Why weren't expat Scots given a vote?

Here's a front page from the Northants Telegraph that we featured this morning on HoldtheFrontPage as part of our latest round-up of how regional newspapers are covering the independence referendum.

It's not only a great regional newspaper front page, it makes an important point about the forthcoming referendum: namely, that hundreds of thousands of Scots who now happen to be living outside Scotland do not have a vote in it.

I'm not entirely sure how we ended up at this pretty pass, or why David Cameron agreed to a referendum which allows English people living in Scotland to vote on whether Scotland should be an independent country but not Scottish people living in England.

A much fairer solution, surely, would have been to allow anyone born in Scotland who meets the age criteria for the referendum to apply for a postal vote, so long as they were able to provide documentary evidence of their place of birth.  It would also, as Mr Cameron seems to have failed to realise, have made it much less likely that there would be a 'Yes' vote.

As Prime Minister, Mr Cameron could have insisted on this course of action. Had he done so, it would have been very hard for Alex Salmond, as a Scottish Nationalist, to argue that anyone of Scottish birth should be denied a vote.

It is tactical blunders such as this that have led some people to argue that Mr Cameron's position would be untenable if, God forbid, the Scots do vote to break away.  I am afraid I am one of them.

Hillsborough: The apology still missing

After more than 25 years in journalism, much of it spent covering the political arena, there is little that surprises me any more about the lengths to which some people will go in order to preserve their power, position or reputation.

But in the week that the truth about the 1989 Hillsborough football disaster was finally and dramatically laid bare, even an ageing cynic like me has to confess to being shocked by the sheer scale of deception and disinformation involved.

Of course bad apples can crop up in any organisations, and sometimes, as in the case of the West Midlands Crime Squad in the 1970s or, dare I say it, News International in the past decade, this can extend into institutional corruption.

But the fact that so many pillars of the establishment, from the police, to the ambulance service, the coroners’ service, the judiciary, the government and, yes, the media could somehow collude to deny justice for so long almost – but not quite - beggars belief.

Looking back at that old footage of the disaster, it seems in many ways to have happened in another country, a Britain where football was still a working-class game and where the North-South divide was as much a cultural phenomenon as an economic one.

As Labour MP Andy Burnham put it: “There was an 'us and them' culture in the 1980s where people seen as being troublemakers could just be treated as second class citizens - football supporters, people taking industrial action. That was very evident in the North of England when I grew up."

Some believe it couldn’t happen again, that in the age of email, mobile phones and Twitter a cover-up on this scale would be impossible to carry out even if it were to be attempted.

Yet the battle to get at the truth of what happened in more recent tragedies such as the deaths of Dr David Kelly, Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson suggest that perhaps the country has not changed quite as much as might first appear.

If Hillsborough has been a saga that has showed the best and worst of humanity – and there are many heroes to stand alongside the obvious villains - then it has certainly also demonstrated the best and worst of British journalism.

South Yorkshire Police’s deliberate campaign of misinformation found a ready outlet in The Sun, whose then editor was this week forced, to use his own immortal phrase, to empty a bucket of something very nasty over his own head.

Not surprisingly, it was the regional press which demonstrated that journalism can be a potent force for good as well as harm.

It was The Journal’s sister title the Liverpool Echo which, as Labour leader Ed Miliband acknowledged on Wednesday, was primarily responsible for keeping the issue on the political agenda during the long 23-year fight.

But amid all the relief of the campaigners at having finally prevailed, there is, however, one aspect of the truth that is still to come out – the role of Margaret Thatcher.

The documents released this week by the independent inquiry panel make clear that the then Prime Minister was briefed by her aides over the level of deceit by South Yorkshire Police - yet she chose to do nothing.

Is it possible she may have felt she owed them one for helping her win the Battle of Orgreave in 1984 – a decisive encounter in the year-long conflict which ultimately led to the rout of Arthur Scargill’s miners?

She certainly cannot have been expected to show any instinctive sympathy for the victims, having previously been on record as linking football fans to the IRA and the miners as ‘the enemy within.’

