Conspiracy theory

The Daily Mail's Stephen Glover is asking whether the Guardian was more than a mere spectator, in the recent, failed plot against Brown:

Was it trying to orchestrate events so as to secure the resignation which it had called for in its editorial? If it was involved as a player, the person whose head was deepest in the maul was Polly Toynbee, the Guardian's sometimes overwrought columnist.

Ouch!

Politically incorrect

I didn't update the blog yesterday as I was commenting elsewhere on Jack Straw's outrageous decision to veto the release of the minutes of those two pre-war cabinet meetings.

I did pieces for Comment is Free and Index on Censorship. Not everyone agreed that Straw's veto was a bad thing. Some of the more conservative commentators - and the Conservatives - argued that it was necessary to maintain cabinet confidentiality. The point that a lot of people seem to have missed is that the potential for cabinet minutes to be released has not gone away. Straw said that he was blocking these particular papers because of their sensitivity.

This morning I was briefly in the BBC's Millbank studios, for BBC Radio Scotland's Good Morning Scotland. In the studio booth next to mine was Hazel Blears, who gave me a very friendly smile although I doubt if she has a clue who I am. Blears was I presume talking about her "common sense not political correctness" speech, which will probably go down well with tabloid readers and Telegraph but was savaged in this Comment is Free piece by Ally Fogg.

On the other hand, Straw's veto has gone down very badly with the Daily Mail, which asks:

What do they have to hide?

The Mail gets it

The Daily Mail is, along with the Indy, one of the few papers to really understand what Gordon Brown did yesterday. Ben Brogan says that Brown

left open the possibility that the long-promised inquiry could be put off indefinitely as long as Britain maintains even a small military presence in Iraq.

In a very strong leader, the Mail says:

we need an inquiry now, and not another whitewash conducted by some Government stooge, but a Royal Commission, with wide-ranging judicial powers, which will leave no stone unturned in the search for the true lessons of this conflict. It must be conducted by substantial national figures whose judgment and independence cannot be questioned.

Is Daily Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre deliberately confusing ethics with sexual morality, corruption with sexual misconduct? He has said that the "imposition" of a privacy law by High Court judges:

apart from allowing the corrupt and the crooked to sleep easily in their beds is, I would argue, undermining the ability of mass-circulation newspapers to sell newspapers in an ever more difficult market,"

Dacre's slightly more sophisticated argument is that tabloid papers need to include sexual scandals to get people to buy papers that "devote considerable space to reporting and analysis of public affairs".

Is the Daily Mail really relying on a public interest case for its existence, based on its analysis of public affairs?

Daily Mail comes out against capitalism

"Spivs, sharks and why the champagne corks were popping on Meltdown Monday", reads the Daily Mail headline above a story about hedge funds, short selling and people who actually wanted Lehman Brothers to crash.

Meanwhile, the Guardian asks some unreconstructed lefties what they make of capitalism in crisis. Ken Livingstone says:

Sadly, I don't think this will be the end of capitalism.

Others are more optimistic.

More spin than substance

The Daily Mail seems to have today's best spin story, that NICE, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, spends more on spin than evaluating drugs. It trots out a host of disgruntled patients to express their outrage.

Except that the £4.5 million that NICE "squandered" on communications last year wasn't exactly spin:

NICE said the majority of its communications budget was spent informing doctors about which drugs had been approved and new guidelines for treatments, although it admitted that it had a 'small' marketing budget.

The truth... at last?

Yesterday's story about the Information Commissioner's latest decision on the Iraq dossier was picked up well by the mainstream media and bloggers but studiously ignored by the BBC.

I've even got the Daily Mail on my side. In a leader (at the bottom), the Mail says:

thanks to the Commissioner's principled stand, the truth may at last come out.

It's a shame it took the Commissioner nearly three years to get there, albeit with some significant obstructiveness from the Cabinet Office.

This morning, I have a piece on the Indy's Open House Blog.

Stirring resentment

Meanwhile, the Mail has a rather sad story that:

The mother of crippled paratrooper Ben Parkinson hit out after an Iraqi teenager was paid £2million for being left paralysed by a stray British bullet.

It's a classic contrived tabloid story. Obviously the Mail asked who it could find to be resentful of a large compensation payment to a foreigner. But in the circumstances, Diane Dernie wasn't particularly resentful:

"It's not that we don't think that anyone deserves compensation if they are shot, but it's hard to see why the Ministry of Defence can give all this money to nonmilitary personnel yet doesn't see fit to look after its own.

"As time goes on, we at the sharp end can see how little the £285,000 will stretch."

Myths and the Mail

The Guardian's report that

A wide-ranging police study has concluded that the surge in immigrants from eastern Europe to Britain has not fuelled a rise in crime

Has been picked up by the BBC and the Telegraph (with attribution) but strangely appears to have gone unnoticed by the Daily Mail.