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.....and probably a little advanced for a puzzle of Times Jumbo level of difficulty.

Related presidents supporting unwanted party's repeated growth?

For gooseberry bushes, the wordplay is the first part of the clue up to and including the word party's. So the definition then follows surely? So not an "&lit" ?

n00b26

I agree with you. I was looking for more depth to the definition, but there isn’t any.

I wondered about babies under gooseberry bushes, or even do they repeat on you when eaten. But, no, it’s just the plural of ‘growth’. I reckon the setter missed an opportunity here.

Yes it's hard to see what else the definition is aiming at... It's pretty meh isn't it.

GOOSEBERRY BUSHES seemed absolutely fine to me, the setter dealing with the plural nicely by using two related presidents and ‘repeated’ in the definition.
The idea that he/she missed an opportunity is a bit fanciful - the baby under a gooseberry bush wouldn’t have escaped them, and a setter has to reject a lot of ideas and settle on just one. The political/economic theme in the surface works well as it is.

Can anyone help with the parsing of 12 down Swedish house's fancy skirting boards shunned by foolish Britons? I have the answer as Riksdag ( Swedish parliament) but can't see where the rest of the clue comes in

I haven't written it out, but it looks like a subtractine anagram - skirtingboards - britons

Ah yes,a sneaky one but quite clever! Thank you so much

deslyxic

Gosh, I hadn’t imagined an opinion on a crossword clue could be so contentious!

This wasn’t an especially difficult clue, but when solved, the solver is asking ‘why gooseberry bushes’? If ‘repeated growth’ is the definition then what would differentiate gooseberry bushes from, say, leylandii hedges, orange trees, gladioli or warts? The solver looks back into the parsing to discover the differentiation, but it isn’t there. It’s missing. In my opinion, the ‘trick’ is missing.

Isn’t that what cryptic crosswords do? The wordplay leads fairly to gooseberry + bushes and the setter needs to find a creative but not unfair definition to match it because something straight such as ‘shrubs’ would make the surface reading nonsense. ‘Repeated growth’ in the sense of economic or political improvement matches the wordplay and can also be a creative description of the solution.
The fact that it applies to other things apart from gooseberry bushes is irrelevant.
Bloomer when dad gets extremely panicky (5)
Would you say, why not daisy or marigold or loaf or faux pas or rosacea? That’s more specific than the Times clue, but still the same principle as far as I can see.





Would you ask what would differentiate from a daisy or tulip or