How to explain the King-Osborne plan to pump more cheap credit into the economy? Robert Peston gave his explanation of last week’s Mansion House speech. Here, our occasional media correspondent, The Skimmer, gives his thoughts on Peston’s thoughts: Peston: The Bank is saying that, in a business-as-usual way, with no stigma attached and at a cheaper
Ed Howker’s weekend post about life in Rochdale – and The Spectator’s study of welfare ghettos – has made the news today. There’s a powerful spread in The Sun, with full and due attribution to the source. But the Daily Mail also ran the figures, incorrectly attributing them to the DWP. (We expressed DWP dole
The Daily Mail has paid a small fortune to secure the rights to a dull book, which has taken three years to publish, by a minor Scottish aristocrat, who runs a jewellery business, used to sit on the Court of St Andrews University and is distantly related to the Queen through marriage to James Ogilvy,
Channel 4, the so-called public-service station that brings you Big Brother and other culturally uplifting events, has really scrapped the barrel. It has a record of bringing controversial alternatives to the screen to match the Queen’s annual Christmas message on the BBC and ITV but this year it has taken leave of its senses.
Is the Beeb’s reputation in tatters after Manuelgate? Sure looks like it, if Politics Home’s latest PHI5000 Index is anything to go by. I quote from their findings: The PoliticsHome Phi5000 Public Opinion Tracker, powered by YouGov, consists of a politically balanced panel of 5000 voters across the UK who are asked their opinion on
And so the sordid BrandRossgate (or should that be Manuelgate?) row steams on. The latest developments are the 12-week suspension of Jonathan Ross without pay and the resignation of the Radio 2 controller, Lesley Douglas, ending her 20 year career at the Beeb. As rolling heads go, Douglas’s is quite a significant one. But every
The BBC’s response to the Brand-Ross row has been pathetic. It’s now been rumbling for around 48 hours yet by late afternoon Tuesday not a single BBC executive has raised his or her head above the parapet. But the quangocracy has trundled into action. The BBC Trust says it wants an explanation while Ofcom has started an
Is our Great Leader getting delusions of grandeur? He told the BBC earlier today that “We’ve had some success in getting the price of oil down …” So not only is Gordon Brown “leading the world” in bank bailouts and moving markets as he does so (mainly downwards, sadly), but now he (who even uses
Do folks at The Guardian not speak to each other? We’ve always known the place had a pretty poisonous atmosphere, but don’t they ever compare notes? This morning, left-wing harpie columnist Jackie Ashley writes this: “Cameron has simply ditched his green agenda. On green taxes, persuading people to turn from cars and cheap air travel
So Ofcom has fined the BBC £400,000 for multiple fiddles of its various fake phone-in competitions. That would make sense if Director-General Mark Thompson and his bloated boss class at the Beeb had to pay the fine from their over-paid salaries. Or if Ofcom had instructed them to hand over the incredible and unjustified bonuses
It looks like Gordon Brown broke into The Financial Times last night and wrote its second leader – which is a summary of all Labour’s clichéd attack points, strikingly unworthy of the newspaper’s normally excellent comment pages. It reads like Brown’s more awkward moments in PMQs. Here are a few examples. “The Tories have given
In the end Rupert Murdoch decided he didn’t want a fight with the Tories after all, so he pulled the plug on Kelvin MacKenzie’s bid to give David Davis a run for his money in the upcoming by-election. The whole plan had been conceived as a terrific wheeze at the 40th birthday party of Sun
The point of all those bribes was so Gordon Brown could wake up to headlines after the 42 days vote saying “principled Prime Minister holds firm to his principles and wins a knife-edge gamble.” Instead, he is today pilloried – and most harshly by his own side. “Desperate Brown scrapes through” says the Guardian, quoting
Time was when the Guardian was the favourite British newspaper of the Indian elite because of its historic support for Indian independence and its generally liberal-left collectivist outlook, which coincided with the ideology of India’s post-colonial governing classes until only recently (then they ditched socialist planning and the Indian economy is now growing at an
What is it with the BBC and Margaret Thatcher? Britain’s leading public-service broadcaster never seems to miss an opportunity to do her down, especially in its dramatic depictions, which regularly demean and disparage her and her record. Not content with having a library full of anti-Thatcher footage, the excellent First Post Daily website reports that
The Skimmer is genuinely puzzled and needs the help of Coffee Housers. A story appeared on 5th April about a Scottish Muslim called Mohammed Anwar who was clocked doing 64mph in a 30-mile zone in Glasgow — but kept his licence because he said he needed to be able to continue driving to visit his
The reaction from the liberal-left to David Mamet’s confession that he is no longer a “brain-dead liberal” has been strangely muted — and often hilariously ludicrous. The most priceless piece of bien pensant thinking comes, naturally, from Michael Billington, the Guardian’s tedious, right-on theatre critic. “I am depressed to read that David Mamet has
With the FTSE100 soaring 191 points and Dow Jones up 321 points, what are the odds that tomorrow’s front pages will have headlines of “markets rally”, the same way they announced yesterday’s plunges?
So farewell, then, Derek Conway. You will not be missed. But his departure is no thanks to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. Tory MP Roger Gale was put in to bat for Conway yesterday morning and Caroline Quinn (or was it Sarah Montague — it’s quite hard to tell the difference) was such a soft
As the weekly news cycle comes to an end and darkness descends on a gloomy Friday, there are two great news stories doing the rounds, neither of which the great British media can report. One involves a famous broadcaster and his love child by another journalist and is covered by an injunction. The other is covered