Guardian

When Alan Rusbridger announced his departure from The Guardian, two questions presented themselves. The first was: who will succeed him? And the second — admittedly far less interesting — was: which Oxbridge college will he end up dumped in? The answer, we now learn, is Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford. Lucky old them. It’s a sign of the phenomenon which The Spectator’s Peter Oborne outlined: the inexorable rise of the media and political classes. Rusbridger is no academic — he was a chorister at fee-paying Cranleigh School and then he read English Literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge. But aside from that, he’s spent most of his life on Fleet Street. But it

Alan Rusbridger’s announcement that he will stand down in summer 2015 as Guardian editor after 20 years has fired the starting gun on one very long succession battle. Current online boss Janine Gibson is a firm favourite with Kath Viner the struggling US editor not far behind. Other wannabes include Jonathan Freedland –  the newly anointed head of comment – Emily Wilson from Guardian Oz and Deputy Editor Paul Johnson, if he is interested. Mr S would tip Political Editor Patrick Wintour, a journalist with a solid pedigree, as the dark horse. Former deputy editor Ian Katz would have once upon a time been top of this list, but his departure to

I have the honour of having my Ch4 Dispatches documentary, now available online, reviewed by Michael White in the Guardian today. I think he was expecting me to lay into Labour, and critiques the show as if I did. In general, I seem to be charged with being in possession of opinions about inequality while being right-wing. I plead guilty, but would still like to offer up a few points in mitigation. First, let’s take the original headline of his piece: ‘Fraser Nelson’s Dispatches show blames Labour for inequality.’ I don’t. As I say right at the start: ‘Decades of government policy intended to help the poorest is now hurting them instead.’ Blame lies with all

The furore over Jonathan Jones’s criticism of ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’ (or the Tower of London poppies, as they’re more familiarly known) has been both understandable and unsurprising, an early foray in what promises to be a four-year-long argument over how best to commemorate the dead of the First World War. Jones’s article caused outrage by condemning the memorial as ‘prettified and toothless’, symptomatic of ‘the inward-looking mood that lets Ukip thrive’. It didn’t help that the original article (Jones has since published a further defence of his position) gave a supercilious and rather unpleasant account of the people who had come to see the installation: loftily, Jones

This is an extract from Hugo Rifkind’s column in this week’s Spectator, out on Thursday Poor Julian Assange. Call me a contrarian but I’m genuinely starting to feel sorry for the guy. He’s just made such a mess of his life, hasn’t he? And with such promise. Only a few short years ago he was the world’s most prominent anti-everything activist, with hair like an indie guitarist, feted and worshipped wherever you might find hot Scandinavian revolutionaries, smug old men who work for ‘theguardian’ and Jemima Khan. Now he’s a hermit with hair like Noel Edmonds who lives in a cupboard. It’s a hell of a fall. Most crushingly, he’s

‘Richard Dawkins, what on earth happened to you?’ asks Eleanor Robertson in the Guardian today. Ms Robertson is a ‘feminist and writer living in Sydney’. She follows to the letter the Guardian’s revised style guide for writing about Prof Dawkins: wring your hands until your fingers are raw, while muttering ‘Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown’. For some time now Dawkins has been saying rude things about Muslims and feminists. This makes him a bigot in the eyes of the Left — and especially the Guardian, which is extraordinarily and mysteriously protective of Islam. As Robertson puts it: ‘Sure, he wrote some pop science books back in the

Zero-hours contracts: refuse to work with one, and you might lose your benefits. To the Left, it’s preeminent proof of the Coalition’s malevolence, a brightly blazoned slave contract clutched in a cold Tory fist. So it’s no wonder that the lefty press has seized upon Beyond Caring, Alexander Zeldin’s new play about the invisible working poor, as one big ‘fuck this Government, basically‘. The Guardian starts its puff-preview with a reminder that ‘16 per cent don’t get the hours they need to make ends meet and one-in-four would like more work‘ (we hear little about the other 84 per cent). The original report from which the Guardian selectively quotes in fact concluded that ‘zero-hours