Press

A great night to be in Pittsburgh. The local baseball team, the Pirates, were attempting to reach their first play-offs in 21 years. Meanwhile in Washington DC, a Republican party rejected at the polls last year was seeking to increase its popularity by bringing the government to a halt. On the Strip, a bustling street along the banks of the Allegheny River, it seemed everyone was wearing a shirt declaring his or her allegiance to the Pirates. In the pizza joint where we’d gone before I played my first Pittsburgh gig in nearly two decades, the TV above the bar reported on the stalemate in Washington. But it didn’t feel much

Oborne’s ideas of ethics Sir: Your edition of 28 September included a 1,500-word demand from the journalist Peter Oborne to the effect that the Times, the newspaper that I work for, should sack its columnist Danny Finkelstein. The reason given by Oborne for this view is that Finkelstein is too parti pris and close to people in power to be a ‘proper’ journalist. He is wrong in his argument and also, I believe, deficient in his journalism. Oborne deploys the veteran cliché about true journalists ‘speaking truth unto power’. Yet the history of British newspapers is full of ‘political’ journalists such as Finkelstein. At the Telegraph there were great figures

A big hello to the revived Trustee Savings Bank — the spin-off of 631 Lloyds branches that were going to be sold to the Co-operative Bank to fulfil EU conditions for the bailout of Lloyds after its catastrophic takeover of HBOS. The new entity starts life with 4.6 million personal and small-business customers, a clean balance sheet, no investment banking arm and no foreign skeletons in its cupboard. That all sounds promising, but those of us who have long argued for a break-up of mega-banks and a return to relationship-driven high-street finance will watch closely to see whether the new TSB’s slogan, ‘Welcome back to local banking’, turns out to

The astonishing level of enthusiasm over the birth of the new prince goes far beyond the pleasure that people naturally feel for an attractive young couple who have had a healthy child. If there is any truth at all to these estimates in the North American media that trinkets and other bric-a-brac, and even increased numbers of tourists, will produce hundreds of millions of pounds for the British economy, the answer lies not just in normal goodwill and the effusions of the most strenuous monarchists. If my memory is accurate,  the last time there was so much public interest in a royal event, albeit of the exactly opposite nature, was

An email exchange with a Conservative-leaning friend this week left me feeling sheepish. But if shameful my behaviour be, I’m not alone in the shame. I thought it worth sharing the conversation. We were corresponding about Ed Miliband’s stand-off with the Unite trade union. In a message to my friend, I remarked: ‘It’s reaching the point where (paradoxically) EM’s tendency to take the line of least resistance may actually push him into confronting Unite.’ And that’s true: worms turn and it’s not always good politics to corner people. But it is the next part of the message that I’m hard-put to defend. If Miliband wimps out, I said, then ‘I

Just because the environmentalists have been proved so epically wrong about global warming doesn’t mean they’re right about everything else. Ocean acidification, overpopulation, species loss… you’re going to hear a lot about dire and urgent threats like these in the coming months as the greenies establish a fallback position after the collapse of their climate change scam. But it’s the same old toxic mix of misanthropy, religious dogma, control freakery and anti-capitalism, repackaged with different labels. Let me give you another example. A couple of months ago, you may have noticed the amiable TV presenter Ben Fogle being monstered in the lefty press for environmental crimes he’d apparently committed on

I bet you remember your first fountain pen. Mine was a Conway Stewart with marbled barrel, I had it for starting Big School and I used to polish it. That trusty pen lasted until A-levels finally broke its back and after that I slipped down the primrose ballpoint path to slovenly writing. I never used a typewriter — too noisy, so I hand-wrote my books until the almost-silent laptop seduced me down another slithery slope. But I still hand-write when I need to take my time — books can be divided, like Americans, into fast ones and slow ones. Recently, a friend told me he had gone back to a

With plummeting sales and the damage caused by the Johann Hari scandal, Chris Blackhurst had his work cut out when he took over as Editor of the Independent in 2011. Perhaps he saw the Leveson Inquiry as a chance to make a name for himself, because he became a frequent figure on the airwaves and signed his paper up to the government’s Royal Charter on the very day it was announced. But he’s cutting an increasingly isolated figure on Fleet Street these days. As the Times (£) puts it this afternoon when reporting news of a rival Royal Charter agreed by newspaper publishers: ‘The Guardian has not declared support for the new charter

If anybody doubts that free speech would be in danger after Leveson it is worth remembering what it is already like in this country. A couple of months back Julie Burchill wrote a column in the Observer about transsexuals. It was a response to complaints by transsexuals about a piece by a friend of Burchill’s, Suzanne Moore. In a glorious broadside of a column Burchill referred to the complainants as, among much else, ‘dicks in chicks’ clothing’ and ‘a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs’. The results were endless further complaints and a junior government minister – Lynne Featherstone – calling publicly for Burchill and the editor of the Observer