Media

Paul Mason’s review of the cuts for Newsnight last night (from 10:20 into the video here) was one of the most powerful critiques of Osborne from the left. His package majored on Osborne’s decision to cut a further £11 billion from welfare and pensions, to soften the departmental cuts. Adopting a rather funereal tone, Mason declared that, “if you are poor, your life is about to change”. He produced a decile graph, showing the poorest are hit second hardest. It foreshadowed this morning’s Guardian cover: “Axe falls on the poor”. Danny Alexander was fed to Paxo: “You said you would not balance your budget on the backs of the poor

How do you get from David Cameron to Simon Cowell in two, easy steps? Answer: Andy Coulson. The former News of the World editor is, of course, Cameron’s director of communications – but he also happens to be on friendly terms with the X-Factor impresario. We set out this, and all the other tangled relationships around the Prime Minister, in a spider graph for this week’s magazine. From Nick Clegg to the designer Anya Hindmarch, from Steve Hilton to Baroness Ashton: it’s not a map of the government, but rather of the people both in and around No.10 who form what we call the New Establishment. To see them in

Courtesy of Ben Brogan, one of the most noteworthy passages from David Cameron’s appearance on Today this morning: ‘Jim Naughtie: Is the Trident upgrade untouchable? David Cameron: We do need an independent nuclear deterrent… JN: Is that a yes? DC: Yes. Basically I was going to give you a longer and fuller answer but the short answer is yes… To me and the Coalition government, yes, Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent is being replaced.’ It is certainly the most assertive that Cameron has been on the subject since the advent of the coalition, but a couple of questions remain that prevent it from being utterly unequivocal. First, what timeframe is the

The warnings from Auntie’s leading hacks have been heeded – the strike has been cancelled. There is no done deal and the government is still in the union’s crosshairs: the strike has been delayed to the 19th and 20th October, the day of the comprehensive spending review, pending further consultation. All this raises a few points. First, Ed Miliband scores by having urged the NUJ to drop its plans in favour of impartiality – very New Politics, now matter how opportunistic the initial impulse to further debase the moniker ‘Red Ed’. The BBC has, for the moment, denied its detractors a major publicity coup, not that I think that Jeremy

Amongst BBC political staff, there’s mounting concern about the plans for a strike during Tory conference. One of them said to me at Labour conference that they just didn’t know what to do, they had been put in an impossible position by the decision to call the strike on such politically important days. These journalists fear that striking during Tory conference would undermine the corporation’s reputation for impartiality. So, a whole host of them wrote to their union rep asking him to make representations on their behalf. His reply shows just the level of hostility these people — who are just trying to do their job — are up against:

To these eyes, this afternoon’s phone hacking debate was a surprisingly sedate affair. Chris Bryant – proposing a motion to have an inquiry conducted by the Standards and Privileges committee into the News of the World’s actions – seemed to go out his way to depoliticise the argument, and other Labour MPs followed his lead. And so there was relatively little mention of Andy Coulson, with the emphasis instead on the wrongs that might have been done to the House by the police and the media more generally. It was, then, little surprise that Bryant’s motion was passed unanimously. There were some flashes of controversy and acid, though. Bryant himself

David Cameron’s father has suffered a stroke on holiday in France and so the PM is, understandably, travelling out there to be with him. This means that Nick Clegg will be standing in for him at PMQs. At the risk of sounding Jo Mooreish, this shift in PMQs personnel has political implications. Labour was always planning to use today to try and associate Cameron personally with Coulson and the whole voicemail interception story. That, obviously, can’t happen now. But Labour could ask Nick Clegg a series of awkward questions on this, has the deputy prime minister sought personal assurances from the director of communications about what he knew of phone