Media

Diary – 27 October 2016

I have never met Donald Trump, but I knew his parents. A fact that makes me feel about 100 years old. Which was actually nearer the age Fred and Mary Anne Trump were when, as a teenager, I made my first trip to New York. I remember riding backwards in their limousine on the way to lunch with the extended Trump clan and the lovely Mary Anne apologising that her son Donald would not be joining us. ‘You know about Donald?’ she inquired. I nodded, and recall her adding rather wistfully, ‘He’s always been the outgoing one.’ One of the great pleasures of life, I now realise — and a

Lights, camera, politics: the triumph of showbiz over argument

At the end of Sunday night’s US presidential debate, the moderators snuck in a final question from a slightly shell shocked looking member of the audience. After an hour and a half of brutal, bitter exchanges, a man asked Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump if they could think of ‘one positive thing that you respect in one another’. In the resulting pause and exhalation it felt as though the country had seen itself in a mirror and realised it looked hideous. Unlike some of our MEPs, the candidates for US president only sparred verbally in St Louis. And nobody watching politics from the continent of Europe (Beppe Grillo anyone?) should

Kids’ stuff | 6 October 2016

When a new TV channel calls its flagship food show Fuck, That’s Delicious, we might surmise that the Reithian ideals are not foremost in its corporate philosophy. You probably haven’t heard of Viceland. You certainly haven’t watched it. It seeped on to the airwaves with little fanfare and few viewers. Viceland is the new 24-hour TV channel of Vice Media, the Canadian-American outfit that describes itself as the ‘world’s preeminent youth media company and content creation studio’. Vice began in 1994 as a magazine but now encompasses a news division, a record label, a film studio and myriad digital ventures. It prides itself on being ‘alternative’, ’disruptive’, sticking it to

This looks like the greatest rugby side ever

British Lions fans of anervous disposition should avoid the telly of a Saturday morning. Live before your very eyes, as the southern hemisphere Rugby Championship unfolds, is the rebirth of an extraordinary new All Blacks side, now without Carter, McCaw, Ma’a Nonu and all. And, scarily, evenbetter than that World Cup-winning side. Warren Gatland, be very afraid. Our own Maro Itoje, the Saracens and England lock, wins every game he plays. The All Blacks win every game they play. How many players eligible for the Lions would get into the current Kiwi starting XV? Probably just Itoje. And how many from the rest of the world would get in? Again,

High life | 8 September 2016

I have a question for you, dear readers: is it me, or is there no newspaper or network in America that tells it like it is any more? Take, for example, the Anthony Weiner case. He is the pervert who keeps sending pictures of his penis to women over the internet, more often than not while in the company of his four-year-old son. If a man like that were married to Donald Trump’s closest assistant, The Donald would have been forced out of the race by now — no ifs or buts about it. But over on the other side, Hillary confirmed her trust in Huma Abedin, a Saudi-raised Muslim

The Spectator’s Notes | 11 August 2016

Those who want to revive grammar schools are accused of ‘bring backery’ — the unthinking idea that the past was better. But many of their accusers suffer from the rigid mindset of which they complain. They say that grammar schools ‘condemned most children to failure at the age of 11’, and that, even at their peak, grammars catered for less than 20 per cent of the school population. Why assume that the return of grammars must re-create either of these things? Grammar schools grew up, historically, in different ways and at different times. Then, in the mid‑20th-century mania for uniformity, they were standardised and, in the later 20th-century mania for comprehensives, almost

Thank God for Sir Philip Green, the perfect modern hate figure

Good old Sir Philip Green. Where would we be without him? So often, those national hate figures let you down. That lady who put a cat in a bin in 2010, for example. Bit of a tragic loony, in the end. Likewise Tony Blair. Not this one. His diamond has no flaw, and we can all join in. He’s perfectly awful in every way. He looks the part, too. Rich-guy hair, of the sort most rich guys don’t deign to have any more. Nonexistent at the front, lacquered and far too long at the back. Brilliant. Clothes that don’t quite fit, because he clearly pays a stylist to tell him

