Bailey on Freddie

For the benefit of those who missed it yesterday, here's blogger Richard Bailey's compelling verdict on why Andrew Flintoff should never have been chosen to captain England in the Ashes series.

"That we so much as considered giving the Captaincy to a man who presents himself to the Queen pissed is intolerable. That he should continue any where near a position of authority after a 5-0 whitewash and the most spineless English series performance ever, is beyond reason.

"The man is a drunk, a talented one perhaps, but a drunk all the same and I for one am thrilled that he has revealed his true colours and will never again presume to lead England in any context ever again."

Sheer class - or is that classism? Either way, it made me laugh.

Justice for Terry Lloyd

Forty years ago this year, a young Derbyshire police officer by the name of Aled Lloyd was killed in a panda car accident while answering a false emergency call. It was the kind of tragedy that would have broken many families, but with the support of their mother Agnes, Aled's two young sons Kevin and Terry went on to make their respective marks in the world of television, one as an actor, the other as an award-winning journalist.

Against that backdrop, the death of Kevin Lloyd from alcoholism brought on by the pressures of TV stardom in 1998 was bad enough. But the killing of Terry Lloyd by US forces shortly after the start of the Iraq War in 2003 was, for me, the saddest episode in the whole wretched debacle.

So I wholeheartedlty support the campaign launched by Terry's former boss at ITN, David Mannion, to make it a war crime to intentionally kill a journalist.

It is too late for Terry, and for Agnes who died shortly before him. But not too late to hope that some good may yet come of the senseless death of this brave reporter - truly a "local hero" up here in God's Own County.

The enormity of Turnbull's hypocrisy

Good to see Skipper back from a lengthy sojourn in Australia with an excellent post on the Andrew Turnbull "Gordon Brown is a Stalinist" story. I agree with Skip that this will hurt Gordon, and I have no doubt that in the current climate it will have been explicitly designed to do so - but that doesn't alter the fact that Turnbull is a hypocrite of the first order.