In the midst of delivering his “profound apology” to the victims’ families this week on the nation’s behalf, the current Prime Minister David Cameron maintained that the Thatcher government had done nothing wrong.

Well, he had to say that, given the continued emotional hold that the Iron Lady retains over the party which he now rather precariously leads.

But it is nevertheless odd that in the week that has seen everyone from Kelvin Mackenzie to the Football Association to Boris Johnson forced to swallow a large slice of humble pie, there is still one apology missing.

From the woman who sat at the apogee of that complex, interwoven 1980s establishment, there remains an eerie silence.

A tale of three Prime Ministers

Shortly after Rupert Murdoch sacked him as editor of The Times in 1982, the great newspaperman Harold Evans wrote a book about his experiences which he both hoped and believed would devastate the Australian media mogul.

‘Good Times, Bad Times’ remains a classic of its kind and is still pretty much essential reading for anyone wanting to enter our profession, but if the truth be told, its political impact was far more limited than its author had envisaged.

Over the ensuing decades, Murdoch’s continuing accretion of power over the UK media became by and large a subject of interest only to a few left-wing mavericks, with governments of both colours content to indulge the News International chief in the hope of winning his papers’ backing.

Then came the phone hacking affair, propelling the ‘Murdoch question’ to the centre of national debate to the point where it now threatens to eviscerate the entire UK political and media establishment.

This week’s hearings of the Leveson Inquiry into press standards might be termed a tale of three Prime Ministers, each one giving a subtly differing account of his dealings with the Murdoch empire.

Of the three, Sir John Major - who once promised to create a nation at ease with itself - was the only one who looked remotely close to being at ease with himself.

Actually his most intriguing revelation was not about Mr Murdoch at all but the man who defeated him in that 1997 election landslide.

Sir John’s estimation that Tony Blair was “in many ways to the right” of him seems to confirm my long-held suspicion that Tory governments seeking to reach out to the centre-left end up being more progressive than Labour ones which seek to appease the right.

Unlike Sir John, who admitted he cared too much about what the papers wrote about him, Gordon Brown claimed he barely even looked at them during his two and a half years in 10 Downing Street.

This was one of many scarcely believable claims which, taken together, served to undermine the credibility of what otherwise might have constituted a powerful body of evidence.

Mr Brown effectively accused Mr Murdoch of having lied to the inquiry about a 2009 conversation in which the former PM was alleged to have threatened to “declare war” on News International.

Cabinet office records appear to bear out Mr Brown’s version of events, but claiming he had nothing to do with the plot to force Mr Blair out of office might lead some to conclude he is a less than reliable witness.

The contributions from Messrs Major and Brown contained much that will be of interest to future historians, and may yet have a significant bearing on Lord Justice Leveson’s eventual recommendations.

But in terms of the impact on present-day politics, the key session of the week came on Thursday as David Cameron took the stand.

For such a renowned PR man he seemed very ill at ease, perhaps unsurprisingly given the excruciating contents of the text messages which he exchanged with News International boss Rebekah Brooks.

To his credit, though, Mr Cameron did not attempt to shy away from the responsibility for some of his more controversial actions, admitting that he was “haunted” by the decision to make former News of the World editor Andy Coulson his communications chief.

For me, the party leader who emerged with the least credit from the week was not Mr Cameron but Nick Clegg, whose decision to abstain in the vote over Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s future looked like the worst kind of gesture politics.

If they really wanted to see an independent investigation carried out into Mr Hunt’s role in handling the BSKyB bid, they would have voted with Labour, but this was no more than a cynical exercise in political positioning.

In Journal political editor Will Green’s excellent analysis of the state of the Liberal Democrats in the North-East published earlier this week, Gateshead Lib Dem councillor Ron Beadle was quoted as saying that Mr Clegg would not lead his party into the next election.

Party loyalists aside, it is becoming harder and harder to find anyone prepared to dispute that assertion.

Murdoch's power has been broken. Could Cameron's be next?

For the past thirty years, the British political establishment has been in thrall to Rupert Murdoch - the 24th member of Tony Blair's Cabinet as he was once dubbed.

