Guardian

With the Guardian still to name their new editor-in-chief, the Economist has thrown down the gauntlet by appointing their first female editor. Zanny Minton Beddoes will succeed John Micklethwait to be the magazine's next editor, making her the first female editor in its 172 year history. Formerly the publication's business affairs editor, Minton Beddoes interviewed for the post last Thursday, beating off competition from Tom Standage, the magazine's digital editor, and the foreign editor Ed Carr. It's thought that her wealth of knowledge about the US from her time working in Washington made her the favourite for the coveted role.

Je suis Charlie indeed. This is the problem with placards — there is rarely enough room to fit in the caveats, the qualifying clauses and the necessary evasions. I suppose you could write them on the back of the placard, one after the other, in biro. Or write in brackets and in much smaller letters, directly below ‘Je suis Charlie’: ‘Jusqu’a un certain point, Lord Copper.’ Then you can pop your biro into your lapel as a moving symbol of freedom of speech. Only a few of the British mainstream national newspapers felt it appropriate to reproduce the front cover of the latest, post-murder, edition of Charlie Hebdo, which shows the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH, natch) saying: all is forgiven.

As Mr S revealed yesterday, The Guardian has vetoed brown sauce for their palatable readers, confining it to be fit only for lowly members of the establishment. Champagne, on the other hand, is still okay. The paper are running a bubbly tasting session tonight which will allow their readers to ‘break down the barriers of this exclusive domain’ and give them the skills to ‘be able to talk about champagne with confidence’. With ticket prices listed at £99, only the paper’s finest champagne socialists need consider attending.

When Alan Rusbridger announced his departure from The Guardian, two questions presented themselves. The first was: who will succeed him? And the second — admittedly far less interesting — was: which Oxbridge college will he end up dumped in? The answer, we now learn, is Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford. Lucky old them. It's a sign of the phenomenon which The Spectator’s Peter Oborne outlined: the inexorable rise of the media and political classes. Rusbridger is no academic — he was a chorister at fee-paying Cranleigh School and then he read English Literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge. But aside from that, he's spent most of his life on Fleet Street.

Alan Rusbridger’s announcement that he will stand down in summer 2015 as Guardian editor after 20 years has fired the starting gun on one very long succession battle. Current online boss Janine Gibson is a firm favourite with Kath Viner the struggling US editor not far behind. Other wannabes include Jonathan Freedland -  the newly anointed head of comment - Emily Wilson from Guardian Oz and Deputy Editor Paul Johnson, if he is interested. Mr S would tip Political Editor Patrick Wintour, a journalist with a solid pedigree, as the dark horse.

The author of a rather brilliant little book about football could just hold the key to Labour’s otherwise negligible prospects in next year’s election. Jim Murphy is the last of the devout Blairites left on the scene, following the fratricidal killing of David Miliband, the departure of James Purnell to big bucks at the BBC, and the decision of the head of the church himself to spend more time with his mansions. After 2010, the Ed Miliband team reshuffled him out to international development. Murphy is direct, angry, utterly undeferential and passionate about everything he does.

I have the honour of having my Ch4 Dispatches documentary, now available online, reviewed by Michael White in the Guardian today. I think he was expecting me to lay into Labour, and critiques the show as if I did. In general, I seem to be charged with being in possession of opinions about inequality while being right-wing. I plead guilty, but would still like to offer up a few points in mitigation. First, let’s take the original headline of his piece: 'Fraser Nelson’s Dispatches show blames Labour for inequality.' I don’t. As I say right at the start: 'Decades of government policy intended to help the poorest is now hurting them instead.

The furore over Jonathan Jones’s criticism of 'Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red' (or the Tower of London poppies, as they’re more familiarly known) has been both understandable and unsurprising, an early foray in what promises to be a four-year-long argument over how best to commemorate the dead of the First World War. Jones’s article caused outrage by condemning the memorial as ‘prettified and toothless’, symptomatic of ‘the inward-looking mood that lets Ukip thrive’.

This is an extract from Hugo Rifkind's column in this week's Spectator, out on Thursday Poor Julian Assange. Call me a contrarian but I’m genuinely starting to feel sorry for the guy. He’s just made such a mess of his life, hasn’t he? And with such promise. Only a few short years ago he was the world’s most prominent anti-everything activist, with hair like an indie guitarist, feted and worshipped wherever you might find hot Scandinavian revolutionaries, smug old men who work for ‘theguardian’ and Jemima Khan. Now he’s a hermit with hair like Noel Edmonds who lives in a cupboard. It’s a hell of a fall. Most crushingly, he’s become a figure of fun.

‘Richard Dawkins, what on earth happened to you?’ asks Eleanor Robertson in the Guardian today. Ms Robertson is a ‘feminist and writer living in Sydney’. She follows to the letter the Guardian’s revised style guide for writing about Prof Dawkins: wring your hands until your fingers are raw, while muttering ‘Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown’. For some time now Dawkins has been saying rude things about Muslims and feminists. This makes him a bigot in the eyes of the Left — and especially the Guardian, which is extraordinarily and mysteriously protective of Islam. As Robertson puts it: ‘Sure, he wrote some pop science books back in the day, but why do we keep having him on TV and in the newspapers?