The front pages
Saturday 5 April, 2014
The broadsheet knives are coming out for Maria Miller; if the Sundays join the hunt she'll be lucky to survive the weekend, whatever Mr Cameron says. Brucie's decision to quit Strictly on the eve of the Grand National produces a dream Saturday front page for the pops. Great headline again from the Sun, less so from the Mirror "Why I quit"? He's 86, for heaven's sake, we could all answer that question without bothering to pick up the paper. The Mail is back to recycling old news with its Prince Andrew story, but it takes a break from attacking poor Romanians to switch the assault to rich Chinese. Chin Chin, as the Sun says
...and the Scottish editions...
Good to see the Scottish front pages give Margo MacDonald a good send-off. And shame on the English editions for giving her such short shrift. Oh yes, there were obits in the Times, Telegraph, Independent and Guardian - but not a line in the news pages of the Times and only a nib in the other three. The Mail, which splashed on her north of the border, also completely ignored her in the general edition.
Margo MacDonald was a driving force in the nationalist and independence movements that have culminated in the referendum that will take place in September. Her Westminster career was brief, but she was a huge influence in Scottish politics - and hence those of the whole of the UK - for four decades. More than a million Scottish expatriates, including some 800,000 in England, have reason to expect better coverage. And so do the English.
It makes sound sense for the Fleet Street papers to have regionalised editions to compete with home-produced rivals in Glasgow, but this is an example of how good stories of wider interest can get lost because someone has shunted them off to the Scottish folder and forgotten them or mistakenly thinks they don't matter.
I know. I've done it.
Margo MacDonald was a driving force in the nationalist and independence movements that have culminated in the referendum that will take place in September. Her Westminster career was brief, but she was a huge influence in Scottish politics - and hence those of the whole of the UK - for four decades. More than a million Scottish expatriates, including some 800,000 in England, have reason to expect better coverage. And so do the English.
It makes sound sense for the Fleet Street papers to have regionalised editions to compete with home-produced rivals in Glasgow, but this is an example of how good stories of wider interest can get lost because someone has shunted them off to the Scottish folder and forgotten them or mistakenly thinks they don't matter.
I know. I've done it.
Friday 4 April, 2014
Nice of the Guardian to rubbish its own headline. How do these things get into print? The Express and Mail are still smogging and the Mirror would be too if it hadn't got another prison crime exclusive. Where do they come from? Only the Times and Telegraph care about the serious story of the day - that a Cabinet minister can filibuster her way through a parliamentary inquiry, be found wanting and still escape with a 31-second apology to the house and her job intact. Maybe the Press is being kind to Maria Miller because she holds their fate in her hands? Surely not. The redtops are off to the races. It's the National tomorrow and it was Ladies' Day yesterday, so fillies and sweepstakes abound. Some things never change.
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Simon Jenkins (Guardian) says there is nothing new about Nigel Farage. He is just another politician adept at exploiting the gap that so easily opens between public opinion and a ruling class grown detached and introverted. Polls show his Ukip appealing not just to disgruntled Tories but a range of the politically dispossessed, particularly those who did badly from recession and expect little from recovery.
Mary Dejevsky (Independent) Nigel Farage may now find it harder to convince as the insurgent. So while playing the outsider card still looks |
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like offering him the best prospects beyond the European elections, he is far less of an outsider – thanks to Nick Clegg - than he was.
Polly Toynbee (Guardian) you know the world has gone mad when people go out to work in the morning and their house has earned more than they have by the time they get back at night. Here we go again, another mighty surge in property values, up and up, 18% in London, 9.2% nationwide, out of reach of ever more people as home ownership drops. |
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Jan Moir (Mail) After his druggy revelations in his best-selling autobiography, why is Russell Brand allowed to go to Hollywood to make films? It seems very unfair and arbitrary, with Nigella being a victim of her own current celebrity and popularity.
