Beating Reform and the political quotes that people never said (LDN#201)
Welcome to Lib Dem Newswire #201, which includes a special treat for you: a chapter from a great new book on politics by Phil Cowley. Along with a special 25% off offer for you to get your own copy of the full book.
Before we get to the main part of this newsletter, congratulations to our councillors newly elected since the last edition and their agents: councillors Janet Grauberg, Matt Fry, Dawn Logan and Paul Evans.
A note also that the Liberal Democrats have launched a new campaign to “Balance the BBC”, in response to the BBC’s coverage of Nigel Farage. Sign the petition here and more on the campaign from Max Wilkinson here.
Finally, a reminder that you can get Lib Dem news updates 3-5 times a week via WhatsApp.
Happy reading,
Mark
P.S. If you haven’t had a chance to read the previous edition of Lib Dem Newswire it is online here: The Reform vs Lib Dem landscape.
Government backs away from fixing election law
Election law is a mess.
That is not a condemnation of the policy choices embedded in the law (though I do have views on issues such as the choice of electoral system…), but rather a comment on the technical state of the legislation.
But the government seems to be backing away from fixing this problem, as explained in my latest newsletter about my work in Parliament:
The problematic history of famous political quotes
Phil Cowley has a new book out, The Smallest Room in the House, a “collection of political oddities and fascinating research, discussing the politics of fights, cockroaches, riots, potholes, beards and much more … Equal parts entertaining and thought-provoking, and with additional grumpy complaints about bats, overly long constituency names and the idea of giving the vote to sixteen-year-olds, it’s a book that will appeal to the sort of person who likes to tell you that, actually, it’s all a bit more complicated than that.”
I’m delighted to say that he and his publisher agreed to let you read a chapter of the book for free right now. So over to Phil:
Quotes
Almost all the best political quotations – and perhaps the best quotes in general – are not accurate. All half-decent pedants know that no one in Casablanca says ‘Play it again, Sam’, that James Cagney didn’t say ‘You dirty rat’ and that Sherlock Holmes did not announce that things were ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ until Basil Rathbone began to play the character in the late 1930s.
Paul Boller and John George’s excellent They Never Said It claims that a host of political quotes are similarly invented. Among many others, Hermann Göring never said ‘Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver’ (it comes from a 1933 play), Lenin didn’t use the phrase ‘useful idiots’ and Lincoln might have thought that you could fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time but not all the people all the time, but he never said it. Similarly, Louis XIV never said ‘I am the state’ (even if he thought it) and Marie Antoinette never said ‘Let them eat cake’. Voltaire never said ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’; George Washington never claimed that he couldn’t tell a lie.
There are plenty of British examples too. The classic British one is that Jim Callaghan never said ‘Crisis, what crisis?’ Flying back from the four-nation summit in Guadeloupe in 1979, he was asked by reporters at Heathrow what he thought of ‘the mounting chaos in the country at the moment’. He replied: ‘I don’t think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos.’ Despite the fact that the word ‘crisis’ doesn’t feature in either the question or the answer, it did in The Sun’s headline the following day and ‘Crisis, what crisis?’ has since become perhaps the most well-known thing Callaghan never said. Knowing that The Sun’s headline wasn’t an accurate quote is Political Trivia 101, but you get bonus marks if you knew it was a reference to a line from The Day of the Jackal and an album by Supertramp.
The equivalent from the Blair years was that the Labour special adviser Jo Moore never said the words ‘bury bad news’. You see it in quotation marks all the time, but although it’s a perfectly fair paraphrase, it’s not what she wrote. On 11 September 2001, with the world focused on the attacks taking place in the US, she sent an email to her colleagues that said: ‘Today is a good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors’ expenses anyone?’ Neither ‘bad’ nor ‘news’ (let alone ‘bad news’) is in there. Yet ‘bury bad news’ became one of the iconic quotations of the Blair government, despite being as imaginary as Callaghan’s ‘Crisis, what crisis?’
More recently, we had Liz Truss blaming the ‘left-wing economic orthodoxy’ for her downfall in an extended essay in the Sunday Telegraph. If you’ve ever met an economist, either an academic one or one working in the City, you’ll know they don’t, on the whole, lean to the left – and it was taken as a sign of how unmoored from reality some of her views had become. Within days of the article being published, the phrase had made the jump from headlines and articles to memes and gags. The only problem is that she never said it. The phrase didn’t feature once in her almost 4,000-word article. It wasn’t even used as the piece’s headline – which is where these sorts of problems often start. She did note a leftward shift ‘in the media and the wider public sphere’ and elsewhere in the article she complained of an ‘economic orthodoxy’ that was unsympathetic to what she was attempting. The phrase ‘left-wing economic orthodoxy’ might be considered a fair summary of what she was trying to say – although I don’t think it is, because these are two distinct points – and it was used on the paper’s front page in their headline. But they didn’t put it in quotation marks and nor should we.
