Shots of a different kind were fired when news emerged that as a young wife and mother Lindsay had been among several women competing for the affections of Andrew Parker Bowles, then a dashing brigadier, before he and Camilla Shand (now the Queen) married in 1973.
Parker Bowles was indeed very posh but he was not a Brigadier at 34. He was a Major of course.
Sigh.
Now to check my memory. Didn’t she star – with husband, John Alderton – in a series of comic plays for TV? I have in the memory that they did a series based upon Wodehouse short stories. That me AI hallucinating or real?
Her friendships with the future Queen Camilla and Major Ronald Ferguson were much reported, as was her row with her friend Princess Michael of Kent when Cooper wrote an article about her that appeared under the headline “The Pushy Princess”. Princess Michael sent her 30 pieces of silver — 5p coins. Leo put the money on a horse and won, and sent some of the winnings to the princess “as I know you are a bit short”.
A world expert on ancient fermented beverages, McGovern was perhaps an unlikely ambassador for prehistoric booze: Dr Pat, as he was known, sported an excessively bushy beard, a thatch of white hair, an array of cardigans and large wire spectacles. He was proper and polite, the epitome of the respectable professor.
It’s every Camra member ever, isn’t it?
Assata Shakur, an icon of Black liberation who was exiled to Cuba, dies aged 78
Shakur spent decades exiled after she was convicted of killing a state trooper in 1977 and escaped from prison
Exiled – in my book at least – would mean that the US Govt had stated “You may not live here” and told her she was thrown out.
Acshully, she was on the run from righteous justice. Which ain’t exile.
Peter Gurney MBE, GM and Bar, explosives expert,
Still with the Met eight years later, Gurney was called to a London shopping centre in which a fellow officer had been killed while attempting to defuse an IRA bomb. Hardly had he examined the body to see how the device had exploded, when he was called to a nearby store where a bomb had been found in a lavatory. On examining it he knew that it had the same triggering mechanism that had led to the death of his colleague. Carefully he dismantled the trigger device and then the bomb, discovering that both mechanisms were in working order. His cold courage on this occasion was recognised by the award of a bar to his George Medal.
On the morning of February 7, 1991, Gurney was involved in dealing with one of London’s most high-profile attacks carried out by the IRA. At 10.08am a picture fell from the wall of his Cannon Row police station office and he heard the crump of a nearby explosion. Jumping into his Land Rover, he drove into Whitehall to see a white transit van parked opposite the Cabinet Office building at an angle to the kerb and burning furiously. Three shells had been fired at 10 Downing Street from tubes mounted inside the van. A television camera caught him waving his arms to indicate the 200 by 400 yards area to be cleared in case any further bombs remained.
No sooner had he given these instructions than he was told that one bomb had exploded in the garden of No 10 and two more lay on Treasury Green. They were six inches in diameter and four feet long. Unable to call up his equipment as the buildings blocked his radio signal, he pushed the end of a twig through a small hole in the casing of one to fix the sliding striker in position, then began to unbolt the fuze with a spanner borrowed from the prime minister’s boiler room. While sitting astride one bomb, he was suddenly conscious of an intense heat through fire-resistant trousers. As he delicately put it in his autobiography Braver Men Walk Away, he suddenly realised if he didn’t do something quickly he would never again sing anything other than soprano. He scooped up a handful of snow from a nearby drift into his trousers.
Peter de la Billiere has talked of the different between hot courage and cold. There’s something so damned English about this example of cold – the twig, the smoking trousers, the spanner borrowed from the PM, and yet the massive brass balls, proper ton weight cojones, to do this for the modest living either the military or the police provide.
Top bloke.
The practice of promoting the CDS to “five stars” had been discontinued as inappropriate for the downsized forces and Guthrie would have to wait a full 15 years until receiving his field marshal’s baton, and then only in honorary rank.
Indeed, at first he was told he would have to buy rather than receive his baton. “Spink & Son can make you one,” said the Queen’s private secretary. Guthrie discovered that a new baton would set him back £75,000. Fortunately, not long afterwards he met Prince Philip on another matter and mentioned that the cost of a baton was pretty steep. “Oh, I’m sure there must be a few lying around somewhere,” replied his erstwhile colonel, himself an honorary field marshal. A few days later Prince Philip’s private secretary rang to say that one had been found in an attic and the Palace was quite happy for him to have it.
We’ve depreciated the blogroll. Many of the sites are dead and / or not updated.
We are looking to revive this, so please comment away with the blogs, twitter accounts or sites you feel would fit well and we’ll add them to the new ‘To be seen” column (aka blogroll)
Tim & Rich
There were, of course, the Bargepole columns. And this sounds like something from either him of Douglas Adams – possibly even Alan Coren who he worked for:
Michael Bywater was born in 1953 in Nottingham, the son of Jean, a teacher, and Keith Bywater, a doctor, although his biological father was Bertold Wiesner, an Austrian-born physiologist who ran Britain’s first and highly controversial fertility clinic, through which he fathered several hundred children with his own sperm.
Back when I was starting to try to write – 2004/5 sort of time – he was rather kind to me. Encouraging etc. Which, from one towering in the craft to a minion is, I think, rather fine. Had me as a speaker at a conference about Pepys for example, were blogs like diaries (no, a commonplace book)? Occasional emails over the years. We’re not talking mentor here but nice of him to encourage.