Katie Hopkins (Sun) Nigella has lived a blessed life yet took drugs in front of her own children. If she was a single mum on an estate do we really think anyone would be quite so sympathetic |
Thursday 3 April, 2014
The Mirror is alarmist, the Telegraph confused, the Sun witty and the Times is in denial. Everyone has a smog story. Unfortunately everyone has a different smog story, so whether you put on a mask and stay indoors or carry on as normal depends as much on which paper you read as where you live. The Independent fears for a woman who has been in jail in Tehran for five months, apparently over a Facebook status update, the Guardian and the i contemplate either end of children's school careers, and Nigella comes up trumps for the Mail again. Old favourites are also called into service by the Express and Star. Why anyone would think a holiday snap quality photograph of an American woman with a pet kangaroo is worthy of a British national newspaper front page defeats SubScribe.
...and some thoughts on pollution and Afghanistan...
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Jenny Bates (Mirror) We urgently need tough action against pollution, not more half measures and excuses. Fewer polluting vehicles are part of the solution.
Geoffrey Lean (Telegraph) It is not entirely clear why the present pollution has, unusually, received such enormous public attention. One reason may be that the Saharan sand made it especially visible and caught the public imagination – and also gave Whitehall something to blame besides their own failure to clean up emissions at home. Another is likely to be that on Tuesday the Met Office took over the responsibility for providing the Government with pollution forecasts, and enabled Defra to put much more information on its website for those that sought it. John Vidal (Guardian) Blame the Sahara desert for the present air pollution. Blame Europe. Blame climate change – or even the spring sunshine, or the hole in the ozone layer. But if you are in government please don't mention the fact that the toxic air much of Britain has been breathing is mostly of our own making. Stephen Glover (Mail) argues that the most extraordinary thing about our involvement in |
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Afghanistan — which officially ended on Tuesday when our troops in Helmand province handed over control to the Americans — is that neither the political class nor the general public are noticeably worked up about it.
Rageh Omaar (Mirror) We and other Nato countries invaded to dismantle the networks of al-Qaeda and the Taleban supporters so they could not plot more attacks against us. In making us feel safer, the mission succeeded. But progress for Afghans is fragile. The resurgent Taleban is the most potent political and military force here and no other force is capable of opposing them on the ground. Rob Crilly (Telegraph) If, after 12 years and billions of pounds spent on development, we cannot deliver a free and fair election, what will happen next time, when the troops have gone home and the aid has slowed to a trickle? Tolerating the warlords and the ballot-stuffing strongmen might allow us to get out this year. But it sends a bleak signal to those Afghans with the courage to face down Taleban threats and cast their vote on April 5. |
Wednesday 2 April, 2014
Mission accomplished? Britain's Task Force Helmand in Afghanistan ceased to exist yesterday morning, an occasion marked by front page photographs in the Telegraph and Times and an excellent spread in the Sun. The troops will not, of course, be home tomorrow; it will take a year to bring them all back, so we are unlikely to have seen the last Union Flag-draped coffin. n a ceremony at Camp Bastion. The 1,200 personnel still there will now come under American command. The Sun's 'Rip-Off Britain ' campaign is gaining momentum, with the £90 football kit and a case study on a couple in debt as a result of shopping on mail order catalogues. An excellent front page heading that works every way you interpret it and a neat bit of Blue Peterism inside on how to make your own World Cup shirt for a fiver. Last night belonged to the Guardian; today belongs to the Sun.
...and the columnists on five (or ten) a day...
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Zoe Williams (Guardian) Interesting as it is to pick apart the
drivers of ill health, we can ask more searching, immediate questions of, and
demand more accountability from, policymakers. Rather than ask why their
five-a-day message fails, they simply repeat a more demanding message, at
greater volume. It's a level beyond Einstein's definition of stupidity, a modern
giga-stupid.
Rosie Millard (Independent) Five a day was hard enough. But now it’s been doubled. Ten portions of fruit and vegetables which must be eaten, every day, in order to live longer, be healthy and cost the NHS less. So, important to adhere to. But is not everyone – apart from the Innocent Smoothies MD, who must feel he has died and gone to Payola Heaven – greeting this diktat with a sinking heart? |
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Victoria Lambert (Telegraph) Digestion is difficult enough when your body is trying to balance the bloating caused by stress, combined with the corseting effect of a pair of Spanx (or simply your favourite tight jeans). Add in the bacterial effect required to tackle a colander’s worth of cauliflower, green beans and cavolo nero, at just one meal, and we’re talking a knock-on methane-gas climate-change effect which doesn’t bear thinking about.
