Media

When visiting Britain and Australia last November, I discovered that the mayor of Toronto, Robert Ford, is now the world’s best-known Canadian. He has acknowledged the occasional use of cocaine and, overall, the response to his foibles has been welcome. The world has been astounded to learn that not all English-speaking Canadians are whey-faced, monosyllabic Americans-on-Prozac. They might also learn that the contiguous metropolitan area of Toronto — now home to about seven million — has a very high standard of living and a low crime rate and is one of the world’s more impressive modern cities. The mayor is an ample and florid man who describes himself as ‘350

Jon Snow’s interview in the Standard today makes for perfect post-lunch reading: ‘Sex comes into every evaluation of a woman, there’s no doubt about it. It’s there. Once you’ve established a friendship or a working relationship with a woman, it’s parked. But it’s an interesting barrier. When you’ve gone through it and arrived at the other side, it’s never a problem again. Well I’m not saying it is a problem at all, it’s rather a delicious thing really, ‘what might have been?’ or ‘what could be’. It’s a natural animal element of sustaining life.’ Mr S has to wonder what Snow’s colleagues and female guests will make of this ‘delicious

Roy Greenslade has set the hare running with his claim that Alexander Lebedev and his mini-mogul son Evgeny are looking to offload the Independent titles. The ‘viewspaper’ is understood to be haemorrhaging cash. ‘This is not new news,’ one insider tells me; although, as Greenslade reports, ‘the official line’ is that Independent Print (which makes the Indy, the Sindy and the i)  ‘is merely seeking new investors.’ But even that won’t be easy: newsstand sales of the Indy are down to 43,224  (which in part reflects the success of the ‘i’) and any investor/bidder will have to consider the Indy’s integration with the (profitable) Evening Standard, which is so extensive that

It’s right, isn’t it, that the storm we’ve just had was far, far, worse than the Worst Storm In A Million Years © we had a month back and which was trailed in advance by the Met Office and all the news programmes? And as others have pointed out, while there was far more damage done to the country and more people were left without electricity this time around, public transport – and especially the trains – were nowhere near so badly affected. We are back, slightly, in Mandela territory; blanket coverage and predictions of an apocalypse on the news programmes seems to have affected the train companies more deeply

Look; I’m sorry Nelson Mandela is dead. It happens quite often to people in their 90s who have been very ill, even famous people, but I’m sure that doesn’t lessen the sadness for many of us. I never met the man but, on balance, I came to the conclusion that he was a force for good rather than ill. I think I came to that rather banal and broad brush conclusion twenty years ago, or maybe fifteen. So, I’m sorry he’s dead, I wish it were otherwise. But for Christ’s sake BBC, give it a bloody break for five minutes, will you? It’s as if the poor bugger now has

Green shoots were visible in Newbury on Saturday for the 57th Hennessy Gold Cup. While brandy cocktails warmed the punters in the Fred Winter Suite, Rob Brydon and Martin Clunes chatted up Joan Collins, who, despite being the most famous person in the room, was wearing a name badge. Myleene Klass displayed a lack of class when posing for a photograph with Princess Anne. And Tinie Tempah might want to have a word with his tailor: the rapper’s trousers were cut off half way up his shin and he must have been freezing without any socks on. Mr Steerpike feared that he might have had one too many nips of

I see that Russell Brand has morphed into Mehdi Hassan. Mehdi, if you remember, excoriated The Daily Mail and then the paper published the cringe-worthy paean of praise Hassan had written to the paper’s editor in chief, Paul Dacre, when he was after a job. Brand, meanwhile, has bravely stuck it to The Sun newspaper and of course the most evil man in the entire history of mankind, Rupert Murdoch. The paper apparently ran a story that Brand had cheated on his girlfriend. Yes, yes, I know – big story. Anyway, in his usual tortured prose Brand kicked the hell out of The Sun. And then The Sun revealed that

Unfortunate timing. In the Sunday Telegraph today is an article by Gyles Brandreth eulogising the crossword; we are approaching its 100th anniversary. Yes, all well and good. But travel to The Telegraph crossword site and this is what you will see: Sorry we’re experiencing some technical problems and we’re working to try and fix them. Please try back again soon. That message has been up since Friday. I pay forty quid a year for the pleasure of doing Telegraph crosswords online. I realise that this isn’t a tragedy on the scale of Darfur, or that cyclone which hit the Philippines. It’s just annoying. I can’t start a day without doing

There has naturally been plenty of unfavourable comment on how the Revd Paul Flowers, the ‘crystal Methodist’, was allowed by the Financial Services Authority to become chairman of the Co-op Bank. But the story does not reflect very well on the media either. If you look at Robert Peston’s BBC blog on the subject, for instance, there is a lot of ‘I am told’ and ‘according to the Manchester Evening News’. Is there no one in the BBC’s enormous staff who could have done a bit of work years ago on the Revd Mr Flowers? Isn’t it even more extraordinary that the media did not pick up Mr Flowers’s ignorant