Congratulations to Robin and Dave H, who are the winners of last week’s quiz. They each identified a total of seventeen former Cabinet ministers, no longer in the Commons, who are not members of the Lords.
This week’s quiz relates to the background of members. Even when the Lords Temporal were all hereditary peers, not all members were wealthy. The introduction of life peerages has enabled people from a diversity of backgrounds to be ennobled. A good number are drawn from modest origins. Some have written about their backgrounds in their autobiographies. This week’s challenge is to identify them. As usual, the first two readers to supply the correct answers will be the winners.
1. As I wrote in my autobiography, ‘My first job after leaving school was working at Bickers, Dewsbury’s top department store, where they sold everything… Bickers took me on at a wage of one pound a week and gave me a ten-shilling (fifty-pence) rise as soon as I arrived…. Later I joined a teenage jazz band called the Swing Stars… I sang and tap-danced, and what I lacked in polish I made up for in exuberance and cosmetics.’ I later sat in the House of Commons for 27 years. I sit in the Lords as a cross-bencher. Who am I?
2. As I wrote in my autobiography, much of my childhood was spent in a house called Waverley. ‘In fact the house was a slum even before we occupied it, condemned as unfit for human habitation by the council on the eve of war… There was no bathroom… Beside the kitchen door was the lavatory. To flush it required a bowl of water carried from the tap, which when small I found quite heavy.’ I later became an academic and a prime ministerial adviser. I also served as a minister in the Lords. Who am I?
3. As I wrote in my book about parliamentary life, ‘I made up my mind to be an MP at the age of 13… Firm on this point – unswerving, even – I nonetheless kept my momentous ambition to myself for years: one casual mention of it to my scoffing brothers saw to that. Actually, I don’t think I ever revealed it again until my husband proposed. I thought it only fair to tell him. Not that he believed me, of course, any more than my brothers had done years previously. It hardly looked likely to happen: I had no money, no useful connections and no politics in the family. I had been born over a grocer’s shop – which at the time didn’t look a promising start.’ I went on to become an MP for 31 years before joining the House of Lords in 1997. Who am I?
The first one is a former speaker of the House of Commons whose initials were BB then. I am not sure I will have a chance to complete an entry but before I step out…
Nancy Pelosi our current Speaker of the House is our first female I believe in the USA.
I think I’m a bit late this week!
1. Baroness Boothroyd
2. Lord Donoughue???
3. Baroness Knight of Collingtree
1. Betty Boothroyd
2. Andrew Adonis
3. Margaret Thatcher
Lord Norton, the Quiz might be interesting, and might have a strong following;
but is it any real help to The Peoples’ vital and democratic mind-functional needs ?
We need enablement to communicate with British Governance; and thereto to become able to identify falsehoods and to work cooperatively to remove them from whatever governancial, including from citizen-to-government, communications that may be containing and concealing fallacious content either within its internal context or in externally-relevant but fallacious Context.
I feel absolutely sure that you alone could design and present a progressive online ‘Participatory Citizen’s Thinking and Falsehood-spotting Course’, but I suspect that such a radical-reform would need a fairly solid number of supporters from across the Peerage ?
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‘Summarised’: I believe there is plenty of room for more serious extensions of your simple weekly “quiz” to become far more outreachingly interesting and instructive in Thinking, Scrutiny, and Constructive-suggestion-writing skills, for every level of The People (or if you must, of “the public”).
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(JSDM0207M13Sep10)
JSDM: I am keen to encourage the creation of a side bar on the blog that invites readers comments and suggestions, so that we can find out what the concerns of readers are and also respond to queries. At the moment, our comments are driven by what interests us and what we think may interest readers.
Thank you, Lord Norton, for dialoguing the wider, deeper, and more-generic proposal for ‘citizenship-enablement & education’ that I felt it needy and appropriate to submit to your “Weekly Quiz blog.
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The essential spirit of Clarity, Charity, and Self-Correction must now wait whilst one or two immediate pieces, in Lord Norton’s postings, of fallaciousness or even of possibly deliberate ‘crooked thinking’, are dealt with or at least identified and labelled.
