Category: “Media”

I only agreed to do the Chester Literature Festival because it was on a Friday night and I reckoned there would be a good chance Burnley would be at home on the Saturday. A calculated guess rather banjaxed by the fixtures computer which put us at QPR today – the closest Championship ground to where [...]

Seven years after the suicide of Dr David Kelly, former BBC Director General Greg Dyke suggests it might have been better if the BBC had held its own inquiry into Andrew Gilligan’s false report which triggered the events that led to that tragic death. The fact it has taken him so long to come to such a [...]

If a Labour government had ever come up with a strategic defence review at the centre of which was the idea of aircraft carriers without planes to fly from them, we would never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever have heard the end of it. The cartoonists would live off it [...]

The coalition may have a tricky week ahead of them, but they continue to have media opinion (not to be confused with public opinion) blowing a favourable wind up their bums and into their sails. Or, to put it more favourably for their strategists, they have done a good job in winning the battle of [...]

The Cheltenham Literature Festival seems to get bigger every year. It is possible to see the growth of literary festivals as part of the celebrity culture – so there I was, darling, chatting to Salman Rushdie in the green room, when who should walk in but Alistair Darling and Andrew Marr, then Jilly Cooper rushed over [...]

I’m a bit cross with DC. I didn’t see his interview on Channel 4 yesterday, but it popped up on my Google alert (an excellent device that lets you know who’s saying what about you) when he defended Andy Coulson by saying he attracted nothing like the controversy of me or GB’s man, Damian McBride. Now [...]

Oh how intensely the Beeb’s chatterati and Kremlinologists will be studying today’s coverage of their letter calling on colleagues not to strike next week. I’m not saying you have to have an enormous ego to be one of the Beeb ‘big hitters’ but it helps. So who do The Guardian deem to be the most [...]

As David Miliband was preparing to make his announcement today, I was being interviewed by ITN’s Mary Nightingale at a conference in Prague. It was a business audience and she was asking me about how I thought governments around the world would deal with the fall-out from the global economic crisis, in terms of the [...]

Excellent little off the cuff speech by David Miliband at Labour’s conference today. He has handled himself well in defeat. He has a lot to offer. But just as yesterday I suggested his brother Ed would be well served by trying to ignore all the noise around him as he works on his first conference speech [...]

‘The Special Relationship’ goes out tonight, and in the build-up publicity, the promoters, as with The Deal and The Queen, have been keen to talk up how much research they did, and therefore how historically accurate it is. I would love to see the ‘research’ papers. As it’s going out on BBC2, perhaps someone could [...]