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, ...
I’ve just started a companion blog to Slugger at the Daily Telegraph: Brassneck. The idea is to try take a similarly dispassionate view of British and international politics, and try to get a view of what’s going on underneath the headlines. the blog is notionally after Brass Crosby a former Lord Mayor of London, who ...
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”. ...
Whilst we’ve seen a slow (and radical) shift in the way British papers began by dipping their toes tentatively in the blogosphere water. Now, it seems de rigeur for most of the mainstream. Irish papers have still, by and large, to take the plunge. The Bivings Report has some starter tips for nervous editors, particularly ...
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 ...
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. ...
There is much to be said for some of Polly Toynbee’s argument in her Bagehot Lecture, organised by Queen Mary College recently, and entitled “The art of the column”. Particularly when she argued: ...