Sure, the Scottish edition of the Sun splashes with Play It Again Salm as it endorses the SNP but its Irish sibling has a much better story: River Beast’s Rampage and Farmer Attacked by Furbag are just extra, glorious, titillating teasers. But this is what happens when you forsake the Horse Outside for a van… [Thanks to my old friend Ciaran Byrne]
Severin Carrell reports that tomorrow’s edition of the Sun will endorse Alex Salmond and the SNP. This should not surprise anyone. I suspect most of the Scottish press will support, albeit with significant qualifications, the Nationalists. The most significant of those qualifications is that this is a Holyrood election, not a Westminster one. Endorsing the SNP does not require anyone to support independence it’s merely making the best of a poor job and recognising that the Nats are a more attractive choice than Labour. The press is prepared to back Salmond but only because independence is not on the immediate or even medium-term agenda. If it were the Nats would
Vince Cable’s disagreement with David Cameron over immigration seems entirely reasonable to me and much less problematic than his attitude to Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to purchase SKY. Sure, if he were a Tory he’d have been sacked. But he’s not a Tory and on a subject such as immigration – and the way in which the issue should be discussed – I can’t see why we have to maintain the fiction that everyone in the government must agree with one another on everything. Better, surely, to acknowledge that there’s a government-sponsored policy but even within the government, it being a coalition and all, not everyone considers the policy ideal. Or
Hugh Grant’s account of a (secretly-taped!) conversation he had with a former News of the World hack-turned-whistleblower is most entertaining. Credit to our friends at the New Statesman for commissioning* it. There’s plenty to enjoy, including this fine exposition of the mentality of our upstanding truth-seekers in the popular prints: Me Well, I suppose the fact that they’re dragging their feet while investigating a mass of phone-hacking – which is a crime – some people would think is a bit depressing about the police. Him But then – should it be a crime? I mean, scanning never used to be a crime. Why should it be? You’re transmitting your thoughts
The Daily Mail reports: The plot of a Sherlock Holmes story was behind a jewellery raid in Russia, police believe. Thieves paid a 74-year-old woman in St Petersburg to stay out of their flat – and broke through her walls to get in to a jeweller’s shop next door. Although a burglar alarm went off twice security guards thought it was a false alarm because the doors were locked and the windows remained intact. […] The bizarre theft mirrors almost exactly the outlandish heist in the 120-year-old short story The Red-Headed League by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In the story, shop owner Jabez Wilson is kept away from his premises
A classic, via Norm, from Sir Simon Jenkins. Apparently, “The Internet will strut an hour upon the stage, and then take its place in the ranks of lesser media“. Also: So great is the commercial hyperbole surrounding the Internet that common sense is obliterated by dazzle. It has proved a boon for pornographers and lawyers and for the sort of up market pen pals who used to rave about Citizens’ Band radio. For companies and interest groups, the “interment” is a more efficient version of the fax. E-mail has done wonders for the ancient art of letter-writing. I can see that being able to download the entire British Library on
Brother Korski is right to draw attention to Rachel Sylvester’s interview (£) with Unite’s Len McCluskey and right too to note that his defence of Castro’s island gulag* is indefensible. But there’s more that’s wrong with it than that and not all of that is McCluskey’s fault. Consider these lines: He would choose tea and scones at Fortnum and Mason over beer and sandwiches in a smoke-filled room. He is a fan of the romantic poets — “I love Byron, Keats and Shelley, I’m a romantic at heart” — and takes a feminist interpretation of Christina Rossetti. He is a theatre aficionado — “I do like Shakespeare, I’ve probably seen
As Frank McNally says, the sovereignty of Myles na Gopaleen should not be subjugated by the imperialism of Mr Flann O’Brien. The latter fellow had his moments but the first mentioned was really the man of rare genius. There he is on the left there, in the Palace Bar, some time during the Emergency. Those were cold times, as you may discern, for Ireland. As they are again. For more than a quarter of a century he produced a daily column for the Irish Times. In many of those years his column was the only entertaining thing found in that self-consciously noble blatt. By turns satirical, whimsical, loopy, angry, absurd,
Note, please, the wisdom of the man from the San Francisco Examiner who says “We aren’t going to make much [money] from this*.” *So, yeah, subscribe to the Spectator. Please. It’s good for you and, quite importantly, good for us too. [Hat-tip: Radley Balko]
MPs are pretty out of touch, of course, clueless about the way “ordinary people” live. That’s what we’re supposed to think of course. We’re not supposed to remember that MPs probably regularly encounter a much broader range of public opinion and circumstance than highly paid columnists and political editors. Here, for instance, is Ben Brogan committing the sin of assuming (I presume) that everyone is just like the people he meets: If the higher rate threshold stays the same, and yet more thousands of the ’squeezed middle’ are brought into higher rate tax, at what point do we review terms, and rename the 20p rate the lower rate, the 40p rate
George Osborne couldn’t really have expected a much better set of newspaper covers than the one before him this morning. Despite the dreary background picture – war, confusion, higher inflation, lower growth, the ruinous state of the public finances, etc – a handful of papers are leading on the goodies in his Budget, and specifically the £600 rise in the personal allowance that James mentioned last night. Judging by the movements of the grapevine, this will come into effect in April 2012, and will benefit more people than will the £1,000 rise already announced for this April. While that one was targeted at the least well-off by a reduction in
Ben Goldacre deplores the reluctance of newspapers to link to original sources and then demonstrates why they don’t: Professor Anna Ahn published a paper recently, showing that people with shorter heels have larger calves. For the Telegraph this became “Why stilletos are the secret to shapely legs”, for the Mail “Stilletos give women shapelier legs than flats”, for the Express “Stilletos tone up your legs”. But anybody who read even the press release, which is a readable piece of popular science itself, would immediately see that this study had nothing whatsoever to do with shoes. It didn’t look at shoe heel height, it looked at anatomical heel length, the distance
It’s the combination of the stories heralded by these Brighton Argus bills that makes you wonder. Brighton must be quite a piece of work. Perhaps your local paper can do better than this, however? [Thanks to Damian Counsell.]
