• It is with sadness that Monkey reports that the widely popular columnist Rod Liddle has been sacked as “agony uncle” by GQ. What apparently made editor Dylan “Granny” Jones see red was a letter from the suspiciously sock-puppety “Ezekiel, Maidstone”, a self-confessed embezzler asking if he would be eligible for the mag’s “philanthropist of the year” gong next year – an allusion to Tony Blair recently receiving that award (Liddle’s ironic reply advised against counting chickens: as “you have not sewn [sic] havoc in the Middle East … you will need to up your game”). Still, as Monkey’s data mining suggests Liddle pens around 3,750 words a week across the Sun, Sunday Times and Spectator – and could produce more online – he may be glad to be free of the extra deadline.
• Egos are apparently being bruised in a merry-go-round at the Mail titles. Mail on Sunday editor Geordie Greig used to enjoy a corner office away from the grubby hubbub of the tabloid he oversees. But whatever Martin Clarke sees he wants and the Mail Online boss is said to be swiping Greig’s office with its splendid view for himself, another sign of Mail Online’s aggressive advancement within the group; Greig has been offered alternative, less congenial accommodation but work adapting this office has taken weeks. More generally, the MoS, which enjoyed a rare autonomy within the group, is now feeling the squeeze, with the news operation shunted to a darkened corner to allow the Daily Mail and its website to expand. The fragrant toilers at the Sunday title’s glossy mag You are especially put out, as the move will deny them a view of Northcliffe House’s elegant mezzanine. Smelling salts may be needed.
• Monkey’s continuing campaign to highlight “nugs” (plugs for programmes posing as news items) may have given the impression that BBC Radio 4’s Today programme has the monopoly on creativity in that particular field, so it’s important to pay tribute to solid achievement elsewhere. Such as the willingness of Jon Snow (normally a pillar of journalistic integrity) to inte rview Grayson Perry for a “news” item on Wednesday’s Channel 4 News that was really a thinly disguised trailer for Perry’s new series, which was starting on Channel 4 that evening; or the equally obedient plug on the same evening’s Newsnight, with the programme’s head of investigations (!) drafted in for the Snow role, for the BBC2 Afghan-war series The Lion’s Last Roar, beginning four days later.
• Rona Fairhead, previously a non-executive director in the Cabinet office and government business adviser; and the Trust’s director Jon Zeff, also appointed this year, who came from the DCMS – as did the Trust’s head of comms Mark Devane, although he spent time at Defra between the two jobs (James Purnell, now the BBC’s director of strategy and digital, actually headed the DCMS in his stint as culture secretary). Before being hired last year, the BBC’s reigning supreme spinner John Shields was also in Sir Humphrey territory, occupying the same director of comms post at the Department for Work and Pensions. Exemplifying the other tendency is no less a figure than Baroness Stowell of Beeston, the leader of the House of Lords since July, who as mere Tina Stowell, before entering politics, was first the Beeb’s head of corporate affairs and then a personal spinner for the BBC chairmen Davies, Grade and Lyons. A small world indeed.
• A rapprochement between Ian Katz and his former anchorman Jeremy Paxman remains a distant prospect, judging by an interview with the latter in Saga magazine. Asked about Katz’s article in the FT proposing a new deal for politicians and broadcasters, in which the Newsnight editor set out why he prefers Evan Davis’s more emollient style to Paxo-style verbal pummelling, the veteran inquisitor is disdainful: “I don’t actually know what he means … I gathered from the inordinate length of his article he had some axe or other to grind, but I’m not going to get into a scrap.”
• While one Spectator columnist was departing another was returning, as after a long intermission caused by the eight-month phone hacking trial (which also involved his wife, Rebekah Brooks, and notably featured evidence on his lesbian porn collection), horseracing writer Charlie Brooks made his Daily Telegraph comeback last week. Was he bitter? Judge for yourself from his comments on the length of the process (“a lawyer friend of mine defended seven different murder trials during the period”) and lead prosecutor Andrew Edis QC, who failed to secure a conviction of the Brookses: “The prosecutor now gets free vintage port as part of his new job description as a high court judge. That should save on his wine bills.”
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