Daily catch-up: when sheep grazed on Hyde Park and other curios
Plus the garden bridge is falling down, and advice for Jeremy Corbyn's staff
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Your support makes all the difference.A shepherd and his flock in Hyde Park, c.1934, by Wolf Suschitzky. Another lovely picture of old London from Sir William Davenant. Better than those tractor mowers.
• Nowadays our urban planners offer us such fake rurality as the "garden bridge" over the Thames. My colleague Jack Brown at King's College, London, and Queen Mary University of London writes to welcome the (metaphorical) collapse of that vanity project, and urges the new Mayor of London to spend the savings on a new east London river crossing instead.
• "Do not for one moment believe in what you hope for." John McTernan, who used to work for Tony Blair, offers unlikely but completely candid advice to Seumas Milne, the Guardian columnist who has joined Jeremy Corbyn as his head of strategy and communications. One day, the Labour Party might heed it.
Never neglect to think like a Tory – if your polling is right, and if it’s not why are you paying for it, then Cameron and Osborne are seeing similar figures. Harold Wilson would always interrupt Bob Worcester’s polling presentations with the simple question – ‘What will the Tories do with this?’ Plans disintegrate on contact with the enemy because they have plans of their own. Think through what they will be doing and plan to block or disrupt it.
Yesterday my colleague Andy McSmith reported on another remarkable Corbyn appointment, that of Andrew Fisher, a foul-mouthed Labour-hater, as head of policy.
• I reviewed Prime Minister's Questions yesterday. The old rowdiness is already coming back, and Corbyn's style of reading out rhetorical questions from emails has so far not troubled David Cameron greatly. One striking moment came when Iain Stewart, the Conservative MP for Milton Keynes South asked:
Given Russia’s military expansion and North Korea’s development of a submarine-launched ballistic missile system that can strike the west, does the Prime Minister agree that this is no time to campaign for nuclear disarmament?
The opposition benches were a picture, as Labour MPs tried to avoid looking at the Prime Minister, or at the Conservative side, or at their own leader, or at each other.
• And finally, thanks to Moose Allain for this:
"Once you start looking up the word 'slide' in the dictionary you'll find it's a slippery slope."
And to Matthew Sanger for this:
"Google 'eye-speculum'. You'll find it's an eye-opener."
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