Media

As I argued this morning, the Rowan Williams furore will be sustained if the government over-reacts. So far, so softly from Downing Street: ministers and prominent MPs have been across the airwaves this morning and no one has taken the so-called nuclear option. As you can see below, the responses have been mild. Paul Goodman observes that this is because the PM ‘doesn’t get too worked up’ about this sort of media conflagration. Here’s a brief selection of what Cameron’s lieutenants have said to counter Dr. Williams’ incandescence: Matthew Hancock: “It’s just slightly odd that he’s made these arguments which, in some cases, are simply incorrect, when it comes to

Today’s papers are full of comment on the brilliant Panorama exposé of care home abuse. But none have mentioned what jumped out at me: the parallels between this and the Stanford Prison Experiment. The way that the tattooed Wayne treated his mentally ill patients is sickening — but, to me, this is not just a story about human evil. It’s a story about how institutionalisation brings out the evil in people, and that this evil is far closer to the surface than we like to admit. Philip Zimbardo, a psychology professor at Stanford, randomly divided 25 volunteers to play the roles of prisoners and guards in a poorly-regulated, mock prison.

And what about the other sort of debt? We spend so much time harrumphing about the national debt that an important point is obscured: personal debt, the amount owed by individuals, is even higher. I wrote an article on the subject for a recent issue of The Spectator, as well as the Thunderer column (£) for last Saturday’s Times. But, really, a piece in the latest Spectator (subscribers here) by Helen Wood — the former prostitute who transacted with Wayne Rooney, as well as with a “married actor” who has slapped her with a superinjunction — puts voice to the problem in blunter fashion. “My mistake,” she writes, “was to

“It’s not imminent. But you can see this happening.” So sayeth Vince Cable about the prospect of another global financial crisis, in interview with the New Statesman today. To be fair, you can see his point: there is a pervasive sense that the contradictions of the banking sector still haven’t been fixed, and — as I have written recently — our economy, and economies worldwide, are still afflicted by debt of all varieties. But that’s not going to calm those Tories who regard Cable as a combustive liability. In the weeks since the Lib Dems’  annihilation at the polls, the Business Secretary has increasingly reverted to his pre-coalition form: a

Today is, as the saying has it, a good day to bury bad news. With President Obama on the ground and an ash cloud in the air, not much else is going to get a look in on the news’ bulletins. But it is worth noting that Nat Wei, the government’s big society advisor, has quit his role today having scaled back his involvement in February. Wei has been pretty detached from Downing Street for the last few months, his role rather usurped by Cameron’s big society ambassadors, Shaun Bailey and Charlotte Leslie. So his departure won’t make much difference to the government. But it is still rather embarrassing as

I’ve always rather admired Hugh Grant, so it was almost a pleasure to be beaten up by him on Newsnight last Friday. He was attacking the celebrity-hunting media, whereas I set out to defend free press and self-regulation of the media. If you’re going to have sympathy with any Hollywood figure, you’d have sympathy with Hugh: he’s a single man who has never tried to moralise, and has cameras pointing at him everywhere he goes. Besides, he made an impassioned and powerful case against the intrusion of the paparazzi — while yours truly was left defending the Press Complaints Commission. But I didn’t know, until I met him that night,