For the most part, these quotes survive because they are somehow characteristic of the individuals to whom or time to which they are attributed. Listening to Callaghan’s 1979 airport press conference now, it is quite astonishingly complacent in tone. The Sun never presented it as a quote; as a headline, it doesn’t seem too outrageous. Similarly, ‘a good day to bury bad news’ is not all that removed from what was in the email and captures well an obsession with media management. (My own view, which is niche, is that Jo Moore was simply doing her job. It was indeed a good day to bury bad news, even if the phrasing was unfortunate.)
And sometimes, these quotes are just very useful. In an earlier chapter, I referred to Macmillan’s apocryphal response to a journalist asking what was most likely to blow governments off course. He is said to have replied: ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ (Sometimes, you see it as ‘my dear boy’, to make it even more in character.) There’s no evidence he said it, although he was fond of talking about ‘the opposition of events’, which is substantively the same point. But if you need a quote to explain the extent to which governments are often derailed by stuff no one saw coming, it’s perfect. Shit happens, as Macmillan wouldn’t have said.
In other cases, there is no evidence at all for the source. This would apply to the quote about sausages and law referred to in Chapter 46 or the quote about a belief in democracy not surviving an encounter with the average voter in Chapter 19. The former is usually attributed to Bismarck; both have variously been attributed to Churchill, but there’s no evidence for either. We could add that Willie Sutton claimed never to have said that he robbed banks because that is where the money is or that there is no evidence that Deep Throat ever said to ‘follow the money’ (both in Chapter 22); that line was invented for the movie All the President’s Men. Benjamin Franklin’s call to hang together (Chapter 33) is also probably apocryphal. Real Grade-A pedants won’t be worried about things like this, though: they’ll all have been too busy googling to prove that the phrase ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ began not with Rathbone’s performances as Holmes but with the Wodehouse novel Psmith, Journalist, published in 1915.
The Smallest Room in the House by Phil Cowley is available from Biteback. Use the code HOUSE25 to get 25% off.
The book is also available from Waterstones, Amazon (including e-book version) and Bookshop.org.
Beating Reform
Here’s my latest report for Liberal Democrat members and supporters. These reports also appear on the party website.
What makes us different
With the Labour government becoming deeply unpopular so quickly and with Reform on the rise, the need for us to expand into being a credible force across more of the country has never been more pressing.
We are the party that stands up against populist extremists, willing to call out Donald Trump and willing to take on Nigel Farage.
With the pernicious volume of extremist views - aided by Elon Musk’s love affair with extremism - there’s a crucial role for the Liberal Democrats in being willing and proud to stand against such extremism.
While both Reform and the Conservatives spend so much time trying to excuse it or benefit from it, and Labour prevaricates, we simply oppose it.
Rather than putting our energies into telling people how many fellow Brits we dislike and relentlessly seeking to stoke anger and division, our focus is on improving people’s lives through improving our NHS, fixing social care, reining in the excesses of water companies and tackling the cost of living crisis.
Central to growing our economy - to fund the better public services we need - is improving our trade relations with the European Union. Those promises made by Brexit campaigners have turned to dust. They broke their promises - and our economy.
That is why continuing to up our game is so important. We can see in local council by-elections week in, week out, the results where we do. We consistently can take on and beat Reform, even in wards where we were not in contention the previous time, while Labour and the Conservatives nearly always lose out to Reform.
That should give us optimism - and spur us to do more.
Balanced media coverage shouldn’t just be for election time
The BBC is our national broadcaster, people expect and deserve balanced news coverage.
It's clear to everyone the BBC is giving Nigel Farage and Reform far too much coverage. Reform UK only have 4 of the 250 opposition MPs, but Nigel Farage accounts for 60% of the BBC website's mentions of opposition leaders.
The BBC should have to balance its political news so it doesn’t boost Nigel Farage’s dangerous, divisive politics.
There are special Ofcom rules on balance at election time, these rules should apply all year round so people can trust the BBC.
That is the message for the new Liberal Democrat ‘Balance the BBC’ petition, which you can sign and share here.
(As usual, the data from this petition flows into the usual party systems, so local parties can integrate it into their work too.)
Internal elections
The big three-yearly round of Federal Party elections - such as for my successor as President and also to various party committees - is now underway. All members for who the party has the correct, opted-in email address (important caveats!) are receiving a series of emails from the Returning Officer and from Civica (previously known as Electoral Reform Services), the firm who is running the online nominations and voting system for us.
