworth, the wife of Cecil, Lord Harmsworth, and the widow and daughter-in-law of Sir Hildebrand Harmsworth.

8. Politics can be surprisingly full of little quirks an ironies. The previous Labour MP for Makerfield was Josh Simons, elected in July 2024 after two years as director of the think tank Labour Together (now rebranded Think Labour). In September 2025, he was appointed Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office to cover the maternity leave of his colleague Satvir Kaur, and in January 2026 he was given the additional post of Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. In these roles he had responsibility for the design and cross-government delivery of digital ID, data transformation and digital public services, but resigned less than two months later after allegations that, as director of Labour Together, he had commissioned public relations consultancy ACPO Worldwide to look for information about journalists reporting on the think tank. After the local and devolved parliamentary elections in May this year, Simons called on Sir Keir Starmer to announce his departure as Prime Minister and set out the schedule for an orderly transition to a new leader; the following week, he resigned his Makerfield seat to trigger a by-election which would allow Andy Burnham to seek to return to the House of Commons, since the Labour Party Rule Book stipulates that candidates for the leadership must be Members of Parliament. Burnham won the Makerfield by-election, of course, and is now all but certain to be Prime Minister by the end of the month, and there is widespread speculation that Simons will be appointed to a senior role in 10 Downing Street, perhaps as Director of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit, at least in part as a reward for sacrificing his place in Parliament to facilitate Burnham’s rise to the premiership. Simons’s brief ministerial role overseeing design and delivery of digital ID, has a strange resonance. Andy Burnham’s first ministerial post, from May 2005 to May 2006, was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Home Department during Charles Clarke’s tenure as Home Secretary; he was the minister in charge of the Identity Cards Act 2006, It was a controversial scheme which was eventually felt to wither on the vine and it remains to be seen what, if any lessons, Burnham has learned from the experience of 20 years ago.

9. The earliest recorded use of any cognate of the word “fuck” in English comes in an anonymous, untitled poem colloquially known from its opening words as Flen flyys (“Fleas, flies”). It was written around 1475, half in English and half in Latin, and satirises the Carmelite friars of Cambridgeshire, some of the most ribald sections disguised in a very simple code which uses the following letter of the alphabet to stand for its predecessor. One line reads Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk, which once decoded and translated, means “They are not in heaven, since they fuck the wives of Ely”; gxddbov of course stands for fuccant, an Anglo-Latin coinage which is taken to conjugate (no pun intended) as a Latin verb. It derives via Old English or Norse from the Proto-Germanic root (again, no pun intended) fukkōną, meaning “to blow” or “to gust”.

10. The sort of person who delights in detailing the ways in which Christianity is either meaningless or a pale rip-off of pre-existing pagan religion will probably tell you that Easter began simply as an imitation of rites surrounding rebirth attached to the goddess Ēostre. They may also point to links to the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar or her analogue Astarte. Not only is this not true, it could be true: the very existence of a pagan deity called Ēostre is mentioned only once, by the Venerable Bede in his The Reckoning of Time; but Ēostre as the name of the festival marking the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ derives from the same root as “east” after the direction from which the sun rises. Moreover, Ēostre is a linguistic outlier; in Latin and the Romance languages, Easter is Pascha or a derivation thereof: this is a straightforward transliteration of the Greek word Πάσχα, itself a transliteration of the Aramaic פסחא; that in turn is cognate to the Hebrew word פֶּסַח (Pesach), or Passover. Christ was, of course, crucified during the festival of Passover, so the derivation of the more common word for Easter is unsurprising.

“Never forget that if you don’t hit a newspaper reader between the eyes with your first sentence, there is no need of writing a second one.” (Arthur Brisbane)

1. “Are we edging closer to peace in Ukraine?”: in The Spectator, my Defence on the Brink colleague and retired colonel Simon Diggins details the slow, painful but seemingly decisive way in which the Ukrainian Armed Forces have turned the tide of the conflict against the invading Russians. Mainly through the use of first-person drones, the Ukrainians have reversed the usual reality of conflict so that the majority of Russian casualties are now dead rather than wounded. This is taking losses to a scale which ultimately may be unsustainable even for as meatgrinder-happy a leader as Vladimir Putin. Of course Ukraine is suffering heavy casualties too and has a much smaller population than Russia (just over 30 million compared to 144 million), but it has the advantage of being on the defensive, and is also now able to strike targets deep into Russian territory. Much is still to be decided; as Simon concludes, “The tide has turned, but as in 1942-3, the lineaments of the future post-war world are still emerging”. Achieving any kind of durable and equitable peace settlement will be extremely difficult, given Putin’s implacable hostility towards the very idea of Ukraine and the justifiable outrage of the Ukrainian people at the brutalisation of their country. For perhaps the first time, though, we have reached a stage at which it is difficult to seea way for Russia to win this war. And that is vastly important.

