Guardian

Shockwaves this morning in both Fleet Street and BBC land as the news comes in the Guardian’s bridesmaid, but never the bride, Ian Katz, is finally bored of waiting for Alan Rusbridger to retire and has jumped ship to the BBC. The Guardian's deputy editor will be announced today as the next editor of Newsnight, in an attempt to rearrange the deckchairs on the Beeb's hallmark current events show, which is still struggling to recover from the Jimmy Savile cover up. Katz is not the first left-winger to be appointed by the corporation’s new boss Tony Hall.

Michael Gove likes to make mischief. Every so often he stokes London’s liberal elite into fits of righteous indignation. If he does this out of pure joy, then his latest caper will not have disappointed. This afternoon the education secretary gave a speech to private school headmasters in which he made an important point about the quality of children’s education: ‘I suspect that all of us who are parents would be delighted if our children were learning to love George Eliot, write their own computer programmes, daring to take themselves out of their comfort zone and aspiring to be faster, higher or stronger.’ But Gove couldn’t resist teasing his pious critics: ‘Unless, of course, we write for Guardian Education.

They always manage to pull something special out of the hat at Christmas, over at the Guardian. Last year it was that fantastic woman, an editor at The Ecologist, who agonised over what to buy her son for Christmas that was green, ethical, sustainable and non-materialistic, if you remember, when her son Dimitri just wanted a Nintendo DS and a mini car to drive to school in. This time it is George Monbiot’s special Boxing Day tale of how he came to be terrified by some poor people who were a bit rough looking and had tattoos and dirty fingernails. Utterly hilarious stuff from this supposed leftie; Moonbat (Stowe, Brasenose, scion of a Tory dynasty) was quite appalled and a little frightened.

Jonathan Freedland’s column in The Guardian today, explaining why he can’t vote for Ken Livingstone, is a remarkably direct piece of journalism. Freedland states that he ‘can no longer do what I and others did in 2008, putting to one side the statements, insults and gestures that had offended me, my fellow Jews and — one hopes — every Londoner who abhors prejudice’. Now, as Paul Goodman argues, we shouldn’t overstate the importance of a traditionally Labour supporting Guardian columnist coming out against Ken Livingstone. But Freedland’s reasons for doing so are ones that, I suspect, will resonate with a significant section of opinion. The issue with Livingstone is that his politics are sectional.

So why did Ed Miliband stop his brother being leader of the Labour Party? As each month of his uninspiring leadership passes, it becomes more of a puzzle. In today's Guardian interview, we learn that he can solve a Rubik's Cube in 90 seconds. Perhaps David Miliband took two minutes, leaving Ed to regard him as being intellectually inferior. The rest of the interview shows Ed trying to row back towards positions that David Miliband would have adopted from the offset: trying to claim fiscal responsibility, and credibility. The 'In the black Labour' movement is also an attempt to repair the repetitional damage being wreaked by Balls, whose calls for even more debt still strike the public as implausible.

The Liam Fox imbroglio has just started to make more sense. The original story was broken by The Guardian (of whom more later) and the main source appears to have been one Harvey Boulter, an American mogul whom Fox fatally agreed to meet in June at the suggestion of his friend Adam Werrity. It was the kind of meeting that a civil servant would never have arranged. Boulter was, to use a political term, toxic. He was being sued for blackmail by 3M, in a court case being fought in London, and after landing this meeting with the UK Defence Secretary he tried to use it as ammo.