Media

Index on Censorship, once home to the most important defenders of free speech in Britain, is falling apart. Seventeen full-time staff members in place when Kirsty Hughes, a former European Commission bureaucrat, took over as chief executive in 2012 have been fired or resigned. Among the recipients of redundancy notices are Padraig Reidy who was Index’s public face and its most thoughtful writer, and Michael Harris, who organised the lobbying to reform England’s repressive libel laws, the most successful free speech campaign since the fight to overturn the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the 1960s.  The board, headed by David Aaronovitch of the Times and filled with Matthew Parris

The Daily Mail has been holding habitués of the corridors of power to account for so long, it has decided that it deserves a corridor of its own. The Editors Hallway has just been unveiled in Northcliffe House, home of DMGT. It’s a sight to behold, complete with a Vegas-style lobby, pomegranate White Company candles and an all-male line-up of editors since the 19th century. There’s even a picture of Mrs T in the ladies loo. Our only question is: if this is a hallway belonging to the editors, shouldn’t there be an apostrophe? Perhaps it’s an ironic joke about the Mail’s rigorous editing standards.

Some of the best journalists in Britain rarely, if ever, have their names in print. One of them is my colleague Peter Robins, the genius chief sub editor (or, technically, production editor) of The Spectator. In his Times column today (£), Matthew Parris has a story about Peter. Here it is: ‘If you sometimes feel you’re getting gobbledegook from this columnist you should realise how much worse gobbledegook you’d get were it not for that most self-effacing of species, the sub-editor. I blush to remember the errors from which this page’s subs have rescued me. But I believe The Spectator’s Peter Robins touched new heights last week when, after I

By way of a metaphor for the way the NHS and, come to that, the law regards foetuses, you can’t really better the reality, viz, that foetal remains from abortions and miscarriages are being incinerated in NHS hospitals and possibly used to heat that hospital. If a foetus lives less than 13 weeks, it could, in Addenbrooke’s Hospital, for instance, be used as fuel as part of the hospital’s waste-to-energy schemes. And 13 weeks is just over three months’ gestation – the point at which wanted foetuses register as recognisably human on the scans that prospective parents take home and show their friends. Meanwhile, the unwanted foetuses, or the ones

Just to ring the changes, I’ve written about the BBC and political correctness for the mag this week. Yeah, yeah, I know – you haven’t heard enough about that subject. But one of the writers of the 1970s situation comedy It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum has complained that aunty isn’t showing the series any more as a consequence of political correctness. My suspicion is that it isn’t being reshown because it was humourless unmitigated crap, but there we are. The bigger issue, though, is the one raised by the excellent (for a Blairite) Dan Hodges. As it happens, I was invited onto this show and now wish I had accepted.

Every year the Budget comes and goes, amid a flurry of live blogging and urgent blog posts at The Spectator. And almost every year, the papers are full of the minutiae which make for entertaining headlines. So this year, I say: Please, no more pasty taxes.  They just lead to days and days of stupid headlines, which might be fun (for the first hour), but simply end up detracting from the more serious announcements; or rather, the ones that will actually affect most taxpayers. Anyway, moving on. For selfish reasons, I am entirely in favour of raising the basic income tax threshold. I know that the Tories and the Lib Dems

‘Facts are sacred’ claim the Guardian, but some facts are evidently more sacred than others. Mr S was amused earlier this week when the Office of National Statistics rebuked the paper for its splash about the soaring number of ‘zero-hour contracts’. You may recall that the paper reported: ‘The scale of the use of zero-hours contracts has been revealed after official figures showed that nearly 583,000 employees – more than double the government’s estimate – were forced to sign up to the controversial conditions last year.’  Soon afterwards, the Office of National Statistics issued this statement: ‘In response to media reports about “official figures” showing a steep increase in the

Moro (‘moorish’ or ‘sexist’) is a Spanish restaurant on Exmouth Market, near the bones of the old Guardian and Observer building on Farringdon Road. I don’t mind telling Spectator readers (‘you people’) that I once kissed the bricks of this building, quite seriously, like Jews kiss the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport. (At least that is the story; but I have never seen anyone do it. Kiss some dirty tarmac. What for?) Moro is distinguished as the restaurant in which Guardian journalists first realised Julian Assange is mad. He stood up near an olive and announced he didn’t care if the leaks led informants to be murdered, which is a

It’s curious that the story about the National Council for Civil Liberties and its links with the Paedophile Information Exchange is big news now, since it’s been common knowledge for many years, and written about in the Catholic press on a number of occasions. I researched the story back in 2006 or 2007, along with another journalist, and this was already then well-trampled territory, but the papers weren’t interested, despite my friend’s huge amount of work. He even went to Hull, I seem to remember. And back. I only got as far as Cockfosters, which was then the improbable home of the Gay and Lesbian Newspaper Archives, which was where