In the course of that period, his media empire has variously decided the outcome of elections, dictated the membership of Cabinets, shaped policies on a wide range of issues and even influenced whether or not the country went to war.

But this Wednesday, the worm finally turned as the Australian media tycoon's bid to buy 100pc of BSkyB was swept away in the storm that has engulfed him in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal.

It was as if three decades of pent-up resentment had suddenly been unleashed in a torrent , as the politicians who have been forced to kow-tow to Murdoch all that time finally broke free of his yoke.

There is a certain historical irony in the fact that it was the dear old House of Commons which finally delivered the coup-de-grace to Murdoch's dreams of further media expansion.

For those of us with long memories, it seemed a fitting reward for the way in which he conned Parliament into agreeing to his takeover of The Times and the Sunday Times in 1981 by giving 'editorial guarantees' he had no intention of keeping.

These undertakings enabled the then Trade and Industry Secretary John Biffen to sidestep a reference to the then Monopolies Commission.

Within a year, Murdoch had broken every single one of them, including sacking the Times' editor and transferring the two titles into a different part of his business.

I will give two small examples from the recent past of how the influence of his empire has distorted the political life of the nation.

In 2009, the now former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks let it be known that David Cameron's Tories would not get their support at the ensuing general election unless Dominic Grieve was replaced as Shadow Home Secretary. He duly was.

Then, last year, James Murdoch made it clear he wanted the Labour government's plans for regional news consortia scrapped. When the Coalition came in, they duly were.

These, however, are relatively trivial examples compared with, for instance, his papers' routine character assassination of certain party leaders and consultations with Tony Blair in the days prior to the invasion of Iraq.

But if Murdoch was undoubtedly the biggest loser of the week, it's not been a great seven days for Mr Cameron either.

Because it was not the Prime Minister who finally led the fightback against the Murdoch empire, but the man who wants his job - Labour leader Ed Miliband.

Mr Miliband undoubtedly took a gamble by calling a vote on the BSKyB bid – but within 48 hours every other party had followed his lead.

His reading of the public mood in this crisis has been consistently ahead of the curve and, for now at any rate, he has drawn a line under the troubles that had beset his leadership earlier in the summer.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, too, ends the week with his position enhanced, again at Mr Cameron's expense.

It was his threat to vote with Labour on Wednesday that forced the Prime Minister into his U-turn on the BSkyB deal, potentially altering the balance of power within the Coalition in the process.

Mr Clegg has also pointedly disassociated himself with the shadow of Andy Coulson's appointment as Downing Street's director of communications that continues to hang over Mr Cameron.

"It was his appointment and his appointment alone. We did discuss it... it was something that we didn’t see eye to eye on," he said.

This is where the phone-hacking scandal starts to play into the much bigger and wider issue of the Coalition's ultimate survival.

Some Lib Dems have started to speculate that Mr Cameron may emerge from the scandal so badly damaged that they could actually bring him down.

I have argued from the start of this Coalition that the Lib Dems somehow have to find a way of getting out of it alive, and this might just be their best opportunity.

We would then not just be looking at the downfall of a media empire, but the downfall of a government.

Phone-hacking casualties pile up - but spare a thought for Gordon

First it was the News of the World, scrapped by its owner Rupert Murdoch in an attempted damage-limitation exercise amid allegations that it hacked into the voicemail messages of, among others, schoolgirl murder victim Milly Dowler, relatives of the 7/7 victims, the families of soldiers killed in Iraq, and - she had to get dragged in somewhere - Princess Diana's lawyer.

Then it was the turn of the Press Complaints Commission, facing the axe after a rare outbreak of consensus between Prime Minister David Cameron, who branded it "ineffective" and Labour leader Ed Miliband, whose favoured adjective was "toothless."

The casualties of the phone-hacking affair continue to mount up, with those still at risk including News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks, and the company's increasingly forlorn hopes of taking over 100pc ownership of BSkyB.

But the big question at Westminster this weekend is whether those casualties will stay confined to the world of journalism and the media - or whether the scandal will eventually claim political scalps.

