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My first job was working for Index on Censorship, so I instinctively recoil from prior restraint of the media. Nonetheless, there is a difference between censorship and humane editing, and the defence of free speech ultimately depends upon society understanding the distinction. I can see absolutely no merit in Channel 4 broadcasting the photographs of
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Politics in Washington can be an unpleasant affair. But the news that Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, has been sentenced to 30 months in jail for perjury and obstrucion of justice during the investigation into the outing of the CIA agent Valerie Plame is particularly sickening. This whole case has been an absurdity
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A new opera is a major undertaking for any company and one of the challenges is that staff responsible for raising money, enticing audiences and selling tickets can’t know exactly what they’re dealing with in advance. No handy recording to listen to, no DVD of a previous production to slip into their laptops. The problem
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I was depressed to learn yesterday that nineteen people died on a Paramount-operated helicopter in Sierra Leone on Sunday night. They had been travelling to Lunghi airport from Freetown after a football game. Unlike in Europe, where it is usually rich businessmen and football club chairmen who travel back after matches on helicopters, in Sierra
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Jonathan Freedland has a fun piece in The Guardian today on the similarities between Tony Blair and David Beckham. Both have wives with a taste for the finer things in life, both are going to take the Yankee dollar in semi-retirement and both revel in their celebrity. It remains to be seen, though, if the Labour
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Read this excellent piece on the Putin missile row in the DT by Anne Applebaum (a Contributing Editor at the Spectator, when she is not winning Pulitzer Prizes and writing for the Washington Post).
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You would have thought that Lindsey Lohan’s mum would be a little suspicious of the whole showbiz tread mill what with her daughter checking into rehab for a month. But no, she’s in talks to put her two younger children—aged 11 and 14—on a reality show in which she’ll try and turn them into tabloid
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I am a big fan of the London Olympics but I am not a fan of their new logo. It looks like one of the puzzles from the Krypton Factor c.1977 or a very bad local authority advert for a Festival of Fitness. Apparently it is meant to appeal to the “Google Generation”. Dear me,
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ConservativeHome’s regular survey of Tory activists, the same one that got the leadership result pretty much spot on, shows that David Cameron’s popularity with the grassroots has been badly dented by the grammar school debacle with his net satisfaction down from +49% to +22%. David Willetts is bearing the brunt of the party’s displeasure, though.
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Following the Coffee House debate a few days back on the lunacy of referring to “gangs” as “groups”, I was delighted by the revelation in today’s Mail on Sunday that an Islington primary school has decided that the headmaster should now be called the “lead learner”. What would Thomas Arnold have made of that redesignation,
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Major achievements Sir: I enjoyed and applauded Matthew Parris’s piece (Another voice, 26 May). It is indeed time that Sir John Major’s legacy was recognised and that he be remembered for those two acts that will leave what I hope will be an indelible mark on our daily life. Having been involved with cultural institutions
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To John Self, Charles Highway and Keith Talent must now be added another unforgettable Martin Amis character: Tony Blair. Today’s must read is the author’s eyewitness account in the Guardian of the PM’s last days. There are plenty of classic Amis phrases. I particularly enjoyed ; “the white-lipped and bloody-minded persistence of the question of
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Why has the Tory grammar- school row raged for so long? It is glib to suggest, as some have, that it is simply filling a news vacuum as the political world awaits the ascension of Prime Minister Brown and averts its gaze from the slow car crash of the Labour deputy leadership contest. The truth
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Paris Hilton’s coming incarceration and Lindsay Lohan’s trip to rehab creates an opening for a new party girl to keep the paparazzi employed though the summer, the red tops in copy and the rest of us entertained. New York Magazine have done us all a service by providing a guide to the runners and riders
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Bewildered rage has greeted Cardinal Keith O’Brien’s announcement that abortion is a bad thing and that Catholics should be against it. He has been accused of using threatening and inflammatory language and of “punishing” pro-choice Catholic politicians by seeking to exclude them from the Church. He has done no such thing. In a sermon at
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Wales scored a first in the modern political history of Britain this last month. It became the first area of the UK to survive-quite happily-without an elected government. For over three weeks after the inconclusive elections to the Cardiff Asembly the parties squabbled on who should form a coalition. Meanwhile, schools, hospitals and transport systems
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Sergeant Pepper always cheers me up because – aside from its musical brilliance – it is slightly older than I am. Today’s papers are full of readable celebrations of the album’s anniversary, including a Guardian leader and a “where is she now?” piece in The Times on the Lucy of “Lucy in the Sky with
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Now that Big Brother’s returned for its summer run what does it tell us about the political mind of Britain? Leaders-and deputy leaders-come and go, manifestos get launched,opposition spokesmen are sacked and ministers do u-turns. But it’s the cultural mood which decides whether a party’s time is up or not. Brown’s arrival and Brady’s departure,Blears’s bid
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The Portuguese police are now using, of all things, tip-offs from mystics in the search for Madeleine McCann. It is hard to remember a police operation that has been so comprehensively or publicly bungled.
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The Evening Standard has the latest twist in the grammar school row. Dominic Grieve, the shadow A-G, has backed building more grammars in Kent seemingly in contradiction of the party’s no new grammars policy. But CCHQ is spinning that Grieve isn’t going against the party line as more grammars can be built to “maintain the
