Sunak’s Chief Whip on Kemi Badenoch: ‘a permanent state of outrage’
Simon, now Lord, Hart, was Rishi Sunak’s Chief Whip in the run-up to the 2024 General Election. His memoir of the period from 2019-24 is well worth a read. It’s called Ungovernable and while there are some Tory prejudices, most of the book details the absolute dysfunction of the final Tory years.
Below is a passage from 20th February 2024
Kemi Badenoch popped in for a chat about trans stuff- I try but I cannot find a mutually usable wavelength. She is another one who lives in a permanent state of outrage. It must be so tiring.
Christopher Hill. Failed Yorkshire cricketer, British Marxist Historian
A biography of the British Marxist Historian Christopher Hill(1912-2003) has long been awaited and Michael Braddick has now written one (Verso 2025).
There is a wealth of interesting information and some fascinating incidental detail.
The Hill family were from Yorkshire and fielded a family cricket team. Braddick notes that Hill’s ambition was to play cricket for Yorkshire. Hill told the historian Penny Corfield that ‘I practised and practised but I wasn’t any good’.
Hill became a leading of the Communist Party Historians Group, leaving in 1956 and the author of numbers of important works, informed by Marxism, on the English Revolutionary period from the 1640s to the 1660s. He was also Master of Balliol College Oxford
Perhaps Hill made a bigger longer term impact in this context than if he had become a left-wing version of Yorkshire batsman Geoffrey Boycott
What was Marlers Bar, Colney Hatch Lane, Muswell Hill, N10
Tim Martin at 71. Remembering the first ‘Wetherspoons’, Muswell Hill, 1979
Sir Tim Martin is 71 on 28th April. His name and the pub chain he founded, Wetherspoons, divides opinion, often strongly. His pro-Brexit views rankle as do, for me, the failure of his 800 strong pub chain to recognise a trade union. Nigel Farage often seems to be pictured in Spoons but this is just a ‘man of the people’ image he tries to promote. Farage may be pictured with a pint of beer but he is a fine wines man
Some years back I was intrigued by a tweet from beer bloggers and writers par excellence Boak and Bailey about the original Wetherspoons bar, known as Marlers, which was in Colney Hatch Lane, Muswell Hill N10.
They suggested, based on comments in the London Drinker, that it was a pub frequented by the trendy and charged robust prices. There is indeed a letter complaining about the prices, probably the first of many complaints about Spoons, in the CAMRA magazine London Drinker. Notable however because CAMRA has been a great supporter as Spoons is one place where you will reliably find cask ale.
My intrigue-ment was based on the fact that I used to drink in Marlers bar with friends and with my late father at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s. It was about a mile from my parent’s house which was in the Alexandra Park area of Muswell Hill.
How I heard about Marlers I can’t recall but probably via CAMRA (this was well before social media and mobiles).
As a research historian I’m wary of basing things on memory which is often a bit unreliable and prefer to check against printed sources.
The problem here is that as a source the interwebs are just as unreliable as memory.
My memory suggests that Marlers was a joint venture between Andrew Marler and Tim Martin. The officially approved version indicates that Marler was the original owner and then sold to Martin. That did not preclude Martin from having an interest previously of course but it is Marler I remember behind the bar.
What happened to Marler is mildly obscure though his record of owning the Worlds End in Camden Town and then a pub in Shepherds Bush is well known.
The interwebs indicate that in 2012 he was the owner of two pubs in the St Albans area, one of which, the Cross Keys, had been sold to him by Wetherspoons.
What of the beer in Marlers? My memory suggests that it was from regional brewers like Wadworths, Greene King and Ruddles that were then hardly available in London. CAMRA sources from the time concur. I thought I also recalled Sam Smiths but I might well be wrong..
A friend who I drank with in Marlers at the time, Mark Baker, recalls ‘it was quite exotic stuff for that part of the world at that time (i.e. it wasn’t Ind Coope or Courage!)’
It was certainly the case that Marlers was a shop conversion (more or less unheard of the time). It appears to have been a bookies. Before that the interweb suggests it was a private drinking club for footballers, One source says Spurs, another Arsenal. We can be sure it was not both but the pub is on the Arsenal side of Haringey so it was quite probably them.