Phone-hacking has been branded rather too simplistically this week as journalism's equivalent of the MPs' expenses scandal, or even as the politicians' revenge on the trade for having uncovered their duck-island antics two summers ago.

It is nothing of the sort. This is far more than a crisis in British journalism, it is rather a crisis in British public life that goes right to the top of the tree.

No less a commentator than Peter Oborne this week described Mr Cameron as a "profoundly damaged figure" for having hired Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor arrested by police yesterday, and for his friendship with Ms Brooks.

"The series of disgusting revelations concerning his friends and associates from Rupert Murdoch’s News International has permanently and irrevocably damaged his reputation....He has made not one, but a long succession of chronic personal misjudgments," he wrote.

Is this overstating the case? Well, possibly - but if one thing is clear from the past week's events it is that this is a fast-changing story in which assumptions can be very quickly overturned.

Nobody would have predicted a week ago that the country's biggest selling newspaper, an iconic title with 168 years of history behind it, would be abruptly closed. But it has happened.

The most damning aspect of the affair for Mr Cameron is the fact that he was given details about Mr Coulson's possible involvement in phone-hacking before making him Downing Street director of communications after last year's election win.

In his article this week, Mr Oborne disclosed that Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, who was in possession of many of the facts long before they could be published, delivered the warning to Mr Cameron's adviser Steve Hilton prior to the election.

It is inconceivable that Mr Hilton would not have passed on these concerns to Mr Cameron, but evidently the Prime Minister chose to ignore them.

Knowing what we now know of the allegations made against Mr Coulson, that does not just call into question the Prime Minister's judgement, it calls into question his commonsense.

Meanwhile, spare a thought this weekend for Gordon Brown, who wanted to hold the same kind of judicial inquiry into phone hacking that Mr Cameron has announced this week, but was blocked from doing so by the cabinet secretary, on the grounds that it would be too sensitive before the election.

Had he got his way, and the grisly facts tumbled out ahead of polling day, it is very likely that Mr Brown would still be Prime Minister today.

Mr Coulson, who was then Mr Cameron's chief spin doctor, would have had to resign, and the public's doubts about the Tory leader would have been dramatically reinforced.

It's been said plenty of times before, but in politics, as in journalism, timing really is everything.

Local paper reveals Brown is to stay on as an MP

I have to say I was gratified to read this story today, and not just because it gave us a great top story on HoldtheFrontPage this morning.

In my view, Tony Blair's decision to quit as MP for Sedgefield in 2007 in order to swan off round the world making millions of pounds was completely deplorable and an insult not only to his constituents but to the House of Commons.

My heart sank on Tuesday evening when Boulton and Co started suggesting that Gordon would do the same following his resignation as Prime Minister and Labour leader, but of course I should have known better.

Gordon always had that loyalty to his own people that Blair lacked, and there is no way a man with a public service ethic as strong as his would not wish to continue to serve his constituents as a backbench MP. Well done to the Fife Free Press for correcting this ill-informed national media speculation.

Who has the best manifesto for the media?

Check back here tomorrow morning for my verdict on the parties manifestos and yesterday's TV leaders' debate - but in the meantime here's a piece I wrote for HTFP today comparing what the main parties are saying on the key issues affecting the media industry.

Regaining sympathy not the same as regaining trust

The Sun's quite disgraceful personal attacks on the Prime Minister over his letter to Jacqui Janes understandably swung some public sympathy behind him this week. But neither that nor the Glasgow North East by-election result means he is necessarily "safe." Here's today's Journal column.

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Six weeks ago, The Sun newspaper torpedoed Gordon Brown's hopes of a party conference uplift by announcing on the evening of his keynote speech that it would be backing the Tories at the next general election.

At the time, I was among those who sought to downplay the significance of this, arguing on these pages that it was no more than a right-wing newspaper returning to its natural ideological home.

But if I’m honest, I was swimming against the tide on this. Most of the media seem to take The Sun’s own estimation of itself as the paper ‘wot won’ every election since the 1960s completely at face value.