Bear baiting

Oh those Russians. When they’re not beating up English football fans, they’re cheating at the Olympics. They occupy other countries and shoot down civilian airliners, then pretend it wasn’t them. They’re helping Assad win the Syrian civil war. They’re even driving up London house prices. There’s no infamy, apparently, of which Russians are not guilty. ‘OK — we did do all those things,’ admits a Moscow broadcaster friend, a little sheepishly. ‘But everyone else does them too! We’re the only ones to get punished, because everyone hates us.’ Since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russians have become the world’s official pariahs. Russian athletes have been kicked out of the

Number 10 might be more confident than ever of EU referendum victory, but they’re still trying to load the debate dice

Downing Street is more confident than it has ever been that the EU referendum will be won. It is not just Barack Obama’s full-throated warning against Brexit that is responsible for this, but—as I say in my Sun column this morning—the sense that they have got the argument back onto their home turf of the economy. Indeed, it was striking how much Obama talked yesterday about the economic benefits to Britain of EU membership and the single market. The fact that this was his main message, rather than Western unity against Putin and Islamic State, shows which argument Number 10 thinks is working. The truth is that however spurious George

Labour’s war on the media rumbles on: Corbyn tells off hacks outside his home

As David Cameron finds himself in hot water over his admission that he once owned shares in an offshore fund, today ought to be a walk in the park for Labour. In fact, all Jeremy Corbyn need do is give the press a few soundbites on the Tories’ troubles and then sit back and relax. Alas this is Corbyn we’re talking about so things were never going to be that simple. Instead the Labour leader has managed to become the story after he was filmed scolding an LBC journalist outside his home after she attempted to ask for his thoughts on Cameron’s admission. Rather than answer, Corbyn told her that he

Cock

On the Radio 4 news at 11 o’clock last Saturday morning there was a joky report about roosters in Brisbane. The cocks, it said, were annoying people with their crowing. The news at noon called them not roosters and cocks, but cockerels and fowls. I wrote here in 2005 about the advent of the ‘Year of the Cockerel’ and suggested that cock would soon be unusable because it put everyone in mind of a rude word for penis. Things have got worse since then. Mealy-mouthed folk who say cockerel simply ignore its meaning, which is ‘a young cock’. It’s like calling all cats kittens. Oddly enough, the Oxford English Dictionary says

From Hitler to girls in pearls

I’ve heard it said that the ‘countryside’ is an urban idea, a place invented by the late Victorians in order to escape industrialisation. If so, we’re craving it more than ever. Surveys suggest 80 per cent of us now dream of living in a rural idyll. Since foxhunting was banned, riding to hounds has never been more prevalent. Suddenly five million people — most of them city dwellers — are tuning into The Archers, and viewing figures for Countryfile are higher than for The X Factor. But perhaps the most revealing indicator of the allure of the countryside is the enduring appeal of Country Life magazine, which was founded in

Are we ready for virtual-reality news?

John Humphrys staggering around in a piece of ‘virtual reality’ headgear that looked like binoculars and made him feel sick was as attention-grabbing as radio can be. So I listened in last week as the intrepid Today presenter tried out infotech’s latest gimmick. The Oculus Rift began life on a crowdfunding website, heralded as an exciting new tool in virtual reality: a tool that computer-games boffins had long been trying to crack. Facebook bought it, and Rift should hit the market this month. I experienced a forerunner years ago when sampling for my newspaper a day in the life of a bus driver. At a driving school I sat behind

The Spectator’s notes | 4 February 2016

In 2000, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, accused Magdalen College, Oxford, of class bias in failing to admit a student called Laura Spence, a pupil at a Tyneside comprehensive. This was grossly unfair — how could the Chancellor know the details of a particular case? It was also outrageous in principle: why should a politician tell a university whom to admit? This Sunday, David Cameron did much the same thing. In the middle of his EU negotiations, the migrant crisis and the other genuinely important things the Prime Minister must deal with, he found time to offer an article to the Sunday Times, headlined ‘Watch out, universities; I’m

