More Right Attacks on Cameron

If you judge a man by his enemies, then David Cameron is doing pretty well as a centrist, consensus minded One Nation Tory. Barely a day goes by without the sirens of the right launching yet another whinge in his direction. Tim Montgomerie, the editor of online site Conservative Home, now regularly breaks cover from the safety of his internet operation to take the battle into the frontline of the papers that bloggers enjoy deriding as the 'dead tree press'. In the Mail last week, and the New Statesman this week, he is busy sounding his by now familiar message of "Woe to Cameron who won't listen to his right-wing backbenchers'. Time was when Montgomerie used to have something interesting to say, but his record got stuck some time ago.

He's joined by the usual variety of right-wing nay-sayers in the predictable corners of the press. James Kirkup, holding forth in that long-term battalion of Thatcherism the Daily Telegraph, provides a detailed analysis of Cameron's governing style which concludes that, er, he's not very good at it. The sort of conclusion, from that source, that's right up there with the shock announcement that Christmas Day will fall on December 25th. this year.

However, amidst the sound and fury of a right-wing that feels ignored, and yearns for the glory days of Thatcherism when we didn't have to put up with the whiney Liberals in government and could watch the Tory vote gradually disappear from the urban areas and that bit of England we know as the North, there are some warnings for Cameron. Not least, his need to sharpen his defence of his government's agenda, and step in early to pre-empt regular attempts to undermine him from his parliamentary opponents. Perhaps his new Communications appointment will help him in this. Meanwhile, there are still several publications that haven't yet printed Mr. Montgomerie's Variation on a Theme so keep a good look out for more of the same.

Post-Mubarak Fears

One Egypt based blogger expresses his fears of the anarchy that might envelop Egypt in the aftermath of the current protests. Hope for a better future competes with such pragmatic pessimism.

Egypt's Eruptions Show Signs of Spreading

President Saleh of Yemen certainly gets it, although possibly too late. He has announced he will not be seeking re-election in 2013, ahead of Yemen's own planned 'day of rage' on Thursday. It may still not be enough, as the extraordinary 'people action' which started in Tunisia continues its rampage across the Arab world. There are reminders here of the fall of communism in 1989, which erupted so unexpectedly and then gathered steam across all of the eastern European countries. The danger in the current instance, however, lies in what on earth will replace the tottering regimes. The dictatorships of Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen sit atop a simmering cauldron of poverty and unrest which is easily exploited by the well organised Islamic fundamentalist groups waiting to seize their chance. The protests in Egypt, and the putative ones in Yemen, seem to be led by liberal minded middle class and young citizens who would have little truck with the conservative islamicists, but unlike their religious counterparts the protestors are not well organised politically. The spectre of Iran hovers above the unrest, and although there are significant differences, including the fact that these protests have not been spun from the sort of religious agitators who took the lead against the Shah in 1979, there can hardly be any western analysts who aren't currently shuddering at the prospect of a post-Mubarak Egypt, or a post-Saleh Yemen. Democracy, after all, is fine, except when it delivers the wrong verdict.

Paxman's Gem

Courtesy of the Media Blog, edited by Old Sutt Will Sturgeon, we have this gem of an email from Jeremy Paxman, announcing the death of the Newsnight daily email.

"The time has come to put this exercise in fatuousness out of its misery" announces Paxman, with typical under-statement. He goes on to say, in his usual mild tones, "The reason for killing it off is pretty straightforward. It's crap." There's more brilliant material in that vein in what is one of the few must-read news emails issued by the BBC.

Paxman's tone clearly hasn't changed from when he was forced to do weather reports on Newsnight. He responded by injecting them with as much verbal contempt as possible, as shown in this compendium from Have I Got News For You:

Good Journalism, Bad Journalism

We watched "All the President's Men" at the History Film Club last Monday. It's slow, but it shows the painstaking care with which the two Washington Post journalists working on the Watergate case - Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein - went about proving their case. Their story eventually brought down a president, but it took many months to get there, and the film illustrated the frustrations of real, investigative journalism, and the painstaking need for certainty, for getting every controversial fact approved by at least three sources. It was a remarkable tale, and no less tense for knowing the eventual outcome. It was a portrayal of journalism at its best. It was an illustration of what one hopes men and women go into journalism for. To bring the mighty to account, to represent the poor and voiceless, to bring us true stories that illuminate the world we live in, to answer the almost unanswerable question of Pilate in the gospels - "What is truth?"

So hold all that in mind and turn now to this harrowing tale posted by one Juliet Shaw (and which I came across courtesy of Jack Burkill, pursuing a little bit of investigativism of his own!). It concerns her dealings with the Daily Mail in 1993. The Daily Mail is one of the most influential voices in the arena of public discourse in this country, and while it is ridiculed on facebook it is read devotedly by hundreds of thousands of citizens. But in the instance described by Miss Shaw, it comes across as a paper that lies and misrepresents its interviewees, to extraordinary detriment. Juliet Shaw was just one of four women, none of them famous, whose lives were trashed by the newspaper and its fatuous, inadequate, shameless reporter.

The Washington Post was at its most triumphant in the 1970s. Its reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, and its editor, Ben Bradlee, and countless others working on it, managed somehow to see journalism as a decent, even moral calling. The Daily Mail should recover some of that spirit itself. I'm aware that Juliet Shaw's tale dates from some years ago, but comments below the story suggest that the Mail is still in hoc to such poor stroy making methods as were evinced in 1993.

There is good journalism out there. The Guardian and Independent stand out in this regard. The Guardian's Nick Davies broke the story of News Corporation's bugging pandemic, while that same paper's media commentator, Roy Greenslade, has used his blog to bring Juliet Shaw's story to a wider audience. Davies, of course, has also authored one of the best recent books into the convoluted world of the media, "Flat Earth News".

UPDATE: This post sums up one of the Mail's reporting techniques beautifully.

Prime Ministerial Power and Christmas Cards

I've linked to Tim Montgomerie's analysis of David Cameron's exercise of the premiership opposite (but note that Montgomerie, as a right-wing Tory, is intrinsically hostile to Cameron), but it is the little things that matter as well, as Iain Martin at the Wall Street Journal noted.

The Significance of the 2010 Coalition Negotiations

One of the doyens of political commentary, Peter Riddell, has written of the lessons that the coalition negotiations following the 2010 election have on our understanding of the impact of a hung parliament. To some extent, the successful coalition outcome has forced a review of previous asumptions about what should happen when an election produces a hung parliament. Riddell's conclusions are certainly worth noting.