Hence the paper’s switch after 12 years of loyal support for New Labour was reported as a political event of huge symbolic importance which drove yet another nail in the government’s coffin.

Perhaps, though, they were right. We have seen over the past week just what a dangerous opponent The Sun can be when it has it in mind to ‘go for’ a particular politician.

It used an error-strewn handwritten letter he wrote to grieving mum Jacqui Janes expressing his condolences at the loss of her son in Afghanistan to mount a highly personal attack on the Prime Minister.

It’s all becoming very reminiscent of the latter days of John Major – another well-intentioned PM who seemingly could do nothing right and who incurred the wrath of a certain red-top tabloid as a consequence.

Who could forget the Sun editor on Black Wednesday who promised to take two large buckets of something unmentionable and empty them all over poor old Mr Major’s head?

But if that at least had the merit of humour, on this occasion the paper appears to have over-reached itself.

As the sheer ferocity of its attack became clear, the public’s sympathy seems for once to have swung towards Mr Brown.

Ironically, had the paper not previously announced its intention to support the Conservatives, its reporting of the whole episode might have had a greater political impact.

But as Alastair Campbell rightly pointed out: “Precisely because they made such a splash with the switch to the Tories, the wider public now know more than ever that their coverage is politically driven and totally biased against Brown.”

The Sun also has something of a credibility gap with some sections of the public on issues such as these – as David Higgerson, a former Journal political correspondent now plying his trade on Merseyside, was not slow to point out.

“Nobody in Liverpool needs reminding about the sick irony involved when The Sun decides to have a pop at somebody for being insensitive,” he wrote on his blog.

As it is, a difficult week for Mr Brown has ended on a triumphant note with Labour’s unexpectedly comfortable victory in the Glasgow North-East by-election caused by the defenestration of Mr Speaker Martin over his handling of the expenses affair.

It did not take long for the Prime Minister’s loyal ally, Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy, to claim the party’s thumping 8,111 majority over the SNP as “an endorsement of Gordon Brown and what he is trying to do.”

But is it? Earlier this week, South Shields MP David Miliband’s decision to turn down the chance to become EU Foreign Minister led to more speculation that he could yet take as Labour leader before the next election.

A defeat for Labour in Glasgow North-East on Thursday might have raised that speculation to fever pitch.

As it is, the consensus among political commentators last night was that the result will make Mr Brown “safe” from any further attempts to unseat him – but I’m not at all sure they’re right.

The Prime Minister may have garnered some public sympathy this week. But regaining the public’s sympathy is a long way from regaining its trust.

Sympathy for Icarus

Slob returns with a reminder that you should never fly too close to The Sun. More on the red-top's little disagreement with Gordon in tomorrow's weekly column.

A fond farewell

An emotional day today as I travelled to North Wales to bid farewell to my former regional lobby friend and colleague Ian Craig. A sad occasion, for sure, but it was lovely to meet Ian's family and to see so many old faces from my Westminster days. The turnout at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Wrexham, which included one or two senior politicians as well as numerous Press Gallery figures past and present, was yet a further indication of the huge esteem in which Ian was held.

Remembering Ian Craig

Last Friday I received an email from an old friend in the Press Gallery informing me of the death of Ian Craig, until earlier this year the political editor of the Manchester Evening News. We have since covered this sad story on HoldtheFrontPage, while both the Evening News and the North-West media website How Do have also published lengthy pieces.

As will be seen from those links, the tributes have been led by no less a figure than Tony Blair, and whatever you think about the former Prime Minister, the fact that he has chosen to take time out from campaigning for the EU presidency to express his sorrow at Ian's sudden loss is a measure of the huge respect in which this great journalist was held.

For those that don't know, I worked in the same room as Ian for the whole of my nine years in the Lobby. Not only was he someone I was proud to call a friend, but he was a hugely important guiding influence on my career throughout my time there.

As his distinguished former editor Mike Unger has already said, Ian was quite simply one of the greatest political journalists of his generation, and proof if ever it were needed that not all the best lobby hacks are to be found on the nationals.

