One might have thought that the case of Christopher Lillie and Dawn Reed – recently awarded £200,000 each in libel damages against the authors of a local government report which made fantastic claims of child abuse – would sound a warning to the government to avoid joining the general hysteria about paedophilia. But not a
Usually, at this time of the year, I am wandering, or renting, in Western Europe. But, for various reasons too uninteresting to recount here, I am spending this August at home. This removes the one drawback of being on holiday abroad: the search, in la France profonde, or wherever, for the British newspapers; and the
In April the Daily Mirror relaunched itself as a more serious newspaper. Its editor, Piers Morgan, got rid of its red masthead. He hired supposedly upmarket writers such as John Pilger and Christopher Hitchens, and resurrected the famous Cassandra column. Mr Morgan invoked the name of Hugh Cudlipp, who edited the Daily Mirror in the
‘Fair trade’ coffee has become as much a staple of the middle-class kitchen as organic carrots and free-range eggs. But, for the fair-trade lobby, voluntary gestures are not enough. They are lobbying the US government, with some signs of success, to establish a ‘coffee purity act’. Under these provisions, all raw or ‘green’ coffee imported
The message was brief and the writer got straight to the point. ‘I’d just like you to know that you are a fucken cocksucker,’ it read, ‘and that your article on Leeds supporters was a load of absolute fucken bullshit. You’re a stupid fucken predjudice [sic] half-wit.’ After more of the same (yawn) it was