1. JSDM’s submitted argument is that:
British peoples at every level need, and should be high-priority and long-term provided with, easily-affordable progressive citizenship education and skilling in Thinking, Scrutiny, and Constructive-suggestion-writing, by the British Empowerment namely the Parliaments.
Lord Norton substituted for that positively- constructive submission his and all the other Peers’ already longstanding but flawed and self-centred career-interest for “ a side bar on the (Lord’s) blog, that invites readers comments and suggestions” for the sole purpose of further empowering ourselves the Lords to find out what readers’ concerns are, and to respond to their queries.
NO specific acknowledgement of nor response to the citizen’s true submission;
NO recognition of the Peoples’ needs.
ONLY complete avoidance and the usurping insertion of his own and all other Peers’ “interests” plus whatever parts of the Peers’ careers or lifestyles The Peers “think” may “interest” us the readers.
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2. When it comes to detailing such fallacious argumentation and lack of honest-governance intent, in the cool light of the three principles of good-communication and clear-reasoning, we shall see that
It fails under each of those three principles:
1. Clarity (under which it even fails to provide the most basic and adequately succinct of definitions);
2. Charity (under which it fails to show true comprehension of the submitted-argument and even fails to select any part of the submitted argument that may be valid, strongly true, or of constructive-relevance);
3. Self-Correction (under which among other self-correction failures it fails to state (confess) a necessary relevant opening-truth about the peer-blogger:
in this instance Lord Norton should have commenced his reply to JSDM somesuch as
“Quite apart from the matter you have submitted, I am keen to encourage a side bar…but the Lords are self-driven by what interests us, and by whatever parts of our careers or lives we think may interest you readers”.
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It does not look at all noble, nor even nice, Ladies and Lords, when an expert professor of a thinking Science
and acclaimed leaderful House of Lords sitting peer-of-realm, continues coming up with such personal, professional, governance, and Earth-citizenship failures.
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One such as JSDM should be able to claim an equivalent to parliamentary “absolute-privilege” in such democratic-issues as these; but as far as I can see JSDM stands alone, isolated, defenceless, and totally vulnerable.
Why else would such a Noble Lord have ignored JSDM’s previous pleas and submissions throughout the Lords of the Blog blogs if not because the Peerage as a class thinks itself protected and us the impecunious and disempowered people to be exploitable, manipulable, liquidatable by dead of night, or just plain ‘to be professionally tolerated’ ?
(Readers new to JSDM may find considerable background and authoritative-sources in his previous submissions since he discovered the Lords of the Blog in May 2010).
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JSDM1155T14Sep10.
Congratulations to Frank Wynerth Summers III for being the first to provide the correct answer to the first question. It is indeed the first female Speaker of the House of Commons, Betty (now Baroness) Boothroyd.
The principal congratulations go, though, to Emmy, who is this week’s only prize winner. She correctly supplies all three correct answers: former Labour MP and now cross-bench peer Baroness Boothroyd, former adviser in No. 10 Lord Donoughue, and former Conservative MP and now Conservative peer Baroness Knight of Collingtree.
Frank Young correctly indentified Betty Boothroyd; I can see why he offered Andrew Adonis and Margaret Thatcher as the other two possible answers – though I doubt if Margaret Thatcher would have kept her ambitions to herself quite to the extent that Jill Knight did!
Well done Emmy – I had a quick look this morning and only thought of BB. Sadly David Beamish’s peerage site seems down which is going to make this quiz that bit harder…
Wow, Thanks! Lord Donoughue really was a stab in the dark. I managed to pick up a copy of the other two books earlier this year and was lucky enough to have Lady Knight herself sign it and write me a lovely message in the front.
For those unfamiliar with the works cited, I should add that Betty Boothroyd’s book is Betty Boothroyd: The Autobiography, published by Century in 2001; Bernard Donoughue’s is The Heat of the Kitchen, published by Politico’s in 2003; and Jill Knight’s is About the House, published by Churchill Press in 1995.