Media

Monday

Steerpike

John Woodcock should know that walls have ears

Labour’s John Woodcock is being teased mercilessly by his colleagues. A recent fundraising event which he organised was secretly recorded – and embarrassing quotes from fellow Labour MPs and candidates, who thought they were speaking behind closed doors, leaked out. Woodcock should know about the sort of dirty-tricks that the parties play on each other. He was the young, wet-behind-the ears bag-carrier who Labour sent out to pretend to be a Tory in order to record events. He got lucky in March 2005 when he caught the Tories’ then Deputy Chairman Howard Flight claiming that the Conservatives would slash spending in power, contrary to their manifesto commitment in that election

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Pesto’s got it: the BBC is too right-wing, obviously

At last, someone has put their finger on the problem, got right down to the real nub of the issue. In an interview, the BBC’s Economics Editor Robert Peston, in a flash of brilliance, defined exactly what is wrong with the corporation – it’s way too right wing. Yes, yes, I know, you’ve been saying the same thing for years and thought nobody was listening. Well, maybe Robert was. Here he is… “If we [the BBC] think the Mail and Telegraph will lead with this [a story], we should. It’s part of the culture.” Next week, David Cameron reveals: “The problem with the Conservative Party is that we have way

Friday

Steerpike

The key to a successful marriage…

Husbands and wives across London gathered last night to hear Tim Dowling’s informed advice on How to be a Husband. At last night’s launch of his book of that title, Dowling told Mr S that marriage isn’t dissimilar from flying in a police helicopter – a task he’d confronted earlier in the day. ‘You get on it, you don’t know where it’s going or why you’re in it,’ he started, before pointing out ‘the difference is that you can’t put children in the helicopter and you can’t get out when the person next to you is being sick.’ Industry friends were present, including publisher William Sieghart, columnists Janice Turner and

Monday

Camilla Swift

The Middleton double standard

I imagine there are very few people who haven’t heard about the Duchess of Cambridge’s clothing catastrophe in Australia. And, of course, this isn’t the first time that the duchess has had clothing issues. The wind has caused her to come a cropper at a variety of events – and who could forget the furore when the French edition of Closer ran pictures of her walking around topless while on holiday in the South of France. But can you imagine what people (and the press) would be saying if, rather than it being Kate, it was her sister, Pippa, whose pants (or lack thereof) had been on show for the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The age of Selfish Whining Monkeys

I had a horrible dream last night that I’ve never had before. In the dream, I knew I had to get up early and couldn’t get to sleep. Every time I checked the clock it got closer to 0600 and I got more and more panicked and frantic. But it was a dream. Most odd. The reason I had to get up early was to talk about my book Selfish Whining Monkeys on the BBC Radio Four Start The Week. The presenter, Tom Sutcliffe, made a point which is often made: that me, and people like me, complain that a whole bunch of serious issues within society are not allowed

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Ukip are like the Russian rebels in Ukraine, says David Aaronovitch. Seriously.

The latest spurt of bile from the metro left about UKIP, and the people who voted for Ukip, comes from the extremely self-satisfied David Aaronovitch, a chap who grows more absurd each year as his waistline becomes ever more vast. Next to nobody voted for UKIP, he maintains. The 73 per cent of the population who didn’t vote for them (the majority of these, of course, did not vote at all) wish the party to simply “go away”. I thought you’d enjoy this extract – he is the first of his breed to compare UKIP supporters to the Russian rebels in Ukraine, who are of course another collective bete noir

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Farzana Iqbal was murdered by Muslims applying ‘sharia’. Why does the BBC not report these facts?

Farzana Iqbal, aged 25, was stoned to death by members of her family in broad daylight on the steps of a courthouse in Lahore, Pakistan, because she had married a man with whom she was in love. This was an “honour killing” and perpetrators use sharia law to justify their murders. Some 1,000 women are killed in this manner in Pakistan each year and an overwhelming majority of the population seems to be in favour of them. Some 91 per cent of honour killings worldwide are “Muslim on Muslim” crimes. In Pakistan, laws introduced in the 1970s, by Zia-ul-Haq, and based on punishments recommended in the Koran and Sunnah, mean

Wednesday

Ed West

The California spree killer: why is that loser’s face all over the media?

Last Saturday a young man in southern California murdered six people. I’m not going to name him or link to his picture because you would have probably seen it anyway, and he does not deserve to be remembered except by his family. He achieved nothing. One of the depressing inevitabilities of such atrocities is the eagerness with which people in the media jump to some sort of political explanation; since many of these killers are men hateful of women or other people generally, and are obsessed with guns, some commentators put this in a wider context of political conflict where scant evidence actually exists. If we were to draw a

Sunday

Camilla Swift

Why Charles Moore could be wrong about the changes at Horse and Hound

As Charles Moore has reported in his Spectator’s Notes this week, changes are afoot at equestrians’ favourite publication, Horse and Hound. Speculating on the decision to replace their editor with a new ‘content editor’, Charles worries that the recent upheaval could damage the ‘brand’ rather than strengthen it. But neither H&H nor its departing editor, Lucy Higginson, are strangers to controversy. Let’s not forget that when Lucy took up the reins in 2002, the arrival of the first female (and the youngest) editor of the 130-year-old publication caused an almighty kerfuffle amongst the old-guard, who worried that her plans to ‘spice up’ the magazine would prove detrimental. The magazine’s new

Friday

Steerpike

Taxi firm Addison Lee’s spiteful prank on ITN

Mini-cab firm Addison Lee exacted cold revenge on ITN last night at about the worst possible time. Slap bang in the middle of the election coverage, they cancelled the news provider’s taxi account. ITN had recently announced that they would be moving the company account to a rival firm, and Addison Lee did not take this news well – suspending their account in the middle of the night on one of the busiest news nights of the year. In a frantic email to all their staff – and crucially the guest bookers – ITN bosses vented their anger: ‘Our decision to move to Green Tomato is based on a number

Thursday

Rod Liddle

I’ve had it with the insufferable London elite. Have you?

