Media

What is it with the Daily Mirror and its spectacular ability to cock up its front page? We all remember the circumstances that led to Piers Morgan’s (first) spectacular fall. And the current editor is not having such a good run of things either. First there was the splash about British children living below the poverty line, but the photo used to illustrate the piece was taken in America in 2009. And today the paper has an incredible global scoop: Monday’s Mirror front page exclusive: Ebola terror as Sierra Leone passenger dies at Gatwick http://t.co/YijDuBzYtX pic.twitter.com/5eS9SHyV2i — Daily Mirror (@DailyMirror) August 3, 2014   Fortunately, it’s set to remain an exclusive because

The mystery is over. A man named Jonathan Burrows has been exposed as the Stonegate fare-dodger. Our own Charles Moore must share a train with this enterprising man. Back in April, Charles reported what the local gossips were saying: ‘Much speculation where we live about the identity of the Stonegate fare-dodger, one stop up our railway line. He recently paid £43,000 to Southeastern, the franchise holder, to escape criminal charges after five years of constant cheating on his daily commute to London. Obviously no suspicion falls on such fine local citizens as my fellow former editor of this paper, Dominic Lawson, who uses the station, or the great writer Adam

Last year, Rod Liddle waded into the Mary Beard ‘misogyny’ row. You may recall that Beard appeared on Question Time, and then complained about the ‘misogynistic’ abuse she received on Twitter when people disagreed with her. ‘The misogyny here is truly gob-smacking,’ whined Prof Beard. The abuse would be ‘quite enough to put many women off appearing in public’. Nonsense, said Rod. ‘It is nothing to do with misogyny – it is just what people reach for when they, perhaps temporarily, hate someone’. Beard had, Rod said, managed to make ‘what can be politely described as an utter fool of herself’. Rod detailed the insults she suffered in consequence: some

If I were choosing a third parent for a baby, you know, I’d be inclined to choose one of the Williams sisters — the top-notch tennis players. If you want to create a baby with really classy metabolism — and metabolic function is just what the third parent provides — you may as well make it good. But what you can’t do, in creating a baby that’s able to process energy efficiently, is pretend that this is anything other than genetic modification. Yet the Department of Health, in effectively approving the three parent baby technique (actually, it’s always going to be two mothers plus one father), has redefined its categories in

The Daily Dot, founded less than two years ago, is best read while sipping the flattest of flat white coffees. I love it, even though it’s not pitched at me: most of its 11 million monthly unique visitors are ‘millennials’. No UK site integrates tech news into the broader culture so expertly. This is what you can find on the Daily Dot home page right now: ‘A guide to Silicon Valley’s top political donors’; ‘How the paleo diet developed into a cult of nonsense’; ‘Anonymous goes to war with Israel’; ‘Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler freaked out by giant reporter’. Those headlines were brewed by some of the world’s best

Mr S hears that the race to succeed Paxo came down to two candidates: the PM programme’s Eddie Mair and Today’s Evan Davis. Davis’s move frees up the morning slot — with the berth potentially pencilled in for Nick Robinson after next year’s general election. That, in turn, would trigger a race for one of the most coveted jobs in journalism: Political Editor of the BBC. Rest now; but Aunty’s game of musical chairs is far from over.

Well, Michael Gove’s wife, Sarah Vine, has made her views clear: tweeting that the reshuffle was ‘a shabby day’s work which Cameron will live to regret’. Crikey. Talk about ‘stand by your man’: A shabby day’s work which Cameron will live to regret http://t.co/M9SN100PE1 via @MailOnline — Sarah Vine (@SarahVine) July 16, 2014 Should Vine be turning her ire on Lynton Crosby? It was Crosby, so the story goes, who forced Gove out after concluding that his polling numbers were irredeemable. The move has created the greatest conundrum of the generally pretty perplexing reshuffle. If the new Chief Whip polls so terribly, why has he been asked to prosecute the election

If you’re walking through any built-up area in England between 8 and 10pm this Sunday and you hear a cheer you can be pretty sure it means one thing – Germany have scored yet again. One of the great myths we were fed as children in the 1980s and ‘90s was that the English don’t like the Germans, and in particular the living representatives of all things Teutonic on earth, the German national football team. We love ‘em, and I imagine most English people will be supporting Germany on Sunday. I remember being stuck in the countryside in 2006 and watching the Argentina-Germany quarter-final in a pub; the place went