2. “The Hybrid Navy and the United Kingdom’s Defence Investment Plan”: for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Dr Emma Salisbury, one of the best contemporary academic commentators on naval warfare, compares the Defence Investment Plan which has finally been published, the best part of a year late, with the concept which First Sea Lord General Sir Gwyn Jenkins and others have championed for some time of a “Hybrid Navy”, a family of uncrewed platforms “networked together and connected to crewed vessels via a Maritime Fighting Web” with the Common Combat Vessel (CCV) at its centre. I think there is broad agreement that moving from mainly crewed vessels to predominantly uncrewed air, surface and sub-surface platforms is inevitable as technology evolves. The anxieties arise, as I suggested in my own contribution on the DIP in The Spectator, from the “how” rather than the “what”. Because of the way in which many decisions have been taken and when, the process of transformation to a Hybrid Navy made provision for in the DIP falls in such a way that there absolutely no slack in the schedule. “The CCV, meant to sit at the center of the whole system, does not appear as a firm commitment until the 2030–35 tranche, where the plan speaks of building ‘at least six’ of them. The Type 45 [destroyer] begins retiring from 2035. That leaves a vanishingly thin margin between the CCV’s earliest plausible entry into service and the point at which the destroyer force it is meant to succeed starts leaving the fleet, in a program area where the United Kingdom has an unbroken recent record of both platforms and enabling systems arriving years late.” There’s the rub: this would be a challenging timetable if we were acquiring replacement vessels of proven technology and straightforward construction; or if the Ministry of Defence was a world leader in swift and efficient procurement. Neither of those things is true, and Salisbury rightly questions whether the expenditure available will be sufficient to make the transformation take place.

3. “Burnham’s biggest problem—UK leftists parroting Putin’s lies”: on his Substack The New World, journalist and author Paul Mason, who was born in Andy Burnham’s previous parliamentary constituency of Leigh, then in Lancashire but now part of Greater Manchester, examines the readiness of the Left in Britain to accept and promote talking points and false arguments favourable to and often directly created by Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin régime. This is familiar terrain for Mason, who began his own intellectual life on the far Left as a Trotskyist and supporter of Workers’ Power, the British section of the League for the Fifth International. His politics are now, in his own words, “very complicated”, he has styled himself as a “radical social democrat” and an “actual Marxist”, supported Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party and then Sir Keir Starmer’s, and sought the Labour nomination in the constituencies of Stretford and Urmston, Sheffield Central, Mid and South Pembrokeshire and Islington North, all without success. Perhaps because he is himself a veteran of the far Left, Mason has a tangible impatience and frustration with those who conflate several separate narratives—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s campaign in Gaza and accusations of genocide, America’s military action against Venezuela and Iran and President Trump’s threats towards the decaying Communist régime in Cuba—and draw the conclusion that for the UK to increase its defence spending is somehow aggressive, imperialist or illegitimate. He is rightly anxious that this is taking place at a time when President Putin, under enormous military pressure in Ukraine, is active in “sub-threshold” warfare and has developed a “comprehensive plan to move beyond spreading disinformation to systematically polluting and destabilising all reliable sources of truth”. The British Left is proving fertile ground for pro-Kremlin useful idiots.

4. “All hail the King of the North! But which north?”: in The Financial Times, trade journalist Alan Beattie, who was born in Chester, neatly exposes the absurdity of a generic “Northern” identity, as cultivated by and applied to Andy Burnham. It comprises “a combination of gritty industrial authenticity, solidarity in adversity, blunt but friendly plain-speaking, performative imperviousness to cold weather and a diet heavy in saturated fats”, and relies, as even a second’s contemplation reveals, on a very homogenous and uniform view of northern England. In fact, as anyone from “the North” will tell you—I grew up in Sunderland and went to school in Newcastle-upon-Tyne—the tiny distinctions between close neighbours are often the most keenly felt of all. As Beattie says of Burnham’s plans for a ‘No 10 North’, “if he starts treating Manchester and something called ‘The North’ interchangeably, his fissiparous notional kingdom will be threatened by a series of subregional peasants’ revolts… carving up the former Yugoslavia was nothing: try mediating between Leeds and Sheffield”. Yet it is a simple and simplistic label of convenience which suits a largely southern-based media. It makes me wonder: is Burnham exploiting this “Northernness” in a completely cynical way, or does he somehow not see the falsity behind it? And which proposition would I prefer to be true?

5. “Labour’s mercurial kingmaker”: an intriguing article in The Critic by journalist and Catch22 Head of Policy and Campaigns Stella Tsantekidou profiles Josh Simons (see above), the MP for Makerfield who became Steward and Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern to vacate his seat and create the opportunity for Andy Burnham to return to Westminster after nearly a decade away. For someone who will celebrate his 33rd birthday later this month, Simons seems to have been around the senior counsels of the Labour Party for a long time, especially bearing in mind he has also fitted in a PhD in government, political theory and political science at the Harvard Kennedy School, a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard and the transformation of his doctoral thesis into a book, Algorithms for the People: Democracy in the Age of AI. Tsantekidou reveals a number of things which are largely absent from the consciousness of the electorate at large, I think: how young many of the most influential behind-the-scenes advisers in political parties are; how impressive and hot-housed they can be, whether for good or ill; and how intense, personalised and vituperative the atmosphere within parties can be, never mind across party divides. There is a fascinating sense of taking off a fascia to examine, if I can borrow the currently popular imagery, the wiring underneath; whether you approve of what you find or not is a matter of taste.

