Robert Buckland Weblog

I have had my face painted at last! The opportunity arose this afternoon at Millie and George’s Fifth Birthday Party, where there was lots of bouncy castle activity (forbidden to me, of course) and face painting. I went for a rather fetching tiger. See below…

My Godson Thomas now has Shrek for a [...]

Writing this entry is proving to be difficult, bearing in mind that my two children are celebrating their fifth birthday today and my eight month old Godson is beating hell out of the piano as I write.  There will be a party later, with much cake and e numbers.
I am glad to see that the [...]

A busy Thirty-Ninth Birthday. A few cards and presents, with special writing from George and lots of scribbles from Millicent. At lunchtime, I paid a visit to Goddard Avenue, an elegant Victorian road in Swindon’s Old Town, where the Swindon Climate Action Network (SCAN) were running a Streets For People event, which involved [...]

Apologies for the slight delay, but I am happy to report that the fourth meeting of the Swindon SEN Network went very well indeed.  Our guest speaker was solicitor and education law specialist Emma Turner.  Emma has recently set up her own practice dealing exclusively with this type of work, so we were lucky indeed.  [...]

This September sees several significant milestones in my life. Sian and I have just passed our Tenth wedding anniversary, which both of us find hard to believe. With almost perfect choreography, the children, who are both now at school, will be five later this month. I couldn’t get it quite to multiples [...]

The death of John Biffen came just before my holiday. His political life is a reminder that independence of mind and approach is a useful asset to a political party, and should not be shunned. His treatment at the hands of Bernard Ingham was disgraceful. I think that Sir Bernard regretted it [...]

Thanks to the good offices of Tim, my long-suffering webmaster, I am now able to upload more photographs to the blog. Here are two of my favourites:
This well-loved comic children’s character is standing with a large penguin who speaks Icelandic. I was even more excited than Millie and George when I [...]

Am I the only person to be surprised that it was none other than Stephen Sedley who has proposed a nationwide DNA database?  Sedley LJ’s credentials could hardly be described to be authoritarian, I had thought.  Whatever your views about such a database, there can be no doubt that the practical problems would be huge.
I [...]