Journalism

I see that Will Self is being lined up as a “writer in residence” at BBC Radio Four. I think this is very good news. Self is an excellent writer and while obviously of the left, is not doctrinaire or predictable in his views. He has wit, he is well-read and very clever. Good luck to him. I commissioned Will to do an essay every week for the Today programme back when I was editor (1998-2003). They were invariably funny, provocative and beautifully expressed; he takes such a pleasure in using our language. But I alternated Will with Freddy Forsyth, who I fancied was a similarly iconoclastic voice, but from the Right. The essays came to an end because the top brass couldn’t abide Freddy, banging on about the EU or immigration or taxes every other week.

The ladies of the London chatterati are at each other’s throats. Left-wing identity politics has been eating itself since the New Year, when the leading feminists of Fleet Street went into battle over who is the better feminist. The  great titan-esses are actually secret subversives determined to surrender their cause to subconscious patriarchy. Well, that’s what you would think if you believe some of the words that have been thrown at the likes of the Times’ Caitlin Moran or the Observer’s Julie Burchill and Suzanne Moore in recent weeks. The barbs are getting sharper. The promotional materials for Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies, the latest offering from Hadley Freeman of Guardian and Vogue fame, have reached me.

Peter York, the ageing Sloane Ranger and style guru, ditched his popped collar and brogues this morning and took to the stage in a Gaddafi-style dictator’s outfit to present the Editorial Intelligence Commentariat the Year Awards. A wistful David Davis proclaimed that he would have ‘loved to be able get away with wearing that’. The metropolitan liberal elite gathered at 7.30am to heap praise upon itself and toast departed friends like Marie Colvin and Christopher Hitchens. Luckily, there was champagne, tiny bacon sandwiches and poached quails eggs to ease the horrendously early start.

Over the pond journalists are one by one being accused of plagiarism, while here our old friend Johann Hari popped back up on my radar. Though the Indy columnist was eventually disgraced for conducting mythical interviews, he never properly addressed other accusations of smearing rivals and colleagues on Wikipedia and in comment sections across the internet. But has he finally apologised to Cristina Odone, one of his more unfortunate victims? She certainly deserves an apology given Hari's alter ego David Rose falsely accused her of anti-semitism and homophobia. According to Guardian columnist Patrick Strudwick, she has finally received one.

This is not a great time to be a tabloid journalist. It is an even worse time to be an out-of-work tabloid journalist. Few tears are shed when red-top hacks lose their jobs and they are consigned to a discard pile that includes unemployed bankers and politicians. This is why the case of Matt Nixson is so unusual. When the phone hacking scandal broke, Nixson had just moved from the News of the World, where he was features editor, to take the same job on the Sun. He was given the push last July amid a flurry of allegations about alleged payments to police and prison officers (Nixson was alleged to have authorised a £750 payment to a prison officer for a story about the Soham murderer Ian Huntley, although he wasn’t told this until five months later).

Imbecilic leftie authoritarians are whining again about being called nasty names by people with less power than them. Exhibit A is the fabulously stupid Islamist Mehdi Hasan, once of the New Statesman and now of the Huffington PostUK, whatever that is. Here’s the emetic opening sentence of his article in today’s Guardian (under the headline 'We Mustn’t Allow Muslims In Public Life To Be Silenced.' Yes, he means himself): 'Have you ever been called an Islamist? How about a jihadist or a terrorist?? Extremist maybe? Welcome to my world.' The abuse he gets, he whines, is 'as relentless as it is vicious'. He complains about being called a dangerous Muslim villain, and a cockroach and so on. Aaawwwwwww. Did they upset you, Mehdi? Did they? You poor little poppet.

Forget the hacks and starlets, the politicians and media moguls, the defining image of the Leveson Inquiry will always be phone-hacking lawyer Mark Lewis’ terrible orange overcoat. The Zara number got inquiry wags and watchers talking and now I hear the coat is about to take a starring role of its very own. Lewis, who suffers from MS, tells me that he will be auctioning the coat for a charity associated with the disease. Form an orderly queue.

I had the strangest call today from an outfit called publicservice.co.uk. A rather pleasant woman, albeit with a slightly insistent phone manner, asked me for my views on work creation and the government’s policy on hard to reach &"NEETS” (horrible jargon for young people not education, employment or training). I have my views, but I also have my own ways of making these known to government, so I asked how the information I gave her would be used. Was someone paying her to provide intelligence? In which case, I wondered how much she was proposing to pay me.