It was great to hear Katharine Gun the GCHQ whistleblower on Saturday Live this morning talking about the morality of the leaker. I suppose the pretext was the banking crisis, but Katharine used the opportunity to explain why she had revealed details of a US/UK spying operation on the United Nations just prior to the outbreak of the Iraq war
Funny what senior Downing St staff find time to do during the biggest economic crisis for 100 years. Here’s a charming text message I received from Damian McBride, former frontline spinner turned backroom strategy man. It doesn’t really need much explaining except to say that ME is Mike Ellam, the PM’s mild-mannered official spokesman. Rather
I am finding the Downing St reaction to the story about officials asking for copies of Obama’s TV apologies rather mystifying. From their perspective, what’s so wrong with asking for them anyway? Shouldn’t Downing Street keep a close eye on the performance of the US president during his first 100 days? It’s a strange thing
Downing Street is categorically denying the Obama DVD story. Hmmm! I’ll check with my sources and get back to you.
Sadly I had to miss the Channel 4 political awards last night. But it was worth it to be at a reception at No 11 to celebrate young British artists and the not-so-young Young British Artists, if you get my drift. Hosted by Alistair Darling and his wife Maggie, it was a great occasion. Andy
A great edition of Newsnight tonight, featuring an ambush of employment minister Tony McNulty in an empty, echoing Birmingham factory. McNulty had been characteristically honest by saying that things are likely to get worse before they get better. Paxman was right to remind Theresa May that there are still a million fewer people unemployed than
I take my hat off to the Treasury select committee for the spectacle of the hearings on the banking crisis. This is more theatre than genuine scrutiny – but without real powers to subpoena witnesses and force the disclosure of evidence then this is about as good as it’s likely to get. In the absence of real
I caught Walter Isaacson on the Daily Show last night (video here) talking about the future of newspapers and it was pretty scary. Isaacson has written a long piece for Time magazine suggesting that media organisations have to find a way of charging for Internet content or journalism will die. His thinking is that if we
President Obama showed that it was possible to apologise with good grace over his appointment of Tom Daschle and now the masters of the financial universe are falling over themselves to follow his lead. Somehow he turned the fact that he “screwed up” to his advantage, though how many times he can get away with
Patrick McGoohan’s character never made it out of “the village”. But I’m back in London after a six hour journey from Portmeirion, where the series was filmed and don’t seem to have been followed by a giant white inflatable ball. I’ve just watched the first episode of The Prisoner again and it really is as brilliant
Portmeirion is a surreal place at the best of times. But it gets even stranger when you see Clarence Mitchell, the spokesman for the McCanns taking a stroll through this pink and green mini-utopia, shortly before bumping into Yasmin Alibhai-Brown from the Independent, the historian Simon Schama and Julia Hobsbawn, the mad genius behind this
I hope to bring on new talent through this blog, so here’s Tara Hamilton-Miller’s drawing of the panel on social entrepreneurship: From left to right: Robert Phillips CEO of Edelman, Suzanne Moore, David Aaronovich, Professor James Woudhuysen, Oli Barrett, Louise Casey.
I’m posting from the We are Names not Numbers symposium in North Wales and wondering what the founder-builder of Portmeirion, Clough Williams-Ellis, would make of this discussion of individualism in the consumer society. His motto was Cherish the Past, Adorn the Present, Construct for the Future, which could come straight from an American mangement guru.
Good to see Will Hutton writing about Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration in today’s Observer. I am convinced that the government needs to start looking at some seriously imaginative work creation schemes. Not everyone will be capable of putting in roof insulation or laying broadband cables. The WPA produced a generation of artists, writers and actors
What I am about to do makes me more nervous than any other piece of writing I have embarked on since my first forays into journalism in the late 1980s. During most of my career I have had the luxury of writing for “people like me”: the sort of middle-class liberals who read the Guardian