Guardian

Kenya We were flown around the country, hovering low over mobs using machetes to hack each other up Each time I sit in St Bride’s on Fleet Street during the memorial of another friend, I look around at the crowds they’ve been able to pull in and feel terribly envious. Riffling through the order of service and then the church’s book of correspondents to find the faces of old comrades, I’m like a man wondering if any guests will bother turning up to one’s own hastily arranged bring-a-bottle party. Our 1990s generation of Nairobi hacks has been severely depleted. While we survivors are not a distillation of complete bastards, it’s

Subscribers will know that I wrote in my column for the magazine this week about the revelations by former journalist Roy Greenslade that he was an active supporter of the IRA throughout the Troubles. But there are a number of people who we should still hear from on this, and have not. One is Greenslade’s long-term editor and defender at the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, now the Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. As I mentioned in my column, in 2000 The Spectator ran a piece by Stephen Glover identifying a Republican cell within the Guardian. Rusbridger responded furiously to this, denouncing the piece, The Spectator, the magazine’s then-editor Boris Johnson, and

What is going on at The Guardian? They don’t like David Cameron, fair enough, but an editorial published earlier on this evening attacked him for only experiencing “privileged pain” following the death of Ivan, his six-year-old, severely-disabled son. Its leading article, published at 8.40pm – and presumably in the print issue tomorrow – had this to say:- Mr Cameron has known pain and failure in his life but it has always been limited failure and privileged pain. The miseries of boarding school at seven are entirely real and for some people emotionally crippling but they come with an assurance that only important people can suffer that way. Even his experience of the NHS,

Q. It was 10 p.m. by the time the canapés appeared and by then it was already too late. The well-oiled guests, including many old friends, were not drawn from the widest gene pool; many of the men had been to ‘school’ and there was a large Oxbridge contingent, of which I was one. I was doing my best to amuse an attractive woman while my wife’s back was turned when the spouse of a well-known Guardian journalist cut me off mid-flow. ‘You’ve come up!’ she declared, apropos of absolutely nothing. ‘You’ve come up a long way, haven’t you?’ It is true that I grew up in an unfashionable part

As if the nation is not already mired in enough scandal, now comes the revelation that half the land in England is owned by just 25,000 individuals and organisations (1% of the population!). How wrong and elitist that sounds when placed beneath a Guardian headline which implies it is a yet another measure of horrible inequality and deprivation. According to Labour MP John Trickett “The dramatic concentration of land ownership is an inescapable reminder that ours is a country for the few and not the many”. But it means nothing at all. We are not an agrarian society. Fewer than one per cent of the population are employed in agriculture.

A couple of days ago I wrote an article uncovering George Monbiot’s shadowy past as an agent of Satan, which was published here. Mr Monbiot took great exception to my suggestion that he kept his extremely privileged upbringing from his readers. He demanded a “correction”. However, when asked to prove that he was upfront about his background he pointed to a handful of articles, some 20 years old, including one with this following line from 2009: “Take one of its finest and most famous holdings: Stowe Landscape Gardens. I know them well, for I enjoyed the astonishing unearned privilege of attending the school that’s housed there.” Not only was it almost

For months I’ve been looking forward to the Guardian’s much-heralded report on racism in Britain, which was unveiled this week. As a nation, we suffer from our fair share of divisions, with new fault lines opening up all the time, but our record when it comes to race relations is pretty good. Surely, a newspaper that prides itself on being guided by the evidence would reflect this? We’re often told by members of the identitarian left that Britain is more racist than most other countries, but I didn’t expect the Guardian to fall for that. When comparing different countries, one way of gauging the level of racism is to ask whether

I know the Guardian is desperate to stop Brexit and will dredge up anything to try to back its case – daily running fanciful predictions of economic Armageddon made by think-tanks as if they were fact, even though those same think tanks have been hopelessly wrong in the past. But honestly, there comes a point when even the newspaper’s editors must be beginning to realise that their demented doom-mongering is making them look ridiculous.     This week the Office of National Statistics (ONS) put out figures showing yet another decline in the number of days lost to sickness by British workers. It is now down to an average of 4.1 days

Here we go. As of Monday, the Guardian is a tabloid – in the physical sense anyway. The paper’s editor Katharine Viner has revealed the new look paper online – complete with masthead: https://twitter.com/KathViner/status/952647642517049344 RIP Berliner…