Articles

With barely a mention of phonehacking (but a nice line on the Mail) here by popular(ish) twitterdemand is the speech on happiness I made at Birmingham University last night. It was the Baggs Memorial Lecture on the theme of Happiness, a long-running annual event which has seen speakers as varied as Yehudi Menuin and, last [...]

Greetings from Burnley where the rain has just started to fall on the Turf Moor pitch and the first meeting of the advisory board of the new University and College of Football Business is about to begin. An odd way to spend publication day of Power and Responsibility, volume 3 of my diaries, but I [...]

Sorry to sound like a tired old record, but one of the reasons the phone-hacking story will not go away is because at so many stages, the key players have handled it so badly. The latest example is the sudden overnight discovery of emails implicating Andy Coulson in the payment of cash to police officers [...]

Up until now, News International and the government have sought, and to some extent succeeded, in making the phone-hacking story one that is largely about celebrities. Even for popular celebrities, there is little automatic public sympathy for the idea that a journalist or a private detective might listen in to their voicemail messages. ‘They use [...]

As someone who campaigns against stigma and discrimination regarding mental illness, I would like to share with you a letter I received recently from Eileen O’Hara in Manchester. It is self-explanatory. Like many people, Eileen has been reluctant to talk about her own experience of mental illness, but feels she has to speak out against [...]

Too hot to blog … that’s it. Apart from Well Done Andy, get well Adele, get real Gove and welcome Wen Jiabao … I was going to say something meaningful about Anglo-Chinese relations … but it really is too hot. That’s it.

I’ve just had a very nice morning helping launch the University and College of Football Business at Turf Moor, home of Burnley Football Club. It has had rather less attention till today than the AC Grayling and Co New College venture, but it is in its own way as innovative, and it is actually happening [...]

Rowan Williams is right to speak out, and right on the substance. As I know from my time in government, Archbishops can provoke and anger from time to time, but why shouldn’t they? They are people in important positions of moral and religious leadership, and part of their role must be to contribute to political [...]

You can be fairly sure that if The Mail put me as a lead story online, it won’t be because they want me to appear all warm and cuddly. As my daughter has just told me, a 54-year-old former spin doctor getting into a bit of a scrap with a boy band singer, especially one [...]

First of all congratulations to Alex Ferguson and Manchester United. Somehow I cannot see them failing to get a point out of Blackburn or Blackpool, so effectively they are Champions. He has further sealed his reputation as the country’s best ever manager, and Manchester United have overtaken Liverpool as winners of the most titles in [...]