Here’s a snatch from Goldsmith’s epitaph for Burke, quoted in this piece from Christopher Lydon in conversation with David Bromwich: Here lies our good Edmund, whose genius was such We scarcely can praise it or blame it too much; Who, born for the universe, narrow’d his mind, And to party gave up what was meant ...
Charlie Beckett notes that all this capacity to dig down in depth into other news bases does not mean that somehow there is a new, internet-based global market for news… It’s sort of borne out by this visualisation from the PDF EU event in Barcelona of the patterns in online conversation which take place in ...
Things are getting heavy for Gordon Brown as he heads for his premiership’s first real electoral test in May. Between them, the local government elections, the London Assembly and Mayoral elections, will provide him with a stern test as his first full year draws to a close. Over at Brassneck, I’ve argued that in the ...
Northern Ireland is no longer the compelling reading it once was. With the sublimation of its more fundamentalist elements into a nascent parliamentary democracy, the working out of big politics has left the streets. It is now more conducive to work out difficulties within the smoke filled offices of the First and Deputy First Minsters, ...
Frazer Nelson is one of the sharpest observers of the New Labour project. All the sharper for being well outside Labour’s domestic melodrama of the last few years. On the occasion of Brown’s ascendency he offers some insight into what faces the Tory’s most popular leader since, well, John Major. They can, he now argues, ...
Apparently I’ve been tagged twice for this blog meme idea started by Matt Wardman, so you can see my thoughts on Labour’s new leader below the fold. I’ve deliberately avoided foreign policy, and not laboured exclusively on his handling of the economy. I’ve been tagged by Anthony over at OpenDemocracy, so here’s my late offering: ...
Interesting to see how things shift in a short time ago. A year ago, Guido was getting attacked for (admittedly amongst other things) his attacks on the lobby system at Westminster. Now the venerable Peter Wilby is taking up Guido’s argument with a will. In parts it chimes heavily with my own CiF piece earlier ...
However unnerving it is to hear a politician harangue, however gently, however intelligently, the free press in a free society, it is hard to argue against Tony Blair when he says that the British media has become “a feral beast”. ...
Kevin March employs Onora O’Neill’s Reith Lecture formula to identify a major flaw with lobby journalism: it is a prime piece of non-assessable communication. Why? Marsh writes: The formula: “the minster said this … but what he really meant was this …” is such a familiar formula in political coverage, we journalists don’t even question ...
One interesting aspect in the wash up to the Republic’s election was a minor furore over alleged anti government bias in the Irish media’s coverage. It was sparked by Bertie Ahern’s comments on the Friday count night, that journalists had had a job to do “in return for good pay and expenses”, implying that undue ...
If tragedy appals and evokes empathy, then happier events often give way to pleasant banality. Yesterday was of the latter kind. There seemed little to add to the promise of Northern Ireland’s new political leadership to build a new future, other than to wish them well in realising that promise and let them get on ...
This essay appears in this month’s edition of Prospect magazine. In it I’ve tried to chart the lengthy political career of Ian Paisley, Northern Ireland’s single most enduring political figure whose career spans the period before during and after the Troubles. ...
In March I was asked to respond informally to a presentation by George Osbourne at the RSA on the need to for government to listen to and respond to those outside the official political and professional cadres in central government. The main thrust of his speech related to the economic and technological good sense of ...
Simon at Irishelection.com ably demonstrates the difference between good political PR and bad… Good is when things happen like you say they will, and bad, well, is when people remember if they don’t… ...
It’s more than four years since political bloggers in the US first exerted their considerable collective power. Then they took their first political scalp: the resignation of Republican majority Senate leader Trent Lott over politically embarrassing remarks that were, at first, largely ignored in the mainstream press. ...