You'll have noticed that this blog has hardly been updated for the past few weeks. That's because I am about to start as Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, and I have been winding other things down and preparing to take over.
I've had this blog for eighteen months, and it's been - for me, at least - wonderful. I could not have wished for a better host than the team at the Spectator, who never once interfered with anything other than positive suggestions. James Forsyth and Pete Hoskin are stars, both.
I first started blogging in May 2002, before I had heard of the word. I simply put all my newspaper pieces up on a site, and started to add little posts. Soon it became a habit.
And I have loved every minute of it since. (Well, almost.) And although this blog will be stopping, that won't be the end of my life as a blogger. I will be blogging from next week - all being well technologically - at the JC's site. The address will be www.thejc.com/stephenpollard
I hope that you'll find that although the blog's style will be rather different, it'll still be worth a visit.
Thanks for reading me here, and I hope the Spectator blogs go from strength to strength.
There's an aspect to the West Wing vs 24 theme which Matt explores which he's missed out. And it's important. It's the real reason why Americans felt comfortable voting for Barack Obama.
There's already been a black President. This man (and his brother, of course).
UPDATE: Er, do I really have to say I am joking? Yes, I know it's fiction.
You should read this. It's an article of remarkable foresight by Christopher Caldwell, entitled The Southern Captivity of the GOP. Today, the GOP is a shadow of its former self, a Southern rump.
If you want to understand what is happening in the US underneath the surface, my advice is to read the above article, and almost anything by Ruy Texeira.
Simon Heffer's colums might be an acquired taste, but his internal Telegraph emails are always something to be savoured. Here's a samizdat copy of today's, which is a treat:
(UPDATE: Ouch, what a howler. I meant columns. Mea culpa.)
Dear Colleagues It should perhaps make us feel better about the mistakes that we all make in our use of English that the new leader of the free world, Barack Obama, managed to slip up in his victory speech in Chicago in the small hours of Wednesday morning. He spoke of the "enormity" of the task facing his country. If you don't know why he was wrong, please do feel free to look the word up in the nearest dictionary.
While these notes attempt to be entertaining, there must be a brief lapse into seriousness. We appear to have had an avalanche of errors online in the last fortnight. This seems to be because of the fundamental failure of writers and their line managers to read back what has been written before posting it. This has to stop. Proper preparation of a piece of journalism is fundamental to what we do, and no piece is so urgent that it cannot be read properly. The readers have all the time in the world to do so, and they write to us in contemptuous terms about it when we get things wrong. WIthout them we are all out of work, so it is a good principle to try to retain their respect. There have also been some bad mistakes in the paper, for which there is even less excuse.
Carelessness would seem to account for much of what we get wrong: such as when reporting a footballer proclaiming total support for his manager, who said the players were "10 per cent behind him". No wonder he lost his job within days. We had a headline on a story saying that Marks and Spencer's sales were down 45 per cent, and then only a few words into the story itself it was disclosed that it was actually their profits that were down, and by 44 per cent. Younger readers please note: it has, over the years, proved a reasonable rule that the headline should reflect what is in the story.
Then there is a chronic problem with missing words: "Mr Osborne and his spent a fortnight...." and "Mr Obama, his wife and two". We managed to have the word "Brzail" in a headline. We also told our readers that "if you sleep with dogs you get flees", and that they could connect things to a computer with a UBS cable. Russell Brand, who presumably has enough problems as it is, was described as not "descent". We had a report of how something "terrifys" something else, and how there were "peels of thunder". We seem to have become rather free with our apostrophes: we wrote about "the Tamil Tiger's" when we meant more than one, and how something "change's its name". We wrote that "the flight was had been scheduled", which seemed somewhat belt and braces, and that someone "seems let to loose" something. Principle and principal mean different things. Passed is not an alternative spelling of past. This week's prize, however, goes to the report of a cook who "with a flourish....places the ready-made meal with suede and carrots into the microwave". I think we shan't go there for dinner.