‘I’ve had it with these people. They are so smug; they think they know everything and they know nothing. They want a good kick in the face.’ So said a close friend of mine, more usually a Labour voter, before she went out to vote for Ukip earlier today. I think it was the Jasmine Lawrence thing which tipped her over the edge. Jasmine is, improbably enough, the boss of the BBC’s News Channel. She had ‘tweeted’ that Ukip was a sexist and racist party – yesterday. Of course, she should be sacked. Right now. The BBC’s News Channel is supposedly impartial – that’s what we pay for, an impartial service.

Douglas Murray

Matthew d’Ancona has unwittingly shown why people want to vote Ukip

Well it’s polling day, and if anybody wants a spur to vote Ukip they have two options: Peter Oborne’s stirring cover piece in the new issue of The Spectator and Matthew d’Ancona’s column in yesterday’s Evening Standard. If the sight of white activists pretending to be Romanians so that they could accuse black UKIP members of ‘racism’ did not push you over the edge, then d’Ancona’s column probably will. His article was headlined: ‘We must expose UKIP as the racist party it is.’ This is some promise: for years, Ukip’s enemies have been trying to suggest that the party is racist. D’Ancona’s evidence? Ukip seemed to be racist because it –

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh

Is Richard Scudamore allowed private opinions? Apparently not.

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

Tuesday

Ed West

Why people will be voting for Ukip this Thursday

Despite levels of media scrutiny and hostility unseen in recent political history, this Thursday up to 30 per cent of British voters will opt for Ukip. The odd thing is that the more outrageous the slurs made against them, and the wackier the members unveiled in the press, the more their popularity surges, perhaps out of bloody-mindedness; if a Ukip candidate was caught committing autoerotic asphyxiation dressed in a Gestapo uniform tomorrow the party would probably be on 50 per cent by the end of the week. One of the reasons is that Ukip is a product of lowered trust; the party’s supporters have noticeably less trust in politicians than

Douglas Murray

Is Labour a racist party?

Is Labour a racist party? The answer, I believe, is ‘no’. Apart from anything else, some of my best friends are in the party and I cannot think they hate themselves or anybody else simply because of their skin colour. Yet the question must be asked. For just this weekend I was rummaging through recent editions of the Gazette Live (the latest news, sport and business from the North East, Middlesbrough and Teesside) when I happened upon this story: ‘Five Middlesbrough councillors resign from Labour Party and will stand as independents.’ You can read about the whole sorry episode here. But the crux of the article is this: ‘Cllr Junier

Monday

Steerpike

Spot-a-doodle-do! Tony Blackburn’s spot the difference

‘Great meeting Rob Brydon at the Chelsea Flower Show today,’ tweeted veteran broadcaster Tony Blackburn earlier. ‘What a very funny and nice man’ he added with an accompanying picture of his new chum. Except the picture was of the ‘funny and nice’, though significantly blonder, taller and less Welsh Ben Fogle. ‘That is not Rob Brydon,’ he mused later. Yes Tony, we know. Is the heat getting to the old boy?

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

German or Romanian neighbour – which would you choose?

I would rather live next door to a German than a Romanian. I thought I’d just make that clear. I don’t mean I’d rather live next door to SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich than the humorously surreal dramatist Eugène Ionesco. I mean, in general, on average, given what I know about the people from both countries who have come here to live. Not all of them, obviously. Just as a generality, if you were to offer me the choice, without telling me any more about the respective merits of the people concerned, just here’s your choice, Rod – Germans or Romanians. I may be wrong, but I suspect most people in this country, if offered the same choice,

Ed West Ed West

What’s the difference between German and Romanian immigrants?

Nigel Farage is in the papers again today – unbelievably! – this time with a full-page advert in the Telegraph responding to his remarks about Romanians on LBC radio. Such was the universal media condemnation over his interview with James O’Brien that on Saturday even the Sun had an editorial on anti-Romanian racism. You couldn’t make it up. Farage was stereotyping, and his tone of ‘you know what the difference is’ hit the wrong note, which lost him the argument over a fairly reasonable point; that is, the typical profile of a German migrant is very different to that of a Romanian migrant. For example, recent figures released showed that

Saturday

Rod Liddle

My verdict on Newsnight’s new face? Pretty — and awful

I hope you enjoyed the new post-Paxman Newsnight last night, if you still watch the programme. It was bad on a whole new level of badness (watch it here). Presented by an Afghan-Australian woman called Yalda Hakim, of whom I had never heard. Yalda was hampered in her presentational debut by being unable to string a sentence together; nor did she have the knowledge or acuity to ask interesting questions of her guests. On one cringing occasion, the reporter William Dalrymple asked questions on her behalf (of a supporter of the triumphant Indian politician Narendra Modi, who, of course, Newsnight REALLY loathes), because she was unable to. On another occasion, during

Friday

Steerpike

It woz The Sun wot won it

Westbourne’s Change Opinion Awards last night might have got rather feisty. The Sun beat feminist campaigners Stella Creasy and Caroline Criado Perez to the top prize for its ‘Check ‘Em Tuesday’ breast cancer campaign, and the Anti-Page 3 brigade was in attendance. The scene was set for a showdown when the paper’s editor went to collect the award. But all turned out well. The audience was moved by the words of a representative of CoppaFeel! (the charity which ran the campaign in conjunction with The Sun) who told the crowd that she had spoken recently to recovering breast cancer patients who had got checked in time because of the campaign.