Guardian

Oh dear. Labour under Jeremy Corbyn is about to get a whole lot stranger. The Labour leader has appointed none other than Guardian columnist Seumas Milne as his ‘executive director of strategy and communications’. Milne starts the job next week and joins on leave from the paper. https://twitter.com/SeumasMilne/status/656540739753615360 The controversial appointment may well do Corbyn some good, in the sense that when compared to the left-wing columnist, Corbyn begins to look like a moderate. While Corbyn has apologised for the Iraq war, Milne has gone further and actually praised the other side. The charming Milne has also commended Russia for ‘challenging’ the West on Syria, blamed the Bush administration for embarking on a path that — he claims — led to terror

In Mhairi Black’s maiden speech in the House of Commons, the young SNP MP voiced her opposition to the Tories by criticising George Osborne over his party’s housing policy. However, despite calling the Conservatives ‘a really dangerous party’ in an interview with the Guardian, it appears Black has at least softened in her approach to some members of the party. The SNP MP says that she has a lot of time for Jacob Rees-Mogg, adding that she could listen to the eurosceptic Tory MP all day: ‘I could sit and listen to him all day, I disagree with him 99.9 per cent of the time, and that wee percent is just because he’s got good

George Osborne was interviewed by Kath Viner, editor of The Guardian, this afternoon and offered some interesting thoughts on Jeremy Corbyn. The Tories have generally kept schtum about the rise of the new Labour leader, focusing instead on the message that he is a danger to Britain’s national/economic security. Echoing the thoughts of Labour’s Jon Cruddas, the Chancellor said Corbynmania is not about the man himself: ‘I don’t think it’s actually about personalities in this sense which is, you know, Jeremy Corbyn is not the cause of the Labour party’s problems, he is a symptom. He was elected by the great majority of Labour members — not just the new people who joined,

The Fabian Society’s question time event at Labour party conference made for a lively debate. Tony Blair’s former staffer John McTernan joined Tim Montgomerie, Labour’s Kate Green and the Guardian‘s Ellie Mae O’Hagan to discuss the future of the Labour party now Jeremy Corbyn is leader. With McTernan criticising Corbyn for a leader’s speech which ‘gave no indication’ that the party had just lost an election, it fell on O’Hagan — who works for the Centre of Labour and Social Studies — to fight Corbyn’s corner. To kick her argument off, the Guardian writer — and Corbyn champion — explained that after the election result she had realised that in order for Labour

The groans that must be coming from the newsrooms of the Guardian and the BBC right now! With a descant of coloratura shrieks from right-on luvvies. And, needless to say, vigorous hand-wringing – they’ll be sending out for Band-Aids to treat their sore fingers by the end of the day. ‘Progressive’ Labour supporters in higher income brackets did not want Jeremy Corbyn to win today. You only have to read the agonised Twitter streams of just about every liberal journalist in the country to realise that. You don’t have to tell me that the man’s policies are bonkers and the sympathies of his far-Left supporters verging on the sinister. But the Guardian/BBC

Oh dear. Is the Labour leadership campaign beginning to get too much for the Burnham camp? After the Guardian announced last night that they would be endorsing Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham’s campaign manager Michael Dugher was quick to tweet a link to the Guardian‘s 2010 endorsement of Nick Clegg. https://twitter.com/MichaelDugher/status/631885221554749441 As this endorsement didn’t work out too well for the Liberal Democrats, some users took this to be a thinly veiled dig by Dugher — who previously worked closely with Labour spin doctor Damian McBride under Gordon Brown — to suggest that the paper’s endorsement is not worth much. https://twitter.com/martingowans/status/631885520239489024 However, Labour’s attack dog appeared to be keen to downplay such suggestions, hastily tweeting

With the newspapers frequently filled with tales of former public schoolboys misbehaving abroad, Mr S was unsurprised to hear reports that a Westminster School alumnus had enjoyed a rather lively flight from Asia to Britain. Still, given that the man in question was aboard the Prime Minister’s private jet, perhaps he ought to have known better. Step forward Patrick Wintour. Word reaches Steerpike that the Guardian‘s political editor has become the talk of David Cameron’s Malaysia trip after being the life and soul of the party on the flight back to Britain. According to Mr S’s mole the journey got off to a bad start when Cameron failed to call Wintour by his name on board, instead

Another conflict of interest and indeed of my mental state. I can think of no journalist I enjoy reading more than Jon Ronson. He is, I think, unequivocally brilliant and my only complaint is that I do not get to read him in the papers more often. His books are very good, too. But this last weekend he turned his attention to Katie Hopkins, a fellow Sun columnist of mine, and he approached his subject as one might approach the inmate of a heavily-guarded lunatic asylum. Some of the stuff in that ludicrous first four hundred words was designed to sell the piece to the (Grauniad) reader, I suppose. But