"What are you doing on this sunny evening, Mic?"
"Oh, you know, very normal, very summer activities..."
*drinks whiskey and watches BBC general election 1997 coverage*
Frank Skinner is interviewing a John Major lookalike and Tony Blair lookalike. The Blair lookalike is *shocking*
55 minutes in and Jeremy Paxman has just asked Portillo if he's "ready to drink hemlock yet". Portillo smugometer still hovering at about 9.3.
Every time it appears I am absolutely delighted by the high tech command centre behind Dimbleby...
1 hr 3 minutes in and we get the first appearance of a very young, very sharp-looking @krishgm interviewing an oleaginous Jeffrey Archer.
Now Martin Bashir is interviewing Edwina Curry. I'm pretty sure he didn't have to falsify bank statements to secure this particular chat.
Michael Crick, looking like a serial killer estate agent, has just described Enoch Powell's successor (and fellow unhinged racist) Nick Budgen as "one of parliament's great independent spirits" so...
And Jill Dando offers Portsmouth possibly more glamour than it might ordinarily deserve:
1 hour 41 in and Gordon Brown appears, unable to hide his delight with the result. Look at his delighted face there... [and this ends this instalment of my 1997 general election rewatch]
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The “Substack is a scam” discourse is dumb as rocks. Is it shit that some of the writers it has given advances to have appalling politics? No doubt. But I’m there making a proportion of my living from it not because they tricked me with stars but because it works for me, for now.
“Substack scam” is pleasingly alliterative but if you read the main piece getting shared around you’ll see it’s shaky logic at best wrapped in some catchy subheads.
Platforms in a capitalistic system are almost always parasitic. They are never apolitical and they are never free of ethical issues. Substack didn’t fool me into using it and when it stops working for me, I’ll go somewhere else.
The moment where Harry tells Oprah that his family are scared of the tabloids and know that they *have* to play the game is the one that has most stoked that media rage. You’re not supposed to say out loud how the trick is done.
The tabloids run as a protection racket for the royals as much as other celebrities. You smile for them, you praise their ‘campaigns’, you give them interviews, access and tidbits of information and they deign to give you ‘nice’ coverage.
Consider how William and Kate let pictures of their children appear in calendars given away with The Daily Mail. And how tabloids in turn damp down the more spicy rumours about Wills in return.
The EHRC report on antisemitism in the Labour Party and the party’s handling of complaints is 130 pages long. I am currently on page 53. The immediate reports so far are based on briefings before publication/the executive summaries. Read the report here equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/…
So far I have encountered a good number of examples in the report of issues that were down to Labour HQ, the party’s permanent staff, as much as LOTO but the focus will be on Corbyn and his staff. The leaked report on Labour HQ is largely dismissed by the EHRC
Broadly, the story as I see it so far is this — Labour had a significant number of members who were antisemitic (as the Tories also do), the Corbyn team didn’t take that seriously enough to begin with and were too close to people who held those antisemitic views...
See, when columnists do this sort of thing it’s not trolling, it’s them defending their colleagues. When those of us without a byline column in a national talk back it’s being chippy.
I critique the media on a daily basis in the service of a relatively small audience that I’ve built. They pay for the work because they value the work. But somehow that’s not valid because a billionaire isn’t my ultimate boss. How curious.