Media

Ah, at last the scales have fallen from Jemima Khan’s lovely fluttery little doe eyes. Having forked out £20,000 towards Julian Assange’s bail, the pouting metro-lefty socialite has come to the conclusion that the bloke is a bit of a rum chap, all things considered. She has even compared him to the barking charlatan who founded Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard and described Assange as demanding from his followers ‘blinkered, cultish, devotion.’ Well, sure – we tried to tell you that at the time, poppet. But you’re still not getting your money back. I wonder if the Ecuadoreans are sick of Assange yet, sitting in the basement of their embassy, referring to himself in the third person and tapping away at his laptop with a messianic look in his eyes?

Journalist Iain Overton is back, in a way. The former head of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism is due to cash in at journalism luvvies’ favourite haunt, the Frontline Club. Overton, who resigned following the Lord McAlpine affair at the end of last year, will be sharing his tips of the trade for a bargain sum of just £150. ‘Investigative Journalism with Iain Overton’ is a one day course that ‘will introduce you to life as an investigative journalist.’ Now you too can learn golden rules like ‘showing the victim pictures of the subject’ and ‘calling up the person you are about to smear on national TV before you go on air’. What could possibly go wrong?

In tomorrow's Spectator, Rod Liddle gives his verdict on the social media storm caused by Suzanne Moore and then Julie Burchill. Liddle suggests that until the 'entire bourgeois bien-pensant left' self-immolates, leaving a slight scent of goji berries, bystanders can 'enjoy ourselves watching them tear each other to pieces, mired in their competing victimhoods seething with acquired sensitivity, with inchoate rage and fury, inventing more and more hate crimes with which they might punish people who are not themselves'. He describes Burchill's Observer  as 'easily the best piece the paper has carried in a decade', and then examines the response of the government and the Observer's editor: 'At which point the government got involved. No, it really did.

Tell me if you have heard this already but it appears that Suzanne Moore has offended the trans-gender lobby. She did this by writing an essay about women’s anger for a Waterstone’s collection of essays, which was then republished by the New Statesman. The following sentence caused deep offence (is there any other kind?): 'We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual.' Faced by the not-inconsiderable wrath of the trans-gender community, Suzanne responded in characteristic fashion with a counterblast in the Guardian: 'In Iceland, they put bankers in prison for fraud. Here, we give them knighthoods. So to be told that I hate transgender people feels a little ... irrelevant.

Anyone remember Mary Fitzpatrick? She was the BBC’s ‘Diversity Czar’ back in the middle of the last decade, paid £90,000 p.a by the licence payer to spout egregious pc bollocks. From a quick Google she now appears to be coining it for doing precisely the same job for the UK Film Council. Nice work, etc. Her most infamous pronouncement, when she was at the Beeb, was that the BBC had too many white foreign correspondents. People reporting from Muslim countries should be Muslim, from Chinese countries Chinese and so on. The audience, this berserk woman suggested, needed ‘valid and culturally accurate’ reportage, which meant far fewer honkeys. Everybody, at the time, said that this was offensive gibberish and the BBC sort of disowned her comments.

Steerpike is back in this week’s Spectator, and here’s a little taster from Wapping: James Harding, the ousted Times editor, left with a £1.3 million payoff in his pocket and the praise of Fleet Street ringing in his ears. But why did he go? A chap who polishes the executives’ shoes at News International tells me that just before the hacking scandal blew up, Rupert Murdoch was planning major changes at the Times. He’d decided to pull the newspaper out of the Press Complaints Commission, just as Richard Desmond had done with the Express. Then he’d pull it out of the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which he felt didn’t reflect the new digital world.

Bestselling author Pippa Middleton has written this week’s Spectator diary*, in which she takes on her critics directly: ‘I have been much teased for my book, Celebrate. Lots of journalists are saying that my advice is glaringly obvious... It’s all good fun, I know, and I realise that authors ought to take criticism on the chin. But in my defence, let me say this: Celebrate is meant to be a guide to party planning and, as such, it has to cover the basics. If I were to write a cookery book, for instance, I would be compelled to say that, to make an omelette, you have to break at least one egg.

Look out for Steerpike in this week's Spectator — here is a taster of what Alan Rusbridger has been up to: Rending of raiment and gnashing of teeth at the Guardian. I’m told that the paper’s veteran editor, Alan Rusbridger, is tipped to take over at the Royal Opera House once the BBC’s director-general designate, Tony Hall, relinquishes control. Quite a wrench for Rusbridger, who has stewarded the profit-averse newspaper since 1995. Last year alone he amassed losses of £44 million, so he’ll be relieved to know that the Opera House comes with an annual subsidy of £28 million from the Arts Council.

Is the net beginning to tighten on Mark Thompson? The Sunday Times have run a story on either the ex-BBC chief, Savile or Newsnight every week since 28 October, and a picture is emerging that Thompson may have known more than we had previously thought about Newsnight's now infamous axed investigation of Savile. I hear that Thompson, now the $4 million chief executive of the New York Times, has been forced to postpone two long-standing open meetings with his new colleagues. He was originally going to chair the ‘Town Hall’ meetings on December 17 and 18. These were supposed to have been ‘a chance for as many people as possible to see me face to face and for us to begin a conversation about the future direction of this great news organization’.