Zoe Harcombe (Mirror) Five-a-day was a marketing gimmick - it was a slogan to increase the profits of fruit and veg companies. Fruit and veg cannot compete with genuine superfoods when we look at nutrients. |
Tuesday 01 April, 2014
Express vindicated At last! UCL researchers have provided the words to go under the headlines, advising us that if we up our five a day to seven or even ten a day we can expect to live quite a lot longer. The story appears everywhere, including as the splash in the Telegraph, The Guardian does it proud on page three, with a teaser on the front. It has other health issues to worry about, though: whether our hospitals could cope with a major outbreak of infectious disease. The new director of the Wellcome Trust is concerned that the long-winded system for testing new drugs means that it is impossible to respond to new outbreaks, which can sweep across the country in a couple of months.
The Mirror also has some worried doctors on its front - neurosurgeons who are alarmed by the threat to 18 specialist brain cancer centres. "To the layman it's appalling, to the expert, it's appalling," Matthias Radatz, chairman of the Radiosurgery Clinical Review Group, says in a letter to NHS England signed by RCG representatives from every region in England. Dr Radatz adds that patients could be harmed because of delays to treatment and accuses NHS England of acting out of spite or ignorance.
The Independent papers are exercised by the way the banks managed the Royal Mail privatisation, the Mail (daily rather than royal) is still cross with the police and the Times is back on the trail of Islamic threats - this time from the Muslim Brotherhood. The paper quotes officials saying that it was "possible, but unlikely" that the organisation could be banned in Britain because of its links with terrorism. It is already banned in Egypt, after the coup that ousted its leader President Morsi.
Pictorially, white is the colour of the day - with the unveiling of the England World Cup strip and the appearance of Emma Watson at the premiere of the film Noah. She looks stunning in her white halter-neck gown, but of course the Mail couldn't resist telling us - and, indeed, showing us inside, that she was wearing Spanx underneath.
The Mirror also has some worried doctors on its front - neurosurgeons who are alarmed by the threat to 18 specialist brain cancer centres. "To the layman it's appalling, to the expert, it's appalling," Matthias Radatz, chairman of the Radiosurgery Clinical Review Group, says in a letter to NHS England signed by RCG representatives from every region in England. Dr Radatz adds that patients could be harmed because of delays to treatment and accuses NHS England of acting out of spite or ignorance.
The Independent papers are exercised by the way the banks managed the Royal Mail privatisation, the Mail (daily rather than royal) is still cross with the police and the Times is back on the trail of Islamic threats - this time from the Muslim Brotherhood. The paper quotes officials saying that it was "possible, but unlikely" that the organisation could be banned in Britain because of its links with terrorism. It is already banned in Egypt, after the coup that ousted its leader President Morsi.
Pictorially, white is the colour of the day - with the unveiling of the England World Cup strip and the appearance of Emma Watson at the premiere of the film Noah. She looks stunning in her white halter-neck gown, but of course the Mail couldn't resist telling us - and, indeed, showing us inside, that she was wearing Spanx underneath.
...and some views on climate change and emotional abuse of children
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George Monbiot (Guardian) We are being told to accept the world of wounds; to live with the disappearance, envisaged in the new climate report, of coral reefs and summer sea ice, of most glaciers and perhaps some rain forests, of rivers and wetlands and the species which, like many people, will be unable to adapt. As the scale of the loss to which we must adjust becomes clearer, grief and anger are sometimes overwhelming.
Richard Tol (FT) The idea that climate change poses an existential threat to humankind is laughable. Climate change will have consequences, of course. These impacts sound alarming, but they need to be put in perspective before we draw conclusions about policy. Ross Clark (Express) I have long come to realise how environmental science works: it starts from the premise that everything in the natural world is |
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under threat, that mankind is to blame and that only drastic changes can save it. It is bad news if temperatures rise, bad news if they fall, bad news if the climate gets wetter, bad news if it gets drier.
Philip Johnston (Telegraph) There is serious intent behind the idea of criminalising the emotional abuse of a child, either by a parent or wicked stepmother. The question that arises, however, is whether it is necessary or enforceable – the essential requirements of a good law. Erin Pizzey (Mail) We have reached a tipping point. If this extraordinarily dangerous piece of legislation is passed, all parents in Britain effectively become suspects in the eyes of the authorities looking out for those deemed not to love their children enough. |
Monday 31 March, 2014
The Mirror and Sun are in campaigning mood. The Mirror's Kevin Maguire has been out to Doha to see preparations for the 2022 World Cup and returns with horror stories of virtual slave labour in one of the world's richest countries, giving a human face to the death tolls the Guardian has been reporting.
