Helen

The London Mayoral election (oh and the Assembly, too)

by

Does anyone on the other side of the Pond care about the Greater London Authority (GLA) elections that we have just had? Actually, not that many people care on this side of the Pond either and even in London the turn-out, much trumpeted by the media as being spectacularly high, was merely 45.30%, exactly the same as it was in 2008 when Boris Johnson was first elected to be Mayor. As I explained some years ago, the Mayor of London is not the same as the Lord Mayor, a position of many centuries’ standing in the City. So, more than half of London’s electorate did not bother to vote, possibly because the Mayor does not have a great deal of power and the Assembly has none or possibly because all the candidates were paralyzingly dull.

Nevertheless, Sadiq Khan’s election is a significant event in British political history: we have had Muslims in Parliament and even one or two in the Cabinet (the Conservative one, naturally); there are many Muslims in local councils and that tale has not been particularly happy. But this is the first time a supposedly practising Muslim has been elected to a reasonably high position.

The excitement about him getting the highest number of direct votes of any British politician in British history is humbug. There are no other places as large as London where direct votes are cast in our system. Altogether Sadiq Khan got 1,310,143 votes; in 2008, with the same turn-out, Boris Johnson got 1,168,738 votes, undoubtedly the highest number at the time of what any British politician had got in a direct vote. I do not recall anybody mentioning this.

I wrote a blog on the subject and some of CBz readers might be interested in reading it.

News from our battlefront

by

There really is very little I can say about the Paris events (the word les événements might acquire a new meaning now and, perhaps, we shall all get over that nonsense of 1968) and their aftermath, particularly as it is still not clear what will happen in the medium and long term. But I thought readers of Chicagoboyz might be interested by news of our own battlefront or, at least, some of it.

I have put up two postings on my blog about debates in the House of Lords where all the interesting political stuff happens: one was the Second Reading of Baroness Cox’s Private Member’s Bill, whose aim is the abolition of Sharia courts, which the Home Secretary, Theresa May, has finally acknowledged as a danger and the other is about a somewhat more idiosyncratic campaign conducted by the Lord Pearson of Rannoch (the word idiosyncratic was invented to describe him) to open up a wider dialogue about Islam. I realize that some of the terminology I use is not always clear to people outside Britain but I shall be happy to answer questions.

And now for something completely different

by

I say quite unashamedly that I am a detective story fan and something of a geek as well. I like British and American detective stories of every age (well, obviously not all) and get extremely angry when I see ridiculous comments made by people who have clearly not read much in the genre. No, not all British novels are cosy and not all American ones are tough; and no, Christie did not write silly mystery stories about country houses, which figure very rarely in her works; and yes, there were a good many excellent male detective story writers in the Golden Age on both sides of the Atlantic as well as a number of women thriller writers.

Luckily for me, there are other fans and geeks on Facebook and we have great discussions. Good thing like blogs, collections of essays and conferences grow out of those discussions or around them. Recently it was suggested by Curtis J. Evans that we should have a Tuesday Night Club to imitate the first Miss Marple stories. Several of us posted five Tuesday Night (or, in my case, sometimes Wednesday morning or afternoon) blogs about Christie. The link to Curt’s blog will lead you to all the other bloggers who took part in this enterprise but I thought that just for fun I shall post the links to my blogs here.And you must admit that is a very different them from my usual ones as well as a much happier one.

My first posting, on September 29, was about Miss Marple’s somewhat mysterious nephew, Raymond West and I think I really succeeded in unravelling certain puzzling aspects of his life and relationship with his aunt.

Then, on October 6, I wrote about Christie’s excellent understanding of social changes in Britain during and after the Second World War as well as her attitude to servants, very different from the way it is characterized by people who have heard of her novels but not read all that many of them.

Then I took one Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, who appear in four novels and a collection of short stories. In my opinion, two of the novels are quite good, one passable and the last one is a complete mess. The collection of short stories, Partners in Crime, remains one of my favourites for reasons of entertainment rather than superior detection. On October 14 I wrote about the Beresfords in general and on October 21 I dealt with the Beresfords’ reading matter, which reflected Christie’s own to some extent and revealed some interesting facts.

My last posting as part of the Tuesday Night Club on October 27 was about archaeologists in Christie’s work. She knew a great deal about them, having married one and having accompanied him to a number of digs in Iraq and Syria where she took part in the work of uncovering the past. I have to admit to an egregious error: I omitted Signor Richetti (Death on the Nile) from my list of fake archaeologists.

It has been suggested that the Tuesday Night Club carries on with blogs about Ellery Queen, a seminal figure in crime writing, particularly in the US. I have read a number of the novels and short stories but have never been able to work out much enthusiasm for them, considering the atmosphere too hysterical, the character of Ellery too annoying and that of his father Richard, a New York police inspector, too stupid. I may sit the whole month out. Certainly, I have no time to do a posting this coming Tuesday but when I have read what my colleagues have written I may well think of something to say. In the meantime, have fun with Agatha Christie whose 125th birthday we are celebrating this year.

We now have a Labour Leader and a Deputy Leader

by

Woop-de-doo! We have a Labour Leader and a Deputy, Jeremy Corbyn and Tom Watson, so the Tom and Jerry jokes have begun. At the moment nobody has the slightest idea what the new Leader’s policies are as he has never had any before and has not, in fact, had much of a political career. We wait with bated breath but as I have written in my latest posting on Your Freedom And Ours, at least his waffle about the European Union does not indicate any support for Brexit. That would be disastrous as we would lose many votes in the referendum.