Alastair's Blog

Greetings from Tirana where this morning I met the Opposition leader before doing a seminar for companies on strategic communications, and this afternoon will see the Prime Minister after doing a session on crisis management. Nobody was talking about Liam Fox, it has to be said. But as I burbled away to my Balkan audience, [...]

At the risk of offending my extremely hospitable hosts in Skopje (capital of Republic on Macedonia or The Former Yuglosav Republic of Macedonia, depending which side of the long and bitter name dispute you’re on)’ I wish I had been in London last night. Because Newsnight asked me to go on to discuss Paul Dacre’s [...]

In addition to phone-hacking and all the other dubious practices employed by newspapers, one of the worst developments in our media over recent years has been the near total fusion of news and comment. I pointed out recently Polly Toynbee’s description of the media herd in the press room after Ed Miliband’s conference speech, all [...]

A few months ago, I felt a little bit like a school-leaver at an interview, going into the offices of Comic Relief to plead for cash for the Time to Change campaign aimed at breaking down stigma and discrimination in mental illness. Together with Time to Change director Sue Baker, I argued that for many, [...]

Having been through a few ministerial media frenzies, and knowing as I do how the press can twist and distort every little detail to feed the frenzy, even with Tories I like to let the benefit of the doubt linger for as long as I can. It partly explains why you will have to look [...]

As Liam Fox and Chris Huhne were embarrassing themselves and the government last night, I won’t have been the only one to have liked the younger, more feminine look of the new shadow cabinet. But I am sure Ed Miliband and his team understand – getting the new team together is the easy bit. Now [...]

I fear I may have been overly kind to the Prime Minister when I described his speech as ‘very average’ on twitter yesterday. This was certainly on the kinder end of the comment spectrum. It would seem even commentators on the right were largely underwhelmed, and instead resorted to saying how Prime Ministerial he looked. [...]

Greetings from Vienna airport where I am waiting for a plane, worrying about the unseasonal heat, getting irritated by a couple who are kissing their dog like it is a baby, and trying to find a single reference to the Tory Party conference in the Financial Times. It is the Europe edition, so unsurprisingly leads [...]

For various reasons I have seen no news coverage and read no newspaper reports of the Tory conference since Sunday morning. This has not been a deliberate snub to one of the two ruling parties, just the result of other things getting in the way. So today I spent a little time wandering around the [...]

I have never felt I have that much in common with David Cameron, but today we share a modest traducement by The Sunday Times. The Prime Minister’s comes in the form of a headline saying ‘Cameron says sorry to women’. What? All of them? What on earth has he done? It turned out to be [...]