Sex acts

Poor Eddie Redmayne. Just because he looks quite like a girl, he finds himself a spokesperson for the burgeoning trans movement. Recently, he was forced to explain to those of us watching BBC News that ‘the notion of gender being binary’ is now considered ‘antiquated’. People are very excited about being trans at the moment. Countless TV shows and films depict it, Mark Zuckerberg has just called his daughter Max, and a man called Hilary has just talked us into another war. Being trans is clearly catching: hermaphrodite whelks on the undersides of fishing boats are growing penises, and vast swaths of young people, unable to buy a home or

Owen Jones gives Seumas Milne a run for his money

As Seumas Milne attempts to settle in to his new job as Jeremy Corbyn’s director of communications, the former Guardian columnist has got off to a rather shaky start. As well as making headlines himself over his controversial appointment, the negative press surrounding Corbyn has shown no sign of disappearing with a fresh storm recently emerging regarding Milne’s colleague Andrew Fisher. Perhaps aware of his own shortcomings, Milne was even overheard outside a pub on Thursday asking the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg for advice on how to do his job. Now, Corbyn’s other original Guardian cheerleader Owen Jones has stepped in to offer Milne some advice of his own. Following the negative press Corbyn received this week over

Umberto Eco really tries our patience

Colonna, the protagonist of Umberto Eco’s latest novel, is the first to admit he is a loser. A middle-aged literary nègre, he dreams of writing his own book, but can’t break the habit of alluding to others’ work: he even refers to himself as a ‘man without qualities’. One day in 1992, he is commissioned to ghostwrite a memoir about a newspaper being launched in Milan. Domani (‘Tomorrow’) will never be published: a tycoon who finances it plans to use it as a blackmail tool in his shady dealings. The proposed title of the memoir, Domani: Yesterday, sets the tone for this pacy book that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Lionel Barber strengthens his ties with China

Last night’s state banquet saw Jeremy Corbyn join David Cameron, President Xi Jinping and Her Majesty to raise a glass to the beginning of a golden era of partnership between China and the United Kingdom. With Corbyn meeting the Chinese president earlier in the day to raise grievances regarding the country’s human rights track record, his encounter with the president at the dinner appeared to be a civil one. Although Corbyn’s wife Laura Alvarez chose to give the lavish do a miss, the Labour leader wasn’t short of company with other guests in attendance including the Bank of England’s Mark Carney — who previously suggested Corbyn’s economic policies would ‘hurt’ the poor, and

Jeremy Corbyn can’t blame the ‘commentariat’ for public opinion

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party conference speech started pretty well, with him poking fun at the newspapers’ more apocalyptic predictions of what would happen should he become Prime Minister. He teased the Daily Mail for a story saying that he once welcomed the prospect of an asteroid hitting the earth.* And then, a wee joke. ‘It’s not the kind of policy I’d want this party to adopt without a full debate in conference.’ Everyone, even the press, had a laugh at the press. They were probably even laughing in Iran, where the state broadcaster was showing his speech. But then Corbyn had to go and spoil it all by denouncing the ‘commentariat’. Again. ‘No one, not me as leader,

Diary – 17 September 2015

With four days to go until the result of Labour’s leadership election, a call from the Sunday Times. Would I like to write a piece, along the lines of the opening chapter of my 1980s novel A Very British Coup, about the first 100 days of a Corbyn government? Anything up to 3,000 words, he says. I am sceptical that the sense of humour of the censors at Murdoch HQ will stretch to the prospect of a Corbyn government, however fanciful. Especially since any such government is likely to be interested in breaking up the concentration of media ownership. What they are really looking for, I suspect, is tale of