Any other business

So the Barclay brothers’ bid for Conrad Black’s controlling share in Hollinger International has been vetoed by an American judge. We are back to square one. A lot of time has been wasted. Meanwhile the patient itself — i.e., the Daily Telegraph — is ailing. Mercifully its journalists have called off a strike, though they remain sunk in gloom. But the paper is losing sales (though not on a Saturday) as some readers defect to the tabloid Times or the tabloid Independent. The Telegraph’s management has its own tabloid plans, and a budget of £15 million to launch the thing, but dares not push the button until it becomes clear who the new owner will be. The thought that the sale of the newspaper might take several more months is not a happy one.

The editor of this magazine has asked me to write about a new publication I am planning. You may possibly have read about it. Two weeks ago John Gapper of the Financial Times telephoned me to say he had heard that several people, including myself, were proposing to launch a new upmarket national daily newspaper loosely based on Le Monde, and provisionally called the World. I could hardly deny it. I told Mr Gapper that we had not yet raised the £15.4 million we are seeking, and suggested that he would be jumping the gun if he were to set pen to paper now. Would anyone be interested if we were hoping to start a widget factory but had not yet got the money?

One of the most brilliant myths fostered by Alastair Campbell is the idea of our nihilistic media attacking the government morning, noon and night. It is utter bunkum. Until the Iraq war the BBC gave Tony Blair the benefit of the doubt in scandal after scandal. Among newspapers, the Prime Minister could count on the support of the Murdoch press, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express and, for much of the time, the Guardian and the Independent. The prospect of the war against Iraq, and its aftermath, changed things somewhat. The Independent, Guardian, Daily Mirror and Daily Mail constituted the opposition, but they were outweighed by the Murdoch newspapers and the Daily Express, which were joined by the Daily Telegraph, a traditional Blair foe.

The great food terror is upon us again. On Friday, 23 January the EU Commission banned all imports of chickens and chicken products from Thailand in response to fears over ‘Avian flu’, which two Thais have contracted from the birds: ‘Although the risk of importing the virus in meat or meat products is probably very low the Commission wants to make sure that any possible transmission is avoided.’ The chances of contracting Avian flu from a Thai curry from your local takeaway aren’t just low, they are non-existent. Imports of live chickens and hatching eggs from Thailand to the EU are already banned; all meat that comes here is already cooked or frozen and is no more likely to give you flu than a tigerskin rug is likely to bite your head off.

The assortment of Snodgrasses and Ponsonbys who make up the British Committee for the Restitution of the Elgin Marbles have launched yet another chapter of their long campaign to return the fragmented statues to Greece. How very appropriate, they argue, if the arrival of the marbles were to coincide with that of the Olympic flame later this summer. That is, presumably, assuming the Greek authorities get their finger out and manage to finish the Athens stadium in time; sending the marbles to Seoul, which has offered itself as a back-up location, would seem a little odd. Were the committee’s campaign modelled around the idea of sending Greeks back to Greece, along with their restaurants, oily kebabs and unpalatable retsina, it would quite rightly be reviled as ethnic cleansing.

Is your food industry being forced out of business by nasty foreign importers who insist on selling a similar product at half the price? Don’t worry: just start a health scare. It’s cheap, it’s rapid and the World Trade Organisation hasn’t yet got to grips with the possibilities for promoting protectionism via fear. Last week the American journal Science published a paper by a team from the University of Albany, New York reporting high levels of various contaminants, including polychlorinated biphenyls (pcbs), dioxins and DDT in Scottish farmed salmon. Already one Scottish salmon farm has been driven out of business. It turns out that this is not the first difficulty that the Scottish salmon industry has had in selling its products in America.

Every year, according to a new report by the World Health Organisation, 150,000 people succumb to the effects of global warming, which, it asserts, is responsible for 2.4 per cent of cases of diarrhoea and 6 per cent of cases of malaria. And if we in the first world think we can feel smug, it adds, 25,842 Europeans died in last summer’s heatwave, while Britain sees a 12 per cent increase in salmonella cases for every one degree rise in temperature. But what about all the elderly and infirm people who would have died had this winter been as cold as those frequently experienced in Europe during the 19th century? Strangely, these non-deaths do not appear to feature in the World Health Organisation’s one-sided ledger on the effects of global warming.

Within the next few weeks Lord Hutton will publish his inquiry. None of us can know where, if anywhere, his axe will fall. Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, may be feeling his neck a little anxiously. So too will Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter whose story about Downing Street ‘sexing up’ the September 2002 dossier lies at the very centre of this drama. It is certain that the Hutton report will be at least mildly critical of Mr Gilligan. He has himself admitted, or almost admitted, to having made some errors. He was unwise to suggest on the Today programme on 29 May — since he had no proof — that the government inserted into the September dossier its claim about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction being deployable in 45 minutes while knowing it to be false.

There seems scarcely to be a person alive who does not hope to acquire ' or know someone who hopes to acquire ' the Telegraph group in the coming year. The names of former Daily Telegraph editors and managing directors, and even one or two still on the payroll, are associated with this or that possible bid. The Barclay brothers, who own the Scotsman, are said to be making inquiries. The interest of the Daily Mail and General Trust and of Richard Desmond, owner of the Express group, is, of course, already well known. American publishers are being cited, though none has so far said that it will make a bid. What this tells us is that the Telegraph group is a highly desirable property. It was not always so.

Jane Root, the controller of BBC 2, has decided to axe the award- winning current affairs programme Correspondent. Thirty years ago there were a number of such programmes on the BBC, and the disappearance of one of them would scarcely have been noticed. But in Greg Dyke’s increasingly dumbed-down BBC, Correspondent is probably unique, and so its passing is of some significance. In consigning it to his-tory Ms Root reveals a great deal about herself. According to her, the programme’s title conjures up visions of ‘an Eton- educated guy in a white linen suit’. It will be replaced by an international current affairs series called This World which, we can be certain, will be entirely free of Old Etonians and linen suits.

Writing from the Commons for the Daily Telegraph this week, though alluding to him, I went to tortuous lengths not to name the MP whom a Sunday newspaper had exposed as the subject of the latest 'gay sex scandal'. Why should I have mentioned him in the first place? Because only the day after the Mail on Sunday had made him famous, he strolled into a committee's proceedings as if nothing untoward had happened to him. In my line of work, it was therefore impossible not to mention him. He did not say a word, but his presence distracted all of us. We were at the standing committee on the inter-governmental conference on the European Union's proposed constitution.

Given President Bush’s refusal so far to lift his illegal tariffs on steel imports, European retaliation is almost inevitable. But a potentially even graver battle is brewing between the US and its fourth largest trading partner, China. Last year America ran a $103 billion-dollar deficit with China, something US unions blame on ‘unfair’ trade practices. Last month US commerce secretary Don Evans warned the Chinese that they faced retaliation, saying, ‘China’s current trade practices are exploiting our open markets and are creating an unfair advantage that is undercutting American workers.