Guardian

It is difficult to describe with equanimity the culture shock that has been administered to Arts Council England, the 69 year-old benefits office for the creative industries. Invented by Maynard Keynes to nurture the grass shoots of an English renaissance with a few quid here and there – £25,000 for Covent Garden, £2,000 for the LSO – ACE has burgeoned into a mighty quango that distributes £1.9 billion of public cash and £1.1 billion of lottery money over three years. It feeds not only the performing arts but museums, galleries, monuments, public libraries, poetry and pottery. It is a nanny state in miniature which, over the past generation, has become

Alan Rusbridger’s announcement that he will stand down in summer 2015 as Guardian editor after 20 years has fired the starting gun on one very long succession battle. Current online boss Janine Gibson is a firm favourite with Kath Viner the struggling US editor not far behind. Other wannabes include Jonathan Freedland –  the newly anointed head of comment – Emily Wilson from Guardian Oz and Deputy Editor Paul Johnson, if he is interested. Mr S would tip Political Editor Patrick Wintour, a journalist with a solid pedigree, as the dark horse. Former deputy editor Ian Katz would have once upon a time been top of this list, but his departure to

The author of a rather brilliant little book about football could just hold the key to Labour’s otherwise negligible prospects in next year’s election. Jim Murphy is the last of the devout Blairites left on the scene, following the fratricidal killing of David Miliband, the departure of James Purnell to big bucks at the BBC, and the decision of the head of the church himself to spend more time with his mansions. After 2010, the Ed Miliband team reshuffled him out to international development. Murphy is direct, angry, utterly undeferential and passionate about everything he does. Remember him doggedly campaigning to keep the Union during the Scottish referendum, lugging his

I have the honour of having my Ch4 Dispatches documentary, now available online, reviewed by Michael White in the Guardian today. I think he was expecting me to lay into Labour, and critiques the show as if I did. In general, I seem to be charged with being in possession of opinions about inequality while being right-wing. I plead guilty, but would still like to offer up a few points in mitigation. First, let’s take the original headline of his piece: ‘Fraser Nelson’s Dispatches show blames Labour for inequality.’ I don’t. As I say right at the start: ‘Decades of government policy intended to help the poorest is now hurting them instead.’ Blame lies with all

The furore over Jonathan Jones’s criticism of ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’ (or the Tower of London poppies, as they’re more familiarly known) has been both understandable and unsurprising, an early foray in what promises to be a four-year-long argument over how best to commemorate the dead of the First World War. Jones’s article caused outrage by condemning the memorial as ‘prettified and toothless’, symptomatic of ‘the inward-looking mood that lets Ukip thrive’. It didn’t help that the original article (Jones has since published a further defence of his position) gave a supercilious and rather unpleasant account of the people who had come to see the installation: loftily, Jones

This is an extract from Hugo Rifkind’s column in this week’s Spectator, out on Thursday Poor Julian Assange. Call me a contrarian but I’m genuinely starting to feel sorry for the guy. He’s just made such a mess of his life, hasn’t he? And with such promise. Only a few short years ago he was the world’s most prominent anti-everything activist, with hair like an indie guitarist, feted and worshipped wherever you might find hot Scandinavian revolutionaries, smug old men who work for ‘theguardian’ and Jemima Khan. Now he’s a hermit with hair like Noel Edmonds who lives in a cupboard. It’s a hell of a fall. Most crushingly, he’s

‘Richard Dawkins, what on earth happened to you?’ asks Eleanor Robertson in the Guardian today. Ms Robertson is a ‘feminist and writer living in Sydney’. She follows to the letter the Guardian’s revised style guide for writing about Prof Dawkins: wring your hands until your fingers are raw, while muttering ‘Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown’. For some time now Dawkins has been saying rude things about Muslims and feminists. This makes him a bigot in the eyes of the Left — and especially the Guardian, which is extraordinarily and mysteriously protective of Islam. As Robertson puts it: ‘Sure, he wrote some pop science books back in the

Zero-hours contracts: refuse to work with one, and you might lose your benefits. To the Left, it’s preeminent proof of the Coalition’s malevolence, a brightly blazoned slave contract clutched in a cold Tory fist. So it’s no wonder that the lefty press has seized upon Beyond Caring, Alexander Zeldin’s new play about the invisible working poor, as one big ‘fuck this Government, basically‘. The Guardian starts its puff-preview with a reminder that ‘16 per cent don’t get the hours they need to make ends meet and one-in-four would like more work‘ (we hear little about the other 84 per cent). The original report from which the Guardian selectively quotes in fact concluded that ‘zero-hours

A moron has written a letter to The Guardian. I realise that this is not ground-breaking news. In the journalistic canon it is very much “dog bites man”, sure. But this brief letter exemplifies the mind-set of these awful, stunted, absolutist people. The letter was from a man called Conor Whitworth, and was in regard to a “Q&A” piece the in the Guardian magazine the previous week about the cyclist Chris Froome, one of those pieces where a sleb has to answer fatuous questions. Here’s Conor’s letter in full: “Morals are important to Chris Froome, he says in his Q&A. Wonder why he lives in Monaco?” – Conor Whitworth, Nottingham.