Please do also let others in your local party or party body know about that, as the most common reason for people not receiving the emails is that either they’ve changed their email address or they opted out of party emails a while back but now are happy to hear from us again.
The contact address for resolving any queries about not getting these emails is returning.officer@libdems.org.uk.
Our new London HQ
During September the Liberal Democrat HQ in Vincent Square is moving to First Floor, 66 Buckingham Gate, London, SW1E 2AU. A two-minute walk from St James’s Park Station, it has extra meeting room space and means we will continue to provide staff with a modern office space to use. It is a long way from when I took up post at the start of 2020 and was kindly warned to be careful about the hole in the floor under the desk I was sitting at!
Post will continue to be forwarded from the previous address. So while membership forms, imprints on posters and so on should be updated over time, there is no immediate need to bin items with the Vincent Square address on them.
Local party officers survey
Thank you to everyone who took part in this survey about how we can make life easier or more effective for voluntary local party officers. It is part of our work to implement the General Election Review.
From the initial analysis, it looks like the main themes running through the responses are:
concerns over increasing complexity and workload - and hence desire for measures to help with these
desire to share the workload - and calls for this to be made easier
openness to a lot more standardisation - though with an important need for flexibility and with standardisation seen as something to opt into when it helps rather than something to be enforced
concerns over expectations and appreciation - does our way of working expect too much of some volunteers, and do local party officers feel sufficiently valued by the wider party?
The party’s training team is already at work on significantly expanding our training for local party officers, and other action is to come, including looking at how to run a new set of ‘Local Party Officer Awards’, so we can properly recognise the vital contributions made by those who volunteer for these roles.
Improving our Conflicts of Interest policy
The party’s constitution gives the Federal Board the task of setting a Conflicts of Interest policy to be used across Federal Committees. Following a review by the Federal Audit and Scrutiny Committee (FASC), the Board has agreed both some updates to the policy, and also a training plan to help meeting chairs understand when they need to act and how they should.
The updates focus on issues such as greater transparency over when an interest has been declared and why, along with reflecting that increasingly committee discussions happen through channels such as WhatsApp or Slack rather than just at face-to-face meetings.
We are often critical of conflicts of interest in other parties or public life, so it is important we continue to have high standards ourselves.
The new policy will come into force just after the current round of internal elections and the policy will be included in the induction information for committee members.
The budget and other Board work
The Board has also agreed the principles for the Federal Party’s 2026 budget. This includes continuing the financial pattern from the last Parliament, using a post-general election surplus to invest in the early part of the Parliament so that we have a full staff team in place.
As we saw last time round, that both ensures we can support significant elections during the first half of the Parliament, and also provides the proper long-term run-in for teams to build up ahead of the next Westminster general election. It means running a budget deficit over the next few years as we run down that surplus, before balancing the budget by the end of the Parliament.
Our deficit this time will peak at a lower level than in the last Parliament, so overall this plan also continues our progress towards longer-term financial stability and strength for the party.
An important part of that will be the new legacy fund, designed for people who wish to leave money to the party knowing that it will be committed to our long-term future. Thank you to everyone involved in setting it up - including members who voted for the relevant measure at a previous Federal Conference. Watch out for news on the fund later in the year.
The Board also filled a casual vacancy on the Disciplinary Sub-Group (DSG) by appointing Daniel Mancini.
Do you have questions about any of this report, or other Lib Dem matters? Then please drop me a line on president@libdems.org.uk. Do also get in touch if you would like to invite me to do a Zoom call with your local party or party body.
Podcast: Do those “Winning Here” posters and bar charts work?
No new episode of Never Mind The Bar Charts this time, so here’s a still relevant show from the archives, about the evidence for some of those popular Lib Dem campaign tactics.
You can take a listen in your favourite podcast app, as well as on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or the web.
🎧Find all the episodes of Never Mind The Bar Charts here.
📟 Sign up for a dedicated email notification each time a new episode appears here.
NHS permacrisis: Lib Dems in the news
Health and social care
“Helen Morgan, the Lib Dem health and social care spokesperson, said the figures [on corridor care] showed the NHS was entering a state of 'permacrisis'.”
Jess Brown-Fuller: “There has been a piecemeal approach that has created defibrillator deserts, which disproportionately affect rural and poorer communities.”
Economy and cost of living
Sarah Olney: “The government’s jobs tax has proven to be nothing but an unmitigated disaster. Countless small businesses were already at the brink of collapse and this growth-crushing [National Insurance] tax hike has only added to the pain.”
Ed Davey on the energy price cap: “The last thing struggling families and pensioners need is higher energy bills this winter. The Government should cancel this rise and take up our plan to halve energy bills instead.”