And damn, I did like those Bargepole columns. Which I did indeed say to him and he looked rather embarrassed at my enthusiasm.
To me, a nice chap, and there’s no higher praise than that now, is there?
Dame Steve Shirley obituary: From Kindertransport to the Rich List
Vale.
At a dance at Ilford Palais in 1958, Lazarus met Fay Ray and they married a few months later. They had a daughter, Rena, and a son, Nicky.
From the obit of Mark Lazarus
James Whale, the veteran broadcaster known for his combative on-air style and pioneering work in late-night radio and TV, has died aged 74 following a long battle with kidney cancer.
Whale, whose broadcasting career spanned five decades, was one of British radio’s most controversial and enduring voices. His death was confirmed on August 4, 2025, by TalkTV, where he hosted The James Whale Show until shortly before his passing. He had publicly shared his terminal diagnosis in 2020 and continued to broadcast while receiving treatment, describing radio as “his life’s medicine.”
Born Michael James Whale in Surrey in 1951, he first rose to prominence in the 1980s with The James Whale Radio Show on Metro Radio in Newcastle before achieving national fame with his late-night ITV television show of the same name. Known for his brusque style, anti-PC rants, and no-nonsense interviews, Whale helped pioneer the “shock jock” format in the UK—years before it became widespread.
His voice became a familiar fixture on TalkSport and later TalkRADIO (now TalkTV), where he built a loyal audience who tuned in for his candid takes on politics, social change, and current affairs. Whale was an avowed libertarian and a vocal critic of what he saw as “woke culture,” though he also displayed moments of surprising vulnerability—particularly when discussing his health and personal losses.
Reacting to his death, Nigel Farage, who interviewed Whale in one of his final public appearances, called him a “legendary broadcaster,” saying:
“James was fearless, funny, and fiercely independent. He was one of the true originals of British broadcasting—never afraid to speak his mind. We have lost a giant.”
Whale was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2000, which led to the removal of one kidney. In 2020, he announced that the cancer had returned and spread to his brain, spine, and lungs. Despite this, he remained active on air and online, determined to work until the very end.
He is survived by his second wife, Nadine, and two sons. His first wife, Melinda, died in 2018.
Whale once said:
“I don’t care if people agree with me—I care that they think. That’s what broadcasting is about.”
James Whale may have divided opinion, but he never went unheard. In an age of increasingly curated voices, his raw candour and irreverence ensured that he remained unforgettable.
As luck would have it, this dismal effort helped Giaever to secure a job at a renowned GE industrial laboratory near Albany, the New York state capital. Eyeing his grades, the personnel director exclaimed: “I see you have 4.0 in both physics and mathematics, you must have been a very good student!” Giaever wisely neglected to mention that the grading system in Norway worked in the opposite direction to the US, meaning that 4.0 was the lowest pass mark rather than the top grade it signalled in American schools.
So, Tom Lehrer’s gone. Well, at 97 hardly a surprise but still.
Oddly, the Times obit makes no mention of his work for Electric Company. “Silent E” and so on. Ho well, mebbe more an American thing.
He also turned up to a meeting over dinner with the boss of his record company in Germany so wasted that he climbed on the table, disrobed to do a naked goose-step and concluded the performance by urinating in the chief executive’s wine glass.
Haven’t well wanted to do that?
Vale.
Heh:
He later studied creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, before starting out as a journalist with the Press Association, a job he soon quit after falling asleep listening to the state budget.
Could happen to any of us.
Smith promptly resold Gorky Park to Random House for $1 million and then earned a further $1 million for the film rights.
Apart from the labyrinthine plot, the chief interest of the book lay in its detailed and utterly convincing picture of Moscow low life, of the seamy underworld of petty crooks and informers, dingy bars and the sleazy suburbs, and of the daily routine of the Moscow police force.
First read it when living there in 1990/1. Not far from Gorky Park in fact. The description of that underlife was ptich perfect. There’s one particular line/event. So, bird runs the sandwich bar inside the Intourist. One day she got a double delivery of bread. Ever since she’s been worried that perhaps there will be a day with no delivery. So, she keeps today’s bread back and makes the sandwiches out of yesterday’s. Always.
Sure, a throwaway line. But so, so Soviet.
He did, however, send me what is perhaps the greatest letter I have ever received. The programme was examining religious belief among politicians and I sent Norman a letter asking if he believed in a literal hell.
His reply, beautiful in its brevity, was this: “Dear Liddle. I do not know if Hell exists. But if it does, I trust that you will burn in it for eternity.”
However, his homosexuality came as no surprise to his family because, according to his daughter Lou, “he had brought us up on a diet of Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Barbra Streisand”.
In the event both were rescued. He said they were saved by Fred Bishop, a fireman, who told his team before rushing into the hotel: “Chaps, you know the rules. If that was a bomb we can’t go in until the bomb squad have cleared it of booby traps. I think it was a fire in the kitchen, don’t you?”
The IMF refused to change its rules and the role went to a Frenchwoman, Christine Lagarde, who was well connected politically but not a trained economist.
Even the technocratic roles get subsumed into politics at some point…..