If we were not permitted to report parliamentary proceedings we would not be able to observe that, protected by parliamentary privilege, the Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming revealed the existence of a superinjunction taken out by Goodwin to prevent reporting on, well, who knows what? But for Mr Hemming’s actions, revealling the existence of this superinjunction would risk being held in contempt of court. Two things arise from this: what kind of judge thinks it appropriate to grant the kind of injunction that includes an injunction on revealing its existence? Is the judiciary not troubled by the apparent ease with which rich public figures can purchase protection from being inconvenienced
Spot the mistake the New York Times makes here. Unfortunate but amusing. This produced, as it would, a fine correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the new Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny as a female. Enda Kenny is a male. As I suspected this was New York’s fault, not Sarah Lyall’s as a sub-editor changed Mr to Ms. These things happen. A Telegraph sub once inserted “Kenyan-born” into a piece I wrote about Barack Obama’s presidential then-fledgling presidential campaign. This was before the Birther movement had got going but, of course, made the whole piece a nonsense since if Obama had been born in Kenya he
If only Britain had something comparable to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution then we’d enjoy greater freedoms than is currently the case. Three cheers, then, to Bagehot for defending liberalism and liberty from the predations of the law and, naturally, the Sun newspaper. The case? An easy one that might have been designed as a litmus or Rorshach test designed to discover who actually really believes in the “values” we like to congratulate ourselves for holding and those for whom such values and concerns are unimportant and may be abandoned at the first sign of trouble or the dreadful prospect that someone, somewhere is doing something of
There are many fine letters in today’s Daily Telegraph but this is my favourite: All quiet on the front SIR – Saturday was World Book Night. I would like to pass on what happened in Clacton-on-Sea that night. I was chosen as one of the “givers” and decided to give the book All Quiet on the Western Front. I wanted to give this title to pupils of the three senior schools in the area. The schools were informed that the “giving” would take place in the library, 3–5pm. I made myself available, waiting for the rush. Not one pupil or member of staff turned up for the book. That sums
My esteemed colleage Nick Cohen dislikes disagreeing with the equally estimable James Forsyth and I dislike disagreeing with Nick in turn. But his comments on the decision not to block Rupert Murdoch’s bid to purchase the 61% of BSkyB he did not already own seem unecessarily belligerent and, moreover, hyperbolic. Nick writes: The editors of every newspaper, television channel and radio station, with the exception of editors at News International, will be telling their hacks to go for Hunt. My colleagues will have a solid public interest justification for acting in their employers’ interest because we will be punishing corruption so blatant a seven-year-old could see through it. Rupert Murdoch
With all the provisos attached to News Corp’s takeover of BSkyB, opposition to the deal has surely now been diluted. But there are, perhaps, two groups who can still legitimately complain about the outcome. Firstly, those of us who believe that unrestricted freedom of speech is vital in the TV broadcasting arena. The Murdoch empire has had to surrender its news channel in order to, essentially, buy a profitable platform for broadcasting sport and movies. This is seriously disturbing for anyone who feels that the BBC’s output of ‘neutral news’ needs to be challenged. The only major independent broadcaster – ITV – gave up long ago with their own
Perhaps it’s because it’s a coalition and this novelty is too subtle a thing to be grasped by Fleet Street, but it’s still strange how unpopular this government has become. Not with the public; that was to be expected given the decision to stress nothing but deficits and cuts during the Camerlegg ministry’s first few months in office. But you might have thought its inky friends might have stuck around a little longer. Then again, they can feel the wind shifting too. One consequence of the decision to stress fiscal austerity – perfectly reasonable and even, you may say, necessary – was to confirm, or seem to confirm, one of