Good to see the Sun concerned with the poor, but not all of its examples fit the bill. It's certainly true that people who use pre-pay meters - mostly the least well-off - pay more for the electricity than those who set up a direct debit, but hospital parking charges hit everyone, rich and poor, so they're not quite as iniquitous (in that sense, at least). The banks deserting the poorest areas, forcing locals to use ATMs that charge them to get at their money, is an interesting - and dismaying - nugget.
The apologetic energy bosses in the Times were not admitting to letting customers down by overcharging and amassing unreasonable profits but for poor customer service. Bit of a let-down that one, really. The Express was surprisingly the only paper to make a fuss of the £10 NHS subscription. The i leads on Labour's promise to cut tuition fees, which was the splash in yesterday's Sunday Times.
The Telegraph led where everyone else followed during the day with the Cinderella law - though, given that police are unwilling even to tackle domestic violence adequately, enforcement may prove well nigh impossible.
The Guardian leads on climate change, focusing on the UN's warning of a threat to world food supplies. The Independent also gave the story a good show inside, but the rest continued to maintain a sceptical stance. The Times tells us on page 21 that climate change will cost "more than we thought". The Telegraph puts the story on the front - but angled on what it will do to UK food prices. Never mind the starving and homeless abroad.
Good to see the Sun concerned with the poor, but not all of its examples fit the bill. It's certainly true that people who use pre-pay meters - mostly the least well-off - pay more for the electricity than those who set up a direct debit, but hospital parking charges hit everyone, rich and poor, so they're not quite as iniquitous (in that sense, at least). The banks deserting the poorest areas, forcing locals to use ATMs that charge them to get at their money, is an interesting - and dismaying - nugget.
The apologetic energy bosses in the Times were not admitting to letting customers down by overcharging and amassing unreasonable profits but for poor customer service. Bit of a let-down that one, really. The Express was surprisingly the only paper to make a fuss of the £10 NHS subscription. The i leads on Labour's promise to cut tuition fees, which was the splash in yesterday's Sunday Times.
The Telegraph led where everyone else followed during the day with the Cinderella law - though, given that police are unwilling even to tackle domestic violence adequately, enforcement may prove well nigh impossible.
The Guardian leads on climate change, focusing on the UN's warning of a threat to world food supplies. The Independent also gave the story a good show inside, but the rest continued to maintain a sceptical stance. The Times tells us on page 21 that climate change will cost "more than we thought". The Telegraph puts the story on the front - but angled on what it will do to UK food prices. Never mind the starving and homeless abroad.
...and a taste from the comment pages...
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Ruth Wishart (Guardian) By suggesting a post-independence currency union was still on the table, the anonymous coalition mole who spoke to the Guardian on Friday has burrowed deep into Better Together's shaky confidence. Better Together has been given a slightly historical ring in a country that has long since grown apart from the world according to Westminster.
Alan Cochrane (Telegraph) Better Together has a board of directors from all three political parties, making Alistair Darling little more than a first among equals. That needs to change. If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, then an operation to save the Union that’s run by a committee is in danger of turning into a turkey. When he confronts his critics this week let Mr Darling make it plain that he’s in charge. Kevin Maguire (Mirror) Dear Scots, I'm anxious you stay to avoid lumbering us with Cameron’s |
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Cons for the foreseeable future. Go your own way and 41 Labour seats disappear while the Tories lose only one. That would’ve awarded Cameron a comfortable Commons majority at the last election.
Chris Huhne (Guardian) Ukip has little to do with policy, and everything to do with fear of change. A European success may temporarily bolster its standing, but it is running up a down escalator. There is the hiss of air escaping from the Ukip balloon. David Aaronovitch (Times) Mr Farage has fallen victim to that most egregious of partisan faults, the belief that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. He hates the EU and the EU is in dispute with Mr Putin, therefore Mr Putin is right. He hates the EU and the Ukrainians like the EU; therefore the Ukrainians are wrong. |
Sunday 30 March, 2014
