Sometimes it really isn't the the thought that counts

There are those who are wondering why the press is making such a big deal about Gordon Brown's error strewn letter of condolence to the mother of a dead soldier. One angle worth considering this: it's something that is drummed into all journalists very early on (in some cases by bitter experience)

Getting someone's name wrong is one of the worst errors you can commit.

Put it this way, I know people who've been threatened with the sack for less; people understandably take that sort of thing very personally because it is, well, personal. More generally, it does look - at the very least - somewhat graceless and unempathetic to send such a shocking scrawl as a letter of condolence. (Realising you've misspelled the name, scrawling it out and then carrying on with the letter is thoughtlessness taken to a quite breathtaking level).

Still, given that Brown will be getting his P45 in a few months anyway, it would be best all round to accept this a dreadful, albeit unintentional blunder. That Brown somehow managed to compound the inadvertent insult by the more calculated refusal to apologise is sadly all to typical.

As someone with a fair amount of experience in editing other people's work, there's a rather obvious comment I could make about the importance here of getting other pairs of eyes to look over what's been written. I'm not entirely sure why this isn't the case at Number 10. I might, however, observe that it is always the prima donnas, louts, ego maniacs and bullies who kick up the most almighty fuss if anyone dares alter a single character they have written, and who take even the gentlest correction as a personal slight, that generally produce the most dangerous errors. I have no idea whether or not this applies in