Huw edwards

The mystery of Huw Edwards’s missing phone

The best thing about being a playwright? The satisfaction of creativity. The worst? Press-night parties attended by friends, industry people and celebs. Playwright Terry Johnson says he knows writers who find such occasions so hellish they’ve been put off writing plays altogether. The problem is the corrosive, deeply unsettling belief that everyone is lying to you. Everyone knows the rules: on press night, say something nice, even if it was a giant turkey. No negatives. That’s the critic’s job. But writers know this, so never believe any compliment, ever, even if the person paying it is telling the truth. The only time a writer can be sure of something is

The tyranny of lawyers

Ihave spent most of the morning trying to convince people online that Huw Edwards’s conviction does not mean that all, or even a majority, of Welsh people are sexually attracted to children. ‘We thought it was just sheep. It isn’t,’ one furious interlocuter named only as ‘Ned’ posted with what I assume he thought was bitter irony. Another mentioned that Edwards’s supposed ‘friend’, from whom he procured the disgusting photographs, was also Welsh and that there had been recent, very serious paedophilia cases in both Swansea and Cardiff crown courts. The big lie is that our courts are above the fray and never beholden to the ephemeral influence of politics

Portrait of the week: Stabbings in Southport, a £22bn ‘black hole’ and Tory leadership nominations

Home Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said she had found a £21.9 billion hole, and a black one at that, ‘covered up’ by the Tories in the finances Labour inherited. ‘The biggest single cause of the £22 billion fiscal hole was Reeves’s decision to give inflation-busting pay rises to public sector workers,’ the Financial Times reported. Junior doctors were offered an average rise of 22 per cent over two years. The Chancellor told the Commons that the government was cancelling: the universal winter fuel payment; the cap on the amount people must spend on funding their social care; A-level reforms; and a tunnel near Stonehenge. Jeremy Hunt, the

Jeremy Paxman is right about BBC newsreaders

Once upon a time there was a very powerful news organisation that was watched, respected and loved by almost the whole of the people. And that big organisation put a very special importance on its main news bulletin of the day which it broadcast at nine o’clock in the evening. And all this happened in the faraway land called ‘back then’; and The Word was the BBC’s and the man – for it was always a man – who read out The Word became one of the most recognisable and famous faces in the country. And then things changed and the big organisation became less-loved and its important bulletin became