The pub has long since ceased to be a Spoons anyway but the story has a, for most, happy ending.
Wetherspoons have returned to Muswell Hill, up the hill, just at the top of the hill itself. The Mossy Well is rather a handsome pub and were you in the area you could do worse than stop by. Possibly best not to mention the name Marler though.
I revisited this post following a social media discussion on what the first Wetherspoons pub to feature in the Good Beer Guide was. Of course in the late 1970s the pub was not badged as a Spoons. I’m fairly sure it eventually was but when that happened I’m not sure(of course!).
Certainly Wetherspoons started out in Haringey and Tim Martin (who was a lawyer) is on record as saying that a key reason was because there were no decent pubs where he then lived in Wood Green.
Mr Martin is not always right but on this he is absolutely correct. Unexciting as the range of beer in Marlers bar in the late 1970s might seem to us now, the best part of 50 years ago it would have been very easily the best real ale and hence the best beer range in Haringey as keg meant Twitbreads and Grotnys. Other alternatives included Courage Best (John Baird Muswell Hill) Ind Coope Burton bitter (Alexandra, St James Lane N10) and Bass and Charrington IPA (Railway Crouch End).
Tim Martin told Desert Island Discs (3rd December 2017) about the early days of Marlers Bar in Muswell Hill & about the expansion of Wetherspoons in North London:
Lord Glasman of Stoke Newington was the only British politician at Trump’s inauguration in January, as opposed to those who were just hanging around in Washington at the time such as Farage and Truss. He also appears to be friendly with Steve Bannon who is associated with what some might see as a proto-fascist wing of MAGA.
Below is an extract from the latest Blue Labour programme, publicised last week by the New Statesman.
It goes on full on Trump and the key figure in Blue Labour Lord Glasman is reputed to have the ear of Starmer’s key fixer Morgan McSweeney. It might be thought that it’s just another culture war but eliminating DEI also seriously undermines the still to be won fight for equal pay, to give one example.
We are proud of our multiracial democracy and we utterly reject divisive identity politics, which undermines the bonds of solidarity between those of different sexes, races and nationalities. We should legislate to root out DEI in hiring practices, sentencing decisions, and wherever else we find it in our public bodies.
In a lengthy piece in the Observer on 27th April 2025 Glasman came out with a line where ‘Reform’ rather than ‘Labour’ could easily be the first word.
Labour must be a pro-worker, patriotic party, not talking gibberish about diversity.”
He has now claimed that Labour would get a kicking from Reform in the Runcorn By-Election(Reform won by six votes). While Glasman clearly wants Labour to move even more to the right, he sounds more like someone who is thinking of forming a provisional wing of Reform
I’ve extracted this subset from a piece by Test Match Special Stats man Andy Zaltzman in the Observer (27th April).
As can be seen in the Bazball era England and Wales Men have the highest scoring rate of any Test playing country. Zaltzman points out its historically high.
What has it meant in terms of results?
England Men have won 22 Tests, lost 12 and drawn one between June 2022 and December 2024. As Zaltzman points out this is an historically unusual successful run over 35 matches. Recently however results have been more in the balance, won 11 lost 10, suggesting that Bazball had an initially huge impact tempered by other teams working out strategies to deal with it.
Work in progress. Hopefully Zaltzman will write regularly for the Observer
The New Observer ‘the enemy of nonsense’ but lacks really useful knowledge
The first edition of the Observer under the ownership of Tortoise appeared on 27th April.
I’ve been reading the paper since the 1960s. As the Editor in Chief James Harding notes it’s a ‘progressive, liberal and internationalist’ voice. I think that more or less sums up how I’ve seen the paper down the years. Not socialist or of the left but certainly not on the right. After all the media in the UK is predominantly on the right, hard right and far right. Reference GB News, the Telegraph, the Mail, the Excess etc etc.
Harding also quotes some longer thoughts from a previous Editor David Astor which revolve around liberal values (again there is a shortage of supply in the UK- liberal does not mean Liberal, think rather of a liberal education).
There are some interesting pieces. For example an article on the increasing noise in restaurants in the Food Monthly read well to me (perhaps Ed Davey could take action).
Was there any nonsense? Well unfortunately there was. Nick Clegg droning on about the EU and a lengthy and rather uncritical piece on Lord Glasman of Blue Labour who certainly does not stand for the values James Harding outlines.
