You can get rid of dogshit. As I was picking up dog mess on Hampstead Heath recently – my own dog’s mess, I hasten to add – my thoughts naturally turned to ‘Lord’ Peter Mandelson and the current Labour Party leadership crisis. The image of this creature selling his interminable, self-serving, platitudinous and badly-written account [...]
Category Archives: Spin doctors
All things considered, Labour is finished. Next question?
July 25, 2009 – 11:35 pm
The Tories overturned a 5459 Labour majority by 7,348 votes in the Norwich by-election on Thursday in a decisive and pivotal victory. Their turnout was 6% lower than expected, but 70% of the Labour constituency stayed at home watching Big Brother. The Lib Dems came third as usual, giving the lie to those who perennially hope that [...]
We have ways of making you talk, Mr Blair
June 21, 2009 – 2:35 pm
It used to be difficult to shut Tony Blair up, especially on the subject of Iraq. Remember his epic war speech to Parliament, when the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ was repeated more than 15 times? Now he only speaks for $400,000 a pop to neocons or lectures the Pope on theology. He might yet [...]
Thus interprets the UK MP's expenses guidelines, for the (sole) benefit of honourable members
May 18, 2009 – 4:10 pm
All this “I stuck to the Rules” stuff delivered to camera by our alternately defiant or ashen faced betters in the Mother of Parliaments prompted me to take a look at the rules (the “Green Book”) of which we’ve heard so much. It’s less than gripping stuff but, as rule books go, it’s fairly clear [...]
What part of surveillance society don't you understand, Jacqui?
April 27, 2009 – 2:03 pm
It almost beggars belief that the UK government, rebuffed in its anti-democratic plans to use the EU Data Retention Directive as a cover to create a database of all communication between citizens, is ploughing the same sordid furrow, using public data from social networking sites to to create ‘profiles’ of potential subversives. We wrote about this [...]
Email update: Brown sends personal letters of apology and abdicates government blame
April 14, 2009 – 11:12 am
Over 72 hours after the McBride/Draper/Whelan poisoned email plot was revealed, and 12 hours after UK Government Minister Alan Johnson had denied the need to do so on national radio, Gordon Brown stopped saving the world for a minute and tried instead to save his own skin. The fact that he still refuses to issue [...]
Credit crunch contrition from the commentariat
This morning an Editorial Intelligence (EI) briefing on ‘The Credit Crunch Commentariat‘ debated whether the media had talked us into recession or had downplayed the crisis and thus exacerbated its impact. “What, pray, is all the fuss about?” wrote Ex Economist editor, Bill Emmott, in the Guardian in August 2008. “Unemployment is down, the economy is [...]