There was nothing that went on at Westminster that Ian didn't know about - often several days before it appeared in print or was broadcast on the airwaves. But more than that, as the comments on the various threads have shown, he was a true gentleman, whose personal kindness and courtesy towards colleagues and contacts alike were legendary.

I find myself in complete accord with the comments of his former MEN colleague Rodger Clark on HoldtheFrontPage: "You could not wish to meet a finer journalist or a finer gentleman. Ian will be sorely missed."

Ian was one of the people I hoped I would stay in touch with after I left the Lobby in the summer of 2004, and although I did have one last drink with him on a brief visit back there in May 2005, I hadn't seen him since then.

That's modern life I guess. Times change, and people move on. But I never forgot Ian, and I never will.

White lines

Sadly, it seems the big media focus in Brighton all week has not been on Gordon's rather good speech (more on that on Saturday) but on The Sun's decision to switch allegiance from Labour to the Tories - which is really no more than a right-wing newspaper coming back to its natural home.

Of all the many words that have been written about it, The Guardian's Michael White surely put it best. "The Sun's policy switch is dictated by Rupert Murdoch and his well-documented policy of being on the winning side – from here to Sydney, Washington and New York, back again via Beijing."

I have to say I particularly enjoyed the paragraph in which Michael likened the red top's behaviour to "making a discarded girlfriend take the bus home carrying a black plastic bag full of clothes that have just been thrown on to the street. Laddish or what? We should hardly be surprised, should we?"

Those who were in or around the Lobby in 2002/3 will know exactly which well-known Sun journalist this was a reference to. Ouch.

Has Bradshaw been sidelined by Mandy?

I posted this piece earlier today on HoldtheFrontPage's offsite blog The Journalism Hub but I thought I'd cross-post it here as it may have a wider political interest. It concerns the question of who is now taking overall ministerial responsibility for the government's Digital Britain proposals.

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After some confusion as to whether Sion Simon or Stephen Timms would be taking over the Digital Britain brief from the now-departed Lord Carter, Downing Street has now ruled in favour of Mr Timms.

But anyone expecting any degree of clarity from the government over which Whitehall department will be ultimately responsible for implementing the plans will have been sorely disappointed.

The story so far is that Timms will remain in his current role as financial secretary to the Treasury, but with additional ministerial responsibilties at Lord Mandelson's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

In terms of his Digital Britain responsibilities, he will report to the Business Secretary, rather than the Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Ben Bradshaw, whose department has hitherto led on the Digital Britain report and who personally delivered it in an oral statement to the Commmons back in June.

Meanwhile Mr Simon, as creative industries minister, is to undertake some ill-defined supporting-role in relation to those aspects of Digital Britain which are still the responsibility of the DCMS.

The upshot of all this appears to be that Mr Bradshaw, a former Exeter Express and Echo reporter who has recently made some welcome comments about the threat to regional newspapers posed by council propaganda sheets, has been well and truly sidelined.

A cynical interpretation of this would suggest that Bradshaw, who is also a former BBC reporter, was deemed insufficiently impartial to rule on the vexed issue of whether the BBC licence fee should be top-sliced to fund new regional TV news consortia in which the local press is expected to play a part.

Either way, with so many departments and ministers now apparently involved, the words "too many cooks," "dog's breakfast" and "camel designed by committee" all spring to mind.

Wishful thinking

A warm welcome back to Slob....

The new blog

Since I took over the editorship of HoldtheFrontPage just over a year ago, my work has drawn me more and more into media reporting.

We've now launched a news and aggregation blog called The Journalism Hub to highlight some of the wealth of content available on HTFP, as well as on UK journalism blogs and other respected media news sources.

Athough I will be keeping this blog going as an outlet for my political writing and occassional personal rambles, The Journalism Hub is where I'll be doing most of my blogging from now on.

If you're a regular visitor here, and particularly if you're interested in the journalism-politics interface, I hope you'll pay us a visit.

A debt of honour

A few months' back, I ran into a former boss of mine at the Society of Editors' Conference in Bristol. After reminiscing for a few minutes about old times and old colleagues, he offered up the following interesting observation on my career: "You've worked for some pretty nasty people in your time, haven't you?"