Environment and water industry
Tim Farron: “Ofwat is a defunct regulator that needs replacing urgently.”
Reform UK
Ed Davey: “We really are through the looking-glass now. Nigel Farage pretending to be patriotic while pledging to rip up Britain’s proud record of leading the world on human rights.”
Alex Cole-Hamilton: “If you want change you don’t have to settle for Reform.”
Housing
News from a Lib Dem-run council: “achievements include delivering 58 new council homes for affordable rent, 10 for shared ownership, and 11 for temporary accommodation.”
Local government
“The Lib Dems have repeated their calls for police and crime commissioners - elected politicians who have authority over each police force - to be scrapped. They believe the money spent on these would be better invested in frontline policing.”
Lib Dem Council Leader Mike Ross announces plan to remove honour from Peter Mandelson.
International issues
Helen Maguire: “It’s unconscionable that, in the fourth year of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the UK is still contributing to the Kremlin’s coffers.”
“Ed Davey has said he will boycott the banquet for Donald Trump's state visit … to ‘send a message’ to the US president over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”
Other issues
Lisa Smart calls for new EHRC guidance to be subject to full parliamentary scrutiny.
Ed Davey clashes with Keir Starmer over the European Convention on Human Rights:
Ed Davey condemns attacks on police at Tommy Robinson rally.
Jane Dodds: “"This £1 bus fare [secured by the Lib Dems] is a transformational step forward for young people.”
“A group of cross-party MPs have set out a 'ready to go' blueprint for an independent review of the UK’s first past the post (FPTP) electoral system.”
Josh Reynolds: “These shameful figures show that the police are failing to crack down on the shoplifting epidemic facing our country.”
Alistair Carmichael: “Every day, vans laden with undeclared, unhygienic and unrefrigerated meat are rolling through our ports for distribution and sale in Britain.”
“The Liberal Democrats have called for Boris Johnson to be stripped of his access to an allowance for former prime ministers over allegations he has profited from contacts he made while in office.”
Lib Dems push vote on banning loud music on public transport as new poll reveals impact of headphone dodgers on commuters.
People news
Lib Dem councillor returns to council work after car crash left him with life-threatening injuries.
Lib Dem councillor climbs a remote 6,250-metre peak in the Himalayas.
Former MSP Ian Jenkins has died. Condolences to his family and many friends.
Other party news
“They demolished most of the 'blue wall' at the general election, and now the Lib Dems are eyeing up Labour voters.”
Mike Storey has been elected deputy leader of the Lib Dem group in the Lords, succeeding Jeremy Purvis who was previously elected leader. The other deputy leader is Kath Pinnock.
Steff Aquarone has been elected Chair of the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Party in the House of Commons, succeeding Lisa Smart.
📲 You can get more updates like the above in real time through my WhatsApp updates 3-5 times a week. Sign up details here.
How much do voters like/dislike each party?
In case you missed them first time around, here are some of my blog posts and assorted pieces since the last LDN:
Which MP tried to vote in their pyjamas?
What the polls are saying
Votes
Leaders
For more details on both the above tables, and for updates in-between editions of LDN, take a look on my website.
Do voters prefer consensus to disruption?
Which reminded me of this finding from earlier in the year:
In other polling news…
Selections news
A new Westminster selection to report on, this time Alice Delemare Tangpuori for Stockport. All the Westminster selections so far are listed here.
Meanwhile, Martin Tod has been selected for the new Hampshire and the Solent Mayor post and Ben Dempsey for the similarly new Sussex Mayor.
The latest Westminster constituencies to advertise selections are Kenilworth & Southam, Sheffield Hallam, York Outer, Farnham & Bordon and Spelthorne.
See all the Liberal Democrat Westminster PPCs selected and publicly announced so far here.
Council by-elections round-up
Council by-elections for principal authorities since last time have included a Lib Dem by-election gain from Labour in Keir Starmer’s backyard, the party seeing off Reform in Luton and also a gain from the Conservatives on Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council.
The net seats changes in those contests are Reform +4, Lib Dem +2, Green +/-0, Plaid +/-0, SNP +/-0, Independent/Others -1, Conservatives -1 and Labour -4.
This brings the total net seat changes since the last May local elections to Reform +34, Lib Dem +8, Green +3, Plaid +/-0, SNP +/-0, Independent/Others -7, Conservatives -13 and Labour -25. For more details, see my table of net seat changes since the last May local elections.
In other changes, a councillor has joined the Lib Dems in Trafford while in Dacorum a Lib Dem is now sitting as an independent following their suspension by the party.
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And finally…
Jennie wins the popular vote at the Westminster Dog of the Year awards.
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Thank you and best wishes,
Mark
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