Guardian

I wouldn’t wish to deny that all drug dealers and crime lords read the Guardian. Indeed, check the circulation figures, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that only drug dealers and crime lords read the Guardian. So, when I read last week about the trouble that GCHQ is now having tracking online criminality, and the way that GCHQ considers recent revelations about state surveillance via the Guardian to be the cause, I did not for a moment think that GCHQ was entirely wrong. I genuinely wonder, though, if the rogue National Security Agency IT boffin Edward Snowden, whom we hear so much about, has damaged national security as much as

There is, you know, quite a bit to be said for having a personal email account for getting stuff off your chest, such as comparing a former girlfriend to a double-decker (don’t ask) and talking about big-titted broads. Any work inbox that your secretary automatically is privy to is, well, not quite the same as one that’s all yours. I’ve taken soundings on this sensitive subject from a friend of mine who is a really good PA, mixes with the mighty and all the rest of it, and she tells me that it’s actually difficult to do the job from her point of view if you don’t have access to

I’m generally a fan of the Guardian’s website, and sometimes write for it, but I’m sick of how much space it gives to ladettes banging on about sex. It’s a firm rule that, to write on matters sexual, you have to be a young female with a jaunty prose style and a strong belief that (fully consensual) sex is GREAT! It’s good dirty fun – if you’re doing it right! Articles that take a more nuanced line are as rare as non-Etonian cabinet ministers. A visiting Martian might be curious to know why this puffing of sex has to come from female writers – don’t men enjoy the bliss of

We live in a recriminatory age, one in which we are only ever a step away from the cringing, self-abnegating apology. Take the case of BBC Newsnight’s latest appointee, as economics editor, a chap called Duncan Weldon. Duncan is doing the tail between the legs thing right now, desperately attempting to excise part of his past in case it puts paid to his promising career in a fusillade of political accusations and an appalled reaction from the general public. The problem is, in his younger days, it seems Duncan worked as an adviser for the deputy leader of the Labour party, Harriet Harperson. ‘It is embarrassing. I was young and

‘Facts are sacred’ claim the Guardian, but some facts are evidently more sacred than others. Mr S was amused earlier this week when the Office of National Statistics rebuked the paper for its splash about the soaring number of ‘zero-hour contracts’. You may recall that the paper reported: ‘The scale of the use of zero-hours contracts has been revealed after official figures showed that nearly 583,000 employees – more than double the government’s estimate – were forced to sign up to the controversial conditions last year.’  Soon afterwards, the Office of National Statistics issued this statement: ‘In response to media reports about “official figures” showing a steep increase in the

On this day in 1989, the World Wide Web was born. Tim Berners-Lee, a contractor at CERN, published a paper called ‘Information Management: A Proposal‘. Although it’s tricky to pin down exactly how and when the Internet was formed, Berners-Lee’s concept of a global system of interlinked pages was key. It wasn’t until a year later when Berners-Lee published a more formal paper, along with the necessary tools to create and host web pages, that the project took the name and form — WorldWideWeb. Since then, the WWW has changed the world in a way that Berners-Lee never predicted. Instead of listing platitudes about all the wonderful things the web

Moro (‘moorish’ or ‘sexist’) is a Spanish restaurant on Exmouth Market, near the bones of the old Guardian and Observer building on Farringdon Road. I don’t mind telling Spectator readers (‘you people’) that I once kissed the bricks of this building, quite seriously, like Jews kiss the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport. (At least that is the story; but I have never seen anyone do it. Kiss some dirty tarmac. What for?) Moro is distinguished as the restaurant in which Guardian journalists first realised Julian Assange is mad. He stood up near an olive and announced he didn’t care if the leaks led informants to be murdered, which is a

Terribly saddened to hear of the death of Simon Hoggart, a lovely writer and to my mind the finest and funniest purveyor of the House of Commons sketch that we have seen. I saw Simon, surprisingly, in concert in Canterbury, around about this time last year, delighting the audience with anecdotes from his many years watching politicians talk rubbish. We went for a curry afterwards and he seemed on good form, if frail from the punishing bouts of chemotherapy. He was a hugely gifted writer; certainly, the only writer in the English language who could tempt me to read anything about wine, other than the words ‘half price £4.99’. His

The media seem to be in a pickle over the removal of a blonde girl from a Roma family in Dublin, which followed the arrest of a couple in Athens who had a suspiciously Nordic-looking child with them. It’s a fascinating story because for the first time I can remember the two great hysterias of our age have finally clashed – racism and child-snatching, the Guardian’s obsession versus the Sun’s. It has also pitted the almost immovable object of media taboo against the unstoppable force of the human-interest story. The highbrow media maintains a sort of code of decency about reporting the Roma, so that you will never read anywhere

I’m starting to get the impression that the Guardian isn’t very keen on Michael Gove, and may not give him the benefit of the doubt in their reporting. The latest offering was this, ‘Genetics outweighs teaching, Gove adviser tells his boss’, which was presumably designed to infuriate teachers, about an essay written by Dominic Cummings. This was followed up by a Polly Toynbee piece denying the role of hereditary factors in intelligence and claiming that it was all part of some government plan to keep the poor in their place. Others have waded in, raising the spectre of eugenics, and I imagine someone is right now composing a comment piece