Is the eight-year reign of Piers Morgan at the Daily Mirror drawing to a gentle close? Last October I wrote, ‘My bet is that in six months’ time the Mirror will not belong to Trinity.’ Mmm. More than six months have passed and the newspaper has not been sold – yet. An approach to buy
This column does not often find common cause with American farmers, nor with farmers of the developed world in general. But it has become necessary to do so, thanks to some brazen protectionist policies on the part of China. Last year, China announced it was going to ban the import of all genetically modified crops.
We shall probably never know what drove someone like Crispin Blunt to carry out a suicide attack on Iain Duncan Smith. The young man was from a respectable, middle-class, and pro-European background. That is, he came from the Tory breeding ground of moderation. But not all respectable, middle-class pro-Europeans try to assassinate their leader. His
In the early hours of last Thursday, armed police arrived at the Belfast house of Liam Clarke, the Sunday Times’s Northern Ireland editor, and his wife, Kathy. They seized four computers, children’s games, old newspapers and written material. Liam’s and Kathy’s eight-year-old daughter was in the house. Police smashed the door to Mr Clarke’s office,
If William Rees-Mogg had a fan club, I would be its president. I would lick envelopes for him and update his website, which would no doubt be full of his latest geopolitical prognostications. I would arrange coach parties of the faithful so that we could travel down to Somerset and glimpse him as he paced
Unesco’s recent Education for All week was outwardly a campaign to boost the educational opportunities for children in the Third World. On closer inspection, however, the campaigning materials betray a political motive involving one issue alone: ‘gender parity’. ‘Educating girls yields the highest return in economic terms,’ asserts Unesco. ‘Countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have
America’s numbering of the Saddam regime’s leading members, and issuing this order of precedence in the form of a deck of playing cards to aid American troops searching for them, has surely caused much unnecessary rivalry, jockeying for position and unpleasantness to one another on the part of the war criminals and torturers thus enumerated.
The Daily Telegraph’s story about the Scottish Labour MP George Galloway is undoubtedly a cracker. In some respects it reminds me of the Guardian’s demolition of the Tory MP Neil Hamilton during the Major years. As a cocky, rather slimy Thatcherite of conspicuously ungentlemanly mien, Mr Hamilton represented everything the Guardian loathed. Similarly, though it
This was not a good war for newspapers. I am not so much thinking of the journalism. Much of it was excellent, though newspapers are obviously at a disadvantage to 24-hour rolling news channels, which not only provide breaking stories but also analysis from people who surprisingly often know what they are talking about. Newspapers
One of the paradoxes of this war is that most of us do not have very much idea of what is going on. That is at any rate what I feel. There are hundreds of brave and talented journalists in Iraq who address us every hour of the day and night on television, and fill
Although much overshadowed by the war in Iraq, environmentalists, businessmen and charity workers met at the World Water Forum in Kyoto last week to discuss why 1.2 billion people still have no access to clean water. The United Nations has set a target of reducing this by half by 2015. But Michel Camdessus, the former
We journalists think pretty highly of ourselves. I don’t mean the chap who touches up photographs of Page Three girls; he may have a proper sense of his place in the universe. I mean columnists, leader writers and foreign correspondents. I mean the undoubtedly brave men and women who stand in the desert in Iraq
In a speech in Ontario a fortnight ago, Leo W. Gerard made an eloquent appeal for the formation of a new ‘worldwide movement for social justice to cure the ills of globalisation’. ‘Two decades of so-called
President George W. Bush has suggested that journalists should be pulled out of Baghdad. You may ask what business it is of his. On the other hand, perhaps he knows better than most of us what is likely to happen to the Iraqi capital over the next few days and weeks. There has been talk
Two weeks ago, I argued here – I hope without any suggestion of great originality – that all crises produce the same people. That is, doves, hawks and a majority which is moderate or opportunistic according to taste. Thus it was possible to compare the present crisis over Iraq with the 1914 crisis over Serbia.
The BSE epidemic is in decline and British beef is once more allowed to be exported. But BSE fears still have their uses. On several occasions in the past couple of years, the United States Department for Agriculture (USDA) has withdrawn several thousand tonnes of Brazilian beef imports from the American market on the grounds
Our old friend Peter Mandelson is alleged to have engineered the removal of Harry Blackwood, editor of the Hartlepool Mail, a newspaper in Mr Mandelson’s constituency. Tony Blair is supposed to have made a telephone call on Mr Mandelson’s behalf which may have been instrumental in Mr Blackwood’s suspension. These and other allegations have been
We are either at Munich, 1938, or Suez, 1956. Depending on whether we are for or against this coming war, one or the other is the favoured comparison. President Bush and Mr Blair, even more so Mr Rumsfeld, would have us believe that we are at Munich. Mr Bush, Mr Blair and, again even more
In the media age, life is a soap opera. For a time we are obsessed with a particular storyline. Then it is resolved, we move on to the next story, new characters are introduced, and the old characters on whose every word we once hung are phased out and forgotten. Two months ago the country
James Tooley recently wrote in these pages of the success of private schools in Africa and India, which in the past few years have exploded in number, offering an education for as little as £3 a term – which even the poor of Somalia can afford. In contrast, he recounted how pupils of government schools