Category: “Media”

I would not normally concern myself too much with the sleeping patterns of the editor of The Guardian, but judging by his editorial on the upcoming Leveson Report, I sense a lot of tossing and turning has been going on. Apologies for not providing a link, but I am having a technologically challenged morning, so [...]

For the third time, I failed to persuade Chris Mullin, who would be brilliant if he embraced it, to join Twitter last night. As fellow diarists of the New Labour era, we seem to have become a fairly regular double act and this time he was interviewing me at Chatham House about the influence of [...]

Sunday Times columnist India Knight and the charity MIND got into a good old ding dong yesterday after she wrote a column (which I have posted below) on the slew of celebrity memoirs revealing the author to have had depression. As the row kicked off, she and her supporters sought to justify her piece by [...]

Good fun as ever in Ireland yesterday, with a seminar on alcohol abuse with politicians and policy experts, a meeting with the See Change and Headline campaigns against mental health stigma, a tour of twitter HQ and then off to the Late Late Show. Great to meet up again with retiring (in both senses of [...]

Just as the media were looking for any signs of Vince Cable moving against Nick Clegg this week, so when we come to the Tory conference, there will be an even greater focus on Boris Johnson’s positioning vis a vis David Cameron. Boris, and the possibility of him being the next Tory leader and PM, [...]

In so far as our Prime Minister impinges upon today’s Labour media monitoring unit analysis of the day’s papers, it is via the revelations that he is to appear on a well-known American chat show, and that he is to ‘take to twitter.’ One of Mr Cameron’s closest advisors – no names but he is [...]

Here is a piece the Telegraph asked to do on Mitt Romney’s latest balls-up, his stupid comments on ‘victim’ Americans, and anti-peace Palestinians. We could be reaching the point of no return for Mr R. S and M. Two vital ingredients of any political campaign. No, this is not yet another examination of the Fifty [...]

I woke up this morning to an avalanche of tweets in response to my asking on the way home from Stratford last night why the US, so dominant in Olympic sport, appear to be so relatively marginal in the Paralympics. It is never possible to predict what will get a big reaction on twitter, but [...]

First, before getting onto the subject in the headline, a restatement of the basic message in my excessive tweets re last night’s Paralympics opening ceremony. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Danny Boyle’s Olympics ceremony made me proud to be British, and proud to be Northern. Last night’s made me proud to be a citizen of a country [...]

The excitement (mine) is mounting … Not quite to the peak of the day I trotted out in front of 72000 people at Old Trafford with Diego Maradona (I never talk about it as regulars know) and three other World Cup winners as team-mates … Nor even an excitement to match election days 1997, 2001 [...]