Media

For people who are meant to be professional communicators, journalists are hopeless at explaining themselves to the public. Everyone I know assumes that when we oppose the Leveson report we are supporting the Sun, the Mail and peeping Toms who hack phones and point lenses into other people’s bedrooms. The fact that the Guardian and Private Eye, who exposed the hacking scandal, are opposed to state regulation has been all but forgotten. Here’s why I, they and many others worry. The New York Times reports today that FBI officers investigating leaks about Trump’s dealing with Russia had seized the phone records of one of its reporters going back years. Of

New York   This week 50 years ago saw the assassination of Robert Kennedy, a man I met a couple of times in the presence of Aristotle Onassis, whom some Brit clown-writer once dubbed Bobby’s murderer. (Bad books need to sell, and what better hook than a conspiracy theory implicating a totally innocent man?) I once witnessed Bobby, at a Susan Stein party, asking Onassis for funds — the 1968 election was coming up — and Ari showing Bobby his two empty trouser pockets. Bobby’s assassination did alter American politics. Violence, black anger and despair spilled out on to the streets of American cities. His death caused far more grief

As previously mentioned in my Spectator Notes, the Guardian has not adapted well to tabloid form. I feel particularly sad about its Review section on Saturdays, which were the fullest books pages in Fleet Street and well understood how to be broadly left-wing without becoming doctrinaire and therefore unliterary. Now tabloid, the Review has boiled itself down to a repetitive essence in which almost every cover is about women’s rights — abortion in Ireland, Meghan Markle being ‘divorced, a woman of colour and a feminist’, and ‘Why feminist fiction needs to break free’ (to take three recent examples). You have to be very woke indeed not to fall asleep. This is an extract

I was going through my paces in Hyde Park, sweating out the booze, raising the heartbeat with short wind sprints, keeping my mind off the weekend’s debauchery and the ensuing Karamazovian hangover. I sat down on a bench, took off my sweaty polo shirt, opened the Daily Telegraph, and took in some rays. A police officer approached me — but with a smile. ‘Are you by any chance Taki?’ he said. ‘Guilty as charged, constable, but this time I’m clean.’ He smiled broadly and asked if he might sit down. Well, Constable Hackworth turned out to be straight out of The Blue Lamp. A Spectator reader, he somehow recognised my

A thread runs through several of the stories that have defined this turbulent summer: reporters have been shocked by the levels of hostility they have encountered. ‘They hate us,’ one seasoned producer told me returning from a Grenfell Tower protest. ‘I haven’t felt anything like it in 20 years.’ When the battalions of the media descend on any big story, the experience rarely leaves those caught up in it feeling warm and fuzzy about the fourth estate. But this is different. In each case there is a specific, albeit related, animus. During the election, it was Corbyn supporters convinced the mainstream media was bent on doing down their man. At

At a chic dinner party last week, a Trump insider gossiped about an American president having had an affair with a former French president’s wife. Actually, Carla Bruni has denied the rumours concerning her and the Donald, although they did have a date once upon a time. It seems that everything about Trump is controversial and some of us are having a rough time defending him. If only he’d shut his mouth and stay away from Twitter once in a while. Mind you, his enemies have become so desperate, and their charges so outrageous, that the 45th president of the good old US of A might even become popular —

A fortnight ago I got a taste of what being far too famous might feel like. A leak that I’m a contender for the Mary Berry slot on The Great British Bake Off morphed into the fake news that I’d got the job. For 24 hours it was a lead story — then it was yesterday’s non-news. My daughter, Li-Da Kruger, has made me her plus-one on the maiden voyage of Viking Sky, the swankiest cruise ship imaginable, all spacious showers, leather handrails and the surreal experience of sitting in the hairdresser’s with a roiling sea of black water and white-topped waves rushing past. Li-Da was booked to show her