Smearing the opposition: déja vu department
From the Sunday Times extract from Paddy Ashdown’s memoirs, published 12 April 09 (Lord Ashdown relates how news of a long-ago extra-marital affair was leaked to the News of the World in January 1992):...
Author: Brian
Mr McBride and Mr Draper: but who let the cat out of the bag? With update 19.04.09
There’s mercifully little to add to the Canadian forests of newsprint and gigabytes of bandwidth devoted to this foolish and shameful caper in which a political adviser at No. 10 Downing Street and a...
The campaign against development aid: a counterblast
From time to time books and articles appear announcing that aid to developing countries does more harm than good. These have proliferated recently, just at the time when the global recession and collapse of...
Flying to New York: not my day
I have posted on Twitter my account of the most memorable features of J’s and my flight from London to New York on Virgin Atlantic a couple of days ago. My Twitter posts (‘tweets’,...
Allow to die, or kill?
Another dispute between parents who wish their child’s medical treatment, however hopeless, to continue, and the hospital doctors, who judge that treatment is burdensome and pointless and should be terminated, has just been decided...
Christmas Diary
My pre-new-year resolution for this diary entry is to resist the temptation to write about the credit crunch, global warming, the bankers, George Osborne, the Pope, the stock exchange, Governor Sarah Palin, the Daily...
On leaking
A lively debate is in progress over on Owen’s blog about leaks of sensitive government information and the best way to deal with them. With apologies for my cowardly reluctance to butt in to...
The Arrest of Damian Green MP: Part 2
According to the BBC’s latest report, The solicitor for the Home Office worker who leaked information [Christopher Galley] says he did it because it was material that was “important for the public to know”....
Arresting Damian Green MP
A huge storm has blown up in the media and among MPs over the action of the police in arresting the Tory front-bench shadow immigration minister, Damian Green, holding him for nine hours (including...
Obamania
Last night was an exciting time to be in New York. Our younger daughter, L, voted in the morning for the first time in an American national election since becoming an American citizen: there...