6. “Philip Larkin has much to teach Andy Burnham about the England Labour has lost”: it is so potentially “problematic”, in that favourite contemporary usage, that you have to assume Andy Burnham, our Prime Minister in waiting, was being honest when he once named Tony Harrison and Philip Larkin as his favourite authors. (Assuming no slip twixt cup and lip, Burnham will be the first English literature graduate to be Prime Minister.) Despite his extensive use of profanity, the left-wing Harrison, whose long poem V was written during the Miners’ Strike, causes no issues at all, but Larkin is a different matter. In The Daily Telegraph, Dr Clarissa Hard, whose doctoral work focused on Larkin, Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence argues that the Hermit of Hull encapsulated a kind of England and English sensibility—“the working classes and their quiet existences”—upon the support of which the Labour Party could once unthinkingly rely, but which is now in many ways alienated from a progressive, urban party of middle-class obsessions. But he was also a bone-deep conservative already mourning the passing of an England he quietly adored, as Going, Going (1972) demonstrates. Hard pinpoints this England—changed, fading, left behind, angrily puzzled and sad at its decline—as a constituency to which Burnham must reach out with sincerity and understanding.

7. “This Supreme Court ruling would make the Constitution’s framers wince”: in The Washington Post, George Will laments another decision by the Supreme Court of the United States, that the President may remove members of regulatory bodies not just for cause but “at will”. As he points out, since the first such body, the Interstate Commerce Commission, was established in 1887, “these have been structured by Congress to prevent what the court has now mandated: uncircumscribed presidential dominance”. We know, of course, that President Trump will revel in the confirmation that he can fire yet more public officials without even having to bother thinking of a subterfuge. Trump’s motivation in this is clear if simple and unpleasant: he is a bully who refuses to tolerate dissent, cannot and will not argue a cause and enjoys people fearing him and his power over them. What is slightly harder to divine is why Congressional Republicans and conservative Supreme Court justices have so readily abased themselves before the crude would-be tyrant, assented to positions and supported decisions with which in the pre-Trump era they would have had no truck and generally offered minimal if any opposition to the seizure of their powers and the ongoing construction of a genuine imperial presidency. There is no subterfuge or secrecy in Trump: he is unapologetic in his autocracy and believes himself wholly justified. Yet there is a consistent parade of otherwise sensible and upstanding citizens and office-holders who claim to be shocked and amazed at the at the high-handedness, defiance, shamelessness, intolerance and sheer grubby corruption the presidency has become. They will eventually have to account for theirinabiliyse.

8. “The truth about how the British Empire is taught in schools”: Max Jeffery produces a brisk and useful corrective in The Spectator about the historiography and paedagogy of the British Empire in schools. Bien pensant progressives like William Dalrymple and ideologically motived halfwits like Zack Polanski, both of whom he mentions, would have you believe that the terrible secret and original sin of Britain’s global imperial footprint is never mentioned in classrooms, and at the same time is not presented in the appropriate morally instructive framework. Both accusations are palpably untrue: pupils do study the Empire and they do not do so as mini-Flashmans, waving Union flags and trampling native populations underfoot. It is hard to know where to start. For anyone who demands that X or Y should be included in lessons, there is an initial responsibility to determine whether or not it already is, on which grounds Dalrymple and Polanski fail. They should then be asked what they would like to delete from the existing curriculutruym to make space for their pet subject. When it comes to demands from the left that the Empire is treated with sufficient moral outrage, we should ask whether this overweening value judgement is applied to all periods of history: do we drum into pupils the barbarity the Romans, wholly dependent on slaves and enthusiastic for blood sports involving not only animals but humans? Do we repeat ad infinitum the narrow interpretation of freedom and democracy applied by ancient Athenians, or the fact that their courts only admitted evidence from slaves on the strict condition that it had been extracted under torture? Is any mention at all made of the Muslim slave trade in Africa which lasted from the 7th to the 20th century, had a mortality rate of around 50 per cent and disproportionately enslaved women and children, while men were often castrated? I’ve argued before that history—good history—is not primarily a morality tale, but even worse than that is a distorted morality tale. The facts, insofar as we can establish them, may not quite speak for themselves but they should not be ventriloquised.

Jukebox jury: Dusty Springfield edition

1. “I Only Want To Be With You”

2. “Son Of A Preacher Man”

3. “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself”

4. “The Look Of Love”

5. “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me”

You will be much missed…

… I once said to a departing colleague in the House of Commons, a man of exceptional procedural expertise and sound judgement. Oh yes, he replied, but not for very long.