One might have thought that the case of Christopher Lillie and Dawn Reed – recently awarded £200,000 each in libel damages against the authors of a local government report which made fantastic claims of child abuse – would sound a warning to the government to avoid joining the general hysteria about paedophilia. But not a
Usually, at this time of the year, I am wandering, or renting, in Western Europe. But, for various reasons too uninteresting to recount here, I am spending this August at home. This removes the one drawback of being on holiday abroad: the search, in la France profonde, or wherever, for the British newspapers; and the
In April the Daily Mirror relaunched itself as a more serious newspaper. Its editor, Piers Morgan, got rid of its red masthead. He hired supposedly upmarket writers such as John Pilger and Christopher Hitchens, and resurrected the famous Cassandra column. Mr Morgan invoked the name of Hugh Cudlipp, who edited the Daily Mirror in the