We have also managed a slew of factual errors. These too must stop, or else people will stop trusting us. We have a superb reputation for quality and we should all be quite keen to maintain it. Some of our errors have been a little esoteric (we should all be glad to know that the men who supplied the voices for Pinky and Perky were Michael John and Charles Young respectively: please note the cultural resonance) but others are just plain silly. Could there really be an MP - even a Liberal Democrat - called Normal Baker? How difficult is it to check that the currency of Japan is the yen and not the yuan (though one might legitimately consider this to be general knowledge). Miss Moneypenny was M's secretary, not James Bond's. Slovakia was not in Yugoslavia. Humberside does not exist. Shiplake is in Oxfordshire. Kansas City is in Missouri. British Columbia is in Canada, not the United States. J Sheekey, the world-famous fish restaurant off the Charing Cross Road, is not a sushi bar, any more than the Savoy Grill is a branch of Burger King. The clocks go back in the autumn and forward in the spring in the Northern Hemisphere. A transsexual man has had a female-to-male process, not the other way round. Harper Lee was not a man, not at any point in her life.
It is one thing for facts to be wrong, another for them to be absent altogether. We had a story about a flight from Glasgow that had skidded off a runway when landing. We did not think it important to tell the readers where it had landed, leaving some of them with holidaymaking relatives in Glasgow concerned for their safety.
The application of logic is often helpful in writing. We used the phrase "completely stop". How can something incompletely stop? It has either stopped or it hasn't. We had a story about Lucian Freud's unfinished portrait of Francis Bacon that we announced was completed in 1967. Oh really? We are not paying attention to sequence of tenses. In reported speech, things are in the past or pluperfect tense, and they stay there rather than hopping about to the present. Again, careful reading and the application of sense should make this clear.
Finally, and for the avoidance of doubt, the man who "misspoke" the word enormity is to be referred to as President-Elect Obama until his inauguration on 20 January. Senator Joe Biden is now Vice-President-Elect Biden. John McCain is history.
Tomorrow the Employment Bill reaches its final stages in the House of Commons. Section 18 of the original Bill would have allowed trade unions to exclude members of the British National Party and other racists. The Bill that will be presented to MPs tomorrow, however, has a very different version - one that would achieve the precise opposite of the Bill's initial intent. The House of Lords altered it so greatly that it now protects BNP members' union membership. Tomorrow Labour MPs will propose an amendment to restore the original section allowing unions to expel BNP members.
This is not, as it has been presented, a question of trade union rights. Rather, the issue at stake is the very notion of freedom of association. It is in everyone's interest - even, counterintuitively, that of BNP members - that the amendment succeeds, and unions are permitted to decide who may or may not join them.
In law, trade unions ought to have no greater rights than any other bodies. But nor should they, in their internal affairs, have any greater responsibilities. The law should step in only when a private body acts in a way that affects the rest of us.
When unions chose not to ballot members on strike action, the law rightly stepped in. But it ought to be no concern of the State how a union structures its private affairs. If it decides to allow membership only to workers who live in Lancashire, that should be its business alone; it is not the State's role to tell it to offer membership to workers in Yorkshire, too. Similarly, the State should not tell unions that they must allow BNP members to join.
But if it is right that unions should, as private members' organisations, be able to decide for themselves if they wish to include members of the BNP, the same should apply to all other private bodies. If a group of women want to set up a women-only lunch society, the law should not dictate that membership must also be open to men, and vice versa - so long as those groups are private bodies whose activities have no significant impact on the rest of us.
As it stands, the Employment Bill's protection of BNP members' right to union membership is another extension of state interference in freedom of association. Were the BNP a more serious organisation, it would see that this could threaten its own existence. Repellent as the BNP may be, racists too have a right to gather together. Their behaviour should only concern the law when it impacts on others.
All MPs who care about freedom of association - whether it extends to unions, clubs or racist parties - ought to support the proposed amendment to the Bill tomorrow.
y been a black President. 
