Daily Archives: February 17, 2008

Between the Rock and a hard place

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So Northern Rock is to be nationalised — something that should have happened months ago. What’s interesting is the light the affair shines on Gordon Brown’s shortcomings — his chronic indecisiveness, coupled with mindblowing stubborness, which means that his government is invariably dragged by the force of events into doing the obvious thing — but too late. This is an administration in terminal decline.

Later: Anatole Kaletsky is speechless with indignation:

Why should a Government that has consistently refused to offer public funding for potentially viable commercial projects of real national importance – aerospace, public transport, nuclear power – now be spending tens of billions on supporting a bust mortgage bank? Is it because Britain is short of mortgage lenders, lacks employment opportunities for bankers or suffers a deficiency of financial innovation?

Even if politicians at Westminster are unwilling to ask such questions there can be no doubt that others will. It is quite likely that the European Commission will veto the business plans for Northern Rock unless these provide for a rapid rundown of both its lending and deposit-taking operations.

The fame game

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Heather McCartney has released a YouTube video detailing how her live has been made a living hell by media intrusion. Mariella Frostrup is not very sympathetic.

Last weekend, while the rest of the film world was occupied at the Baftas ceremony and Heather Mills McCartney was doubtless debating which court costume would best suit her, I was visited at home by a friend who’s also one of this year’s Oscar nominees.

Despite the purported dangers of the paparazzi, she took the tube, without even a pair of Prada sunglasses for protection and, after lunch and a quick briefing on the joys of the Oyster card, returned by the same mode of transport to her West End hotel. Then again, you’re more likely to find a celebrity snapper on the tail of your limo than poised at the entrance to Covent Garden station. It’s proof for those who need convincing that if you don’t turn your life into a circus, you won’t draw a crowd.

Right on! (As we ageing hippies say.)

Hate mail hell of a gap-year blogger

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The Observer carries the kind of internet scare story that delights the heart of every Daily Mail reader. But with one curious omission. The gist of the story is this:

When Max Gogarty, a 19-year-old gap-year student, landed a coveted blogging spot on which to chronicle his two-month backpacking adventure around India and Thailand, he could have never predicted how his moment of triumph would backfire so spectacularly.

But within 24 hours of his first posting on the guardian.co.uk travel pages, the teenager was swamped by a tidal wave of internet hate mail as he became a victim of the phenomenon of ‘going viral’. As the north London teenager was touching down in Mumbai, hundreds of comments – many vitriolic – were appearing not only on his blog, but on scores of message boards and social networking forums, including Facebook and high-profile gossip sites such as Holy Moly.

The astonishing reaction was provoked when surfers spotted that he had the same surname as Paul Gogarty, a travel writer who occasionally contributes to the Guardian. Readers presumed he was a privileged public school boy whose father had secured him the blog spot and whose gap-year travels were being funded by the newspaper.

The resulting ‘cyber-bullying’ has now forced Max, an occasional scriptwriter for the E4 teenage drama series Skins, to ditch his weekly blog while he and his family cope with the consequences of global internet exposure.

What’s not mentioned is that the Guardian has a policy of allowing people to post comments anonymously, which IMHO is a good way of encouraging people to behave badly, because they don’t have to take responsibility for their views. I’ve always thought that was a bad decision. This story confirms that.

Testosterone losing its Nuts?

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At last, some good news for civilisation.

ABC’s magazine circulation results for the second half of 2007, out last week, arrive full of blighted hopes and clouded futures. Are young men, oozing testosterone, the key to the future? Not when you see Loaded down 30 per cent in a year, Maxim 40 per cent, and Nuts and Zoo 8.9 per cent and 12.8 per cent off the pace respectively. Boobs and booty seem to be more of a turn-off than turn-on these days. And over in the celebrity gossip enclosure, too, Heat, Now and Closer are all down around 12 per cent (with 5.4 per cent saying Goodbye! to Hello!

Yippee!

Gordon Brown and the copyright lobby

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This morning’s Observer column…

The award for Fatuous Statement of the Month goes to Geoffrey Taylor, chief executive of the quaintly named British Phonographic Industry, aka the BPI. (Note for readers under 65: a ‘phonograph’ is an instrument that reproduces sound recorded on a grooved disk.) The winning statement reads: ‘For years, ISPs have built a business on other people’s music.’