Red Top Rundown
Notting Hill Git
It’s OK – this isn’t another blog about the domestic life of the popular young Leader of the Opposition or his Shadow Chancellor or, for that matter, Ozzy’s mildly disgraced younger bro, who, it’s alleged, is setting up a bookmaking business in his parents’ Notting Hill home while he can’t be a doctor.
I just want to use the headline before the subs on the Sun, the Mirror, or even one of the junior ShagRags get round to it.
News of the World’s ‘Honest Stu’ Kuttner in Court
Matt Driscoll was a hard-working, straight-writing, experienced sports journalist on the News of the World. He’d been told by his boss, Mike Dunn that he was shortly to be promoted chief sports writer. But incoming editor Andy Coulson took against him, and Driscoll was bombarded with a series of baseless disciplinary charges to force him to resign. He subsequently developed a stress-related illness, on the basis of which Coulson and his managing editor, Stuart Kuttner dismissed him. Driscoll has been unable to work since.
Last week the Employment Tribunal at Stratford, East London held the second hearing into the case which Driscoll has brought against the paper for unfair dismissal and disability discrimination.
Sea, sand and the Fake Sheikh
The wi-fi is a little erratic at the Druidston Hotel, perched on a cliff top in the western extremities of Wales. But wi-fi of any sort is unexpected in the wonderful other-timeliness, which is part of the unique charm of this place, one of the loveliest hotels in Wales, if not Britain. Communications are thus a little tortuous, and encourage more time for the greedy filling of lungs with ozone charged with sea spray, heather and bracken while striding the hairy undulations of the coast path.
Nature chucks in a soundtrack of twittering oyster catchers, keening gulls and squawking choughs (oh yes, Mr Oddie), supported by the ceaseless thud and hiss of waves onto the broad sands of Druidston Haven.
The News of the World is indignant.
The News Of The World is indignant this Sunday about local authorities using surveillance techniques to catch Council Tax cheats. There’s always an enjoyable sense of the ridiculous to be had in seeing the Screws working themselves up into a righteous frenzy about someone else doing exactly what they’ve been doing – extensively and sometimes illegally – for years.
In their usual scrappy way, without naming one authority or citing any specific examples, they tell us that ‘Town Hall’ snoopers are using anti-terrorist powers to monitor mobile phone signals to see who is sleeping over with whom, and doing it regularly enough to nullify a single occupancy discount. They quote MP Eric Pickles “the country is walking into surveillance state where spying on citizens has become the norm.”
Yes – and more often than not by the News of the World.
News Management in Georgia
The President of the Republic of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili is a savvy fellow, and he looks it. He’s young (still 40), well-groomed and suited and wouldn’t seem out of place in the swishest of Manhattan offices. He laughs a lot; he speaks fluent, idiomatic American (and half a dozen other useful tongues) and he knows the terms of reference to use. These are all characteristics guaranteed to endear him to large sections of the American administration. Add to that a passion to join the EU and NATO, and there is the basis for a love feast with all the big boys of the Western World. George W is standing right by him (for all the good it will do him), the French have Sarkhozied up to him and even Young Cameron has shot over to see him (for all the good it will do YC).
The Sun Sinks Lower
Those beneficent guys at News International have responded to the “Credit Crunch” (what hack was responsible for this beastly weasel?) in more ways than one.
Two weeks ago, Colin Myler, cuddly Lancastrian editor of the News of the Screws explained to a judge in the High Court that the reason they had chiselled their informant (Woman E) out of half her money for filming Max Mosley’s S&M session wasn’t that she failed to deliver any ‘Zieg Heil’ salutes, but as a result of the Credit Crunch.
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Glad to see the bile level are back to normal.