Psychoanalysis is not a busted flush
TO understand the important things in life we need to take a big step: we need to concede that unpacking the rational will not get us very far.
This is neither a pseudo-spiritual cop-out nor a religious come-on; it goes to the heart of the matter.
These “important things” I take to include self, purpose and morality. And most people embed the [...]
Why journalism is not a profession
JOURNALISM is not a profession. It is an activity.
It is not, cannot and should not, be placed in a parallel category to law and medicine.
It is not, except in the most extreme circumstances, societally desirable for one to do “a bit of law” or “a bit of medicine”.
One is a lawyer or not a lawyer; a medical doctor or not a medical doctor. If [...]
An all-devouring Terrible Mother
FOR Britain’s baby-boomers, Margaret Thatcher was the defining political punctuation mark.
Her incumbency put a full stop to any nostalgic consensus around class, cash, cooperation and competition that had somehow managed to survive satire, the permissive society and the three-day week.
For us on the left she was the archetypal “all-devouring [...]
Press: regulating the unicorn
THE Leveson inquiry was always a unicorn hunt to distract attention from the politically unpalatable truth that all the press transgressions complained of, from voicemail interceptions to contempt of court, were already illegal acts that could and should have been vigorously prosecuted.
The core reason that UK press legislation can never work [...]
Yes dad, they are all still at it
MY old dad knew a thing or two about the political class. He wouldn’t have called it that. He would have called its members something unprintable.
A street trader in London’s Soho, the earliest, and only, political advice he ever gave me was: “They’re all at it, son.”
As well as professional politicians, his assessment embraced all the est [...]
Tabloids: raucous and necessary
THE recent furore over this front page in Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper, the tabloid Sun, got me thinking even harder than usual about the PhD dissertation I am writing.
The thrust of the criticism is that it was inappropriate for The Sun to publish a large, near-naked image of a glamorous young woman who had been shot dead.
She was Ree [...]
Little Britain would drown
IT seems that within a few years it is entirely, and frighteningly, possible that I will be living in a non-EU state comprising England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the “dependencies” of the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey.
I wonder what it would be called.
The appellations attached to these 8,000-year-old islands nestled off the north-west [...]
Network that backed rookie
WHEN I joined the late, lamented News of the World as a sub-editor in 1977 I could prove to the world that I was “a journalist” because I belonged to a well-resourced network of experts that had pronounced me so after I provided it with evidence of my skills and means of income.
This network presented me with a strict ethical cod [...]
Trickster that is our true X factor
WE post-modern humans are rational beings, or so we tell ourselves as we avoid walking under a ladder on our way to buy our lotto ticket comprising numbers selected from loved ones’ birth dates.
We step off the pavement with a secret smile acknowledging our deference to the god Justincase, and we check those magic numbers carefully before gla [...]
Marr, strokes and staying stubborn
MY heart goes out to the BBC’s “Renaissance Man” Andrew Marr following his stroke at the age of 53.
I was a few months younger than that when I had mine a decade ago. Like Marr I was a jogger (my stroke came two years after I ran the London Marathon) and, although I cannot claim anything like his enormous work output, I had just completed a M [...]