In fact Harding notes that the Observer is the Sunday paper you can read all week. Indeed so, because it has the feel of a magazine as much as a paper.
The NUJ Chapel at the Guardian and Observer took strike action on the plan to sell the paper to Tortoise and Private Eye reports that only a minority of journalists transferred. Frankly it shows.
So really useful knowledge in the first issue (i.e insights into what ‘their side’ are up to- for that read the FT) is in short supply. Even so I hope the new Observer manages to continue because the great moving right show of the UK media is bad for democracy. On this evidence the Observer is not moving right. Its more or less where it has been in the seven decades I’ve been reading it.
When in Algiers in late April 1882 Marx decided to have his beard trimmed. He wrote to Engels about the experience on 28th April 1882. The photos mentioned are not extant. The well-known picture of Marx with trimmed facial hair is not genuine, or shall we say, an artist’s impression
Apropos; because of the sun, I have done away with my prophet’s beard and my crowning glory but (in deference to my daughters) had myself photographed before offering up my hair on the altar of an Algerian barber. I shall receive the photographs next Sunday (30 April). Specimina will be sent to you from Marseilles. On inspection you will observe that, CONSIDERING the 8 whole weeks (during which I did not in fact have one day of complete repose) of painting with collodion (after the manner of Ludwig of Bavaria), j’ai fait encore bonne mine à mauvais jeu.
Collodion was an early form of photography, while Ludwig of Bavaria was someone thought to have good looks. Marx is making the point that despite not sleeping well for eight weeks he didn’t look too bad
Marx’s decision to shave his beard was very likely related to wider health issues which had led him to stay in Algiers and then Monte Carlo. By late June 1882 he was in Paris.
On 28th June 1882 Engels wrote to Bebel:
For the past 3 weeks or so Marx has been staying with his daughter at Argenteuil near Paris, is said to be looking very well, brown as a real ‘Moor’ (this being his nickname, as you know)
Protests at and occasional attacks on abattoir’s happen. While the Archers seem to be focusing on Rochelle’s Veganism as a motor, in fact the protests and attacks have been provoked by very poor animal welfare conditions at the institutions in question. In one case that came to Court quite recently activists were acquitted on that basis.
The storyline from the BBC hasn’t provided much enlightenment though opinion may well be split amongst our readers as to whether Vince Casey is running a legit or dodgy outfit.
Commentary on the Archers chat boards is a bit hazy primarily because the BBC’s account of matters is not very well written, unusually so.
VE Day
Preparations continue. Leonard & Joy have climbed Lakey Hill to check if the paths are clear. They find that Daveed has erected posters warning dog owners to collect the droppings of their canine friends. Left uncollected they can cause harm to animals. For once Daveed has hit on a sensible cause not involving badgers or inheritance tax
Moving home
Tom and Natasha have finally moved into Beechwood, while Helen ponders…
May 1st Elections in England. Beware Ephology opinion polls
The late socialist historian E P Thompson wrote the following on opinion polls in the New Reasoner in 1959 (the NR went on to be part of New Left Review from 1960)
A psephologist is a man employed by the mass media to research into what people think the mass media has told them to think. An ephologist is a man employed by the ‘Observer’ or BBC to interpret the results of psephology and who makes an ephing good thing out of it
Opinion polls were still in their infancy 65 years ago and today regular updates from YouGov and other appear. While based on surveys of voters they can tell us little about what is actually happening on the ground in Constituencies.
Historically YouGov polls used to favour the Tories. However YouGov is now a significant commercial polling organisation and deliberately skewed political polls are bad for business.
Recently More in Common polls associated with Luke Tryl are often outliers, looking as if whatever questions are asked of respondents are designed to get not the most accurate results but the most eye catching ones
My prediction based on ad hoc polling in meetings, pubs and shops is that turnout will be low.
The last issue of the Observer published by the Guardian, the Scott Trust, was on 20th April. Above is the first issue of the paper now owned by Tortoise (the Guardian retains a stake).
To be fair it is a very powerful and striking image for the front page and just as in the Victorian era, the picture or image was as powerful as words, social media in 2025 has seen the return of the power of the image.
