Journalism

Two weeks ago in St Moritz I ran into both Nicolas Niarchos and Nikolai von Bismarck, two talented young men and Old Harrovians whose parents are friends of mine. This week I was proud to read the former’s byline and to see the latter’s pictures from the warzone in Ukraine. Good on them, the Fourth Estate could do with talented amateurs rather than world-weary pros. But don’t get me wrong. By amateurs I mean those who write and photograph for the love of their craft, not because it’s their job. I’ve always insisted that the amateur is superior to the pro because he or she glories in the execution of

I’m writing this on my last day in Mexico City, having accompanied my 18-year-old daughter here for the first week of a six-month stay. She’s hoping to become fluent in Spanish before embarking on a degree in languages in September. My mission was to help her find a flat in a nice part of town and a job so she can support herself, and between us we just about managed it, thanks to the help of the local expat community. Mexico City reminded me of being in New York in the mid-1990s, where being British and having the modern-day equivalent of letters of introduction meant an entire social network opened

My first posting as a BBC foreign correspondent was Belgrade in the mid-1990s. Serbia was led by Slobodan Milosevic, practically the only Communist ruler in eastern Europe not to have been overthrown. He survived by reinventing himself as a nationalist, though he kept the Communists’ secret police. Our secretary was accosted one day by a couple of them, nasty-looking thugs in black leather jackets. ‘State Security,’ said one, pushing her into a doorway. They wanted her to inform on me. If she didn’t, they would see to it that her elderly father stopped getting his pension. She told them to get lost, a brave thing to do. To Serbian State

Last weekend, Rolling Stone ran a story about an interview an emergency room doctor had given to a local news station in which, according to the TV reporter, he’d said hospitals in his state were so swamped with patients who’d overdosed on ivermectin that gunshot victims were struggling to be seen. For context, ivermectin is an anti-parasitic drug used for deworming horses that has been touted by vaccine sceptics as an effective prophylactic against Covid-19. For boosters of the Covid vaccines, this story was manna from heaven. Here were a bunch of hicks so dumb they were stuffing themselves with horse pills rather than getting jabbed, with predictably disastrous results.

I write this as a follow-up to last week’s essay on muzzling after making whoopee. I’m on my way to Patmos, an island so difficult to get to, it has kept the great unwashed away. From now it is the only island I will grace with my presence, until the next time, that is. It was Kipling who quipped about journalists having ‘power without responsibility’. He then added the phrase ‘the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’, which was repeated by Stanley Baldwin, not Stanley Johnson. Comparing hacks to harlots is, of course, unfair to the girls. Some of them have risen to the highest offices in the past

‘Whatever you do, don’t call them snowflakes,’ Caroline said the last time I spoke to Oxford students. ‘That’s not a grown-up way of conducting a political debate. It’s like calling you a gammon.’ She’s right, of course, but by God they make it hard. This week we learned that the Oxford University students’ union is planning to elect a ‘consultancy’ of ‘sensitivity readers’ to scrutinise articles in student newspapers before publication to make sure they won’t offend anyone. If the union has its way, the editor of Cherwell, one of Oxford’s oldest student publications, won’t have final say over what’s published in the weekly paper. Once he’s signed off on

A couple of weeks ago Ally Ross, the longtime TV critic at the Sun, was summoned to the managing editor’s office. Such confrontations normally involve expenses. At the Daily Express in the 1950s one Middle East correspondent submitted his — one camel: £125. The narrow-eyed managing editor pointed out that if the camel was bought, it must have been sold, and they would be grateful if the claim was adjusted. Another form turned up 30 minutes later — burying a dead camel: £200. This conversation with Ally was not about money. It was much more serious. It was solemnly explained to him that he had used the word ‘woke’ in

‘Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.’ Those were the words that Kenneth Tynan, the most celebrated drama critic of the 20th century, had pinned above his desk. During my five-year stint as The Spectator’s theatre critic I did my best to follow that philosophy. But according to a new set of guidelines devised by Equity and embraced by the National Union of Journalists, reviews should be ‘balanced, fair and designed to be productive’. Any critic living by that credo would be more likely to raise a yawn than a whirlwind. The guidelines, part of Equity’s anti-racism campaign, have been developed to help critics ‘challenge their own biases and to

Perhaps you remember footage of the wave. It was mostly from traffic cameras, mute but darkly mesmerising. Millions of gallons of Pacific seawater upended by a 9.0 earthquake and hurled irresistibly inland. A few days later I saw what that meant, turning a corner in my hire-car to find the road blocked by a trawler that had been washed ashore. This week, Japan has commemorated the tenth anniversary of the tsunami which killed 15,000 of its people. A seismic tragedy which begat a man-made disaster. Inundated by water, part of the Fukushima nuclear reactor blew up, producing the worst radioactive leak since Chernobyl. It wasn’t long before scores of foreign journalists

I feel like a prisoner, making daily marks on the cell wall to chart the approach of freedom. But will it be freedom, or will we be on parole, obliged to wear a tag and subject to re-incarceration at authority’s whim? Such thoughts do not encourage equanimity. On that subject, I remember a delightfully splenetic political column by the late — alas — Alan Watkins, published a generation ago. As Christmas approaches, even the most acerbic hack feels obliged to relent and sound a little more like Fezziwig, a little less like Scrooge. Perhaps because he was never given to excessive astringency, Alan did not relent. He was complaining about