This article was originally written for my new website, salmanshaheen.com There comes a time in every man’s life when two of his most dearly held positions come into conflict with one another and he finds himself questioning what he had hitherto believed sacred. For as long as I can remember, I have held firm to [...]
As readers may or may not be aware, on Boxing Day the Guardian published a column by George Monbiot, lefty commentator and erstwhile Third Estate interviewee. Titled “The day my inner anarchist lost out to the bourgeois me”, the article recounts Monbiot’s encounter in an A&E department with a Traveller man seeking treatment for his [...]
So, as expected, the Leveson Report is proving pretty unpopular in some circles. Most of the objections seem to centre round his lordship’s proposal that self-regulation of the press should now have “statutory underpinning”. This would mean that the way the chair and board of this body are to be chosen would be established in [...]
Ed Miliband accuses the Tories of playing politics with the tanker drivers’ strike. The Mail accuses Miliband of playing politics with the Olympics, because of the party’s funding by the unions (IIIE has already covered the ham-fisted idiocy that is the Tories’ attempts to paint the unions as undemocratic). Guardian commenters (again, let’s not go [...]
OK, I’ll admit it. It was pretty damn funny, and it’s hard to deny that Rupert Murdoch should be somewhere near the top of anyone’s list of ‘people who richly deserve a righteous plate of shaving foam in the face’. Equally, though, it has to be said there’s something which grates about the long-awaited calling [...]
Yes, I know – George who? I hadn’t heard his name either until today, but until very recently he was a spin doctor for the Archbishop of Canterbury (who says the C of E doesn’t move with the times?). The Guardian suggests his departure may have something to do with Rowan Williams’ searingly anti-government New [...]
Aid staff and famine-stricken Somalian refugees expressed their shock today at the News of the World phone-hacking revelations. Françoise Chevalier, 35, a nurse with Médecins Sans Frontières, whose clinics and feeding centres in Kenya and Somalia have been completely overwhelmed by the effects of the devastating drought told our correspondent she was appalled. “Steve Coogan, [...]
In the middle of any media broo-haha there is the possibility that new unanticipated stars can be born. This time we have been blessed with an especially fabulous new z list celeb in the form of hack’s hack, hapless Paul McMullan, who – with his wonky tie, unbuttoned shirt, and impossibly crumpled, maybe slept in, [...]
Hari has now told us that people can sometimes express themselves unclearly in interview – hence the apparently rather frequent need to bend the truth about what was said. One would think, however, that such considerations would be irrelevant to the task of writing a political biography of Che Guevara – after all Johann clearly [...]
So, superinjunctions. Everyone’s talking about them, right? Well, they were on Monday. Not so much now admittedly, our collective attention span being as hummingbird-like as it is. The papers are still full of them, of course, but they’re acting more out of sheer bloody-minded determination to finally publish what they’ve been blocked from printing for [...]
