He says he's confident

Five out of ten for this story from the BBC:

Prime Minister Gordon Brown is confident he will still be the leader of the Labour Party at the next general election, Downing Street has insisted.

As it's the Beeb, naturally it takes the story from the government's point of view, rather than that of Frank Field, who suggested otherwise. But at least it attributes the claim that Brown is confident to someone else, instead of making the assertion itself.

Meanwhile, the BBC seems as determined as the press to show unflattering pictures of Brown, which is part of his problem. Or is his problem that it is so easily done?

Hurray for Hari

I don't normally take much notice of Johann Hari after he got it so wrong on the Iraq war, but in the Independent today he says that:

In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works.

It's impossible to disagree, even on Israel's "birthday".

Was it spin?

I've done a piece for the New Statesman today, revealing that:

Tony Blair's former chief of spin, Alastair Campbell, may after all have sexed-up the notorious 45 minutes WMD claim when the case for invading Iraq was being made.

Sarkozy gets my vote

Nicolas Sarkozy has withdrawn his backing of Tony Blair to become the first president of the European Union, senior sources have told the BBC.

It is thought he feels EU opposition to the former UK prime minister is too strong because he backed the Iraq war.

Super sceptics

In the Observer, Will Hutton writes about the superclass, who are more powerfull - certainly collectively - than individual governments. He indirectly shows why Rupert Murdoch's papers are anti-EU:

Euroscepticism is the superclass's best friend, as is undermining all forms of multilateral collaboration.

Not lobbygate yet

I've done a piece for the Guardian, about an Information Tribunal ruling (pdf) requiring a government department to disclose details of meetings with business lobbyists, including the CBI.

It will be interesting to see what the government doesn't want us to see, if/when the documents are released.

PR Week has also covered the story.

Ingesting poision

In a long piece in the Independent, Mary Dejevsky asks if Alexander Litvinenko was really murdered and suggests that his death may have been part of a nuclear smuggling plot that went wrong.

She cites an article in the New York Sun by US investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein:

Edward Jay Epstein is not someone whose journalism should be dismissed lightly. He is, to be sure, something of a professional sceptic, but that does not make him wrong. He has in the past exposed stories published in The New York Times as having been essentially dictated by the political establishment. How right he was about the cosy relationship between that venerable newspaper and the Administration was evident from its obsequious coverage of Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction – a humungous error that eventually produced an abject apology.