He had a point, but thankfully, they've not all been like that, and it was a source of huge pleasure that today, 23 years after he gave me my start in journalism, it fell to me as publisher of HoldtheFrontPage to pen a parting tribute to my first editor, Jeremy Plews.

Jeremy is standing down as editor of the Mansfield Chad later this month after an amazing 36 years in charge. Although I hedged my bets somewhat in the story, I am quite sure he must be the longest-serving editor in the UK and quite possibly the longest-serving since WW2.

He told me with typical generosity that "the best aspect of the job over the years was being able to give a first break to so many youngsters, and the satisfaction gained from seeing many of them go on to success elsewhere." I feel genuinely privileged to have been one of those.

When I was plotting my route into journalism, I never expected to start my career in a place like Mansfield, in the bitter aftermath of the miners' strike and in the midst of the inexorable demise of the Nottinghamshire coal industry. But looking back, I'm bloody glad I did.

Quite apart from all the friends I made in that part of the world - two of whom are now godparents to my son - it was the best damned training I could possibly have wished for on the best damned weekly newspaper in the country. Thanks Jeremy.

An old debate rears its head again

Today's call by the House of Lords' Communications Committee for the introduction of televised lobby briefings inevitably gave me a certain sense of deja vu. They were talking about this back in 2004 when I left the Lobby and, given the usual pace at which things tended to change in that august place, I'm not entirely surprised to find they are still talking about it now.

I suppose that now I am a website editor I ought to be instinctively in favour of the committee's proposal for video-streaming the briefings on the No10 site, but the regional press print journalist in me still suspects that it would be bad news for the sector.

To me, what was so remarkable about the lobby briefings was how incredibly democratic they were, in the sense that a regional political reporter like myself had as much opportunity to ask a question as the political editor of the BBC. That would no longer be the case if they were televised, as the broadcasters would invariably fight to get their questions in first for the requisite news footage.

I was surprised to find that my written contribution to the original Phillis Review on government comunications in 2003 in which this issue was also raised is still available online at the Cabinet Office archive. You can read it in full HERE.

The day Downing Street "lost it"

Most journalists have a favourite story, and most people who knew me in my Lobby days would probably assume mine was the infamous Eddie George gaffe - in which the then Bank of England Governor told me that lost North-East jobs were an acceptable price to pay to curb inflation in London and the South.

But they would be wrong. The story I enjoyed the most was actually written a year earlier in October 1997 and concerned the then Labour Cabinet Minister and South Shields MP, Dr David Clark.

A Downing Street press officer, perhaps mistaking me for someone who could be relied on to unthinkingly recycle the New Labour spin, told me that Dr Clark had "lost it" and would shortly be sacked in a reshuffle. We duly turned the story round, reporting that far from having "lost it," Clark was actually the victim of a smear campaign, and splashed it all over the front page.

But what was No 10 up to, exactly? You can read the full story in my "Where Are They Now" column this month's edition of Total Politics which focuses on the Good Doctor's short but fascinating Cabinet career.

Credit crunch Britain

Throwaway line spotted in Manchester Evening News report on Ronaldo's car smash earlier today:

It has been estimated Ronaldo has spent around £2m on cars since joining United five years ago.

Sadly, such largesse was not quite enough to save the 1,200 workers at Nissan who have lost their jobs today.

Brown spooked by curse of Clough

Nine times out of ten whenever a Prime Minister pays a flying visit to a provincial city to talk about safeguarding thousands of jobs he would expect to make the front page of its local evening newspaper. Unfortunately for Gordon Brown, his arrival in Derby today coincided with the news that Nigel Clough is to follow in Old Big 'Ead's illustrious footsteps as boss of the Rams. No real contest for the Derby Evening Telegraph's splash in this footie-mad city.

It would never have happened back in the days of Alastair Campbell's famous "Grid" of course. He'd doubtless have been on the phone to the club telling them to delay their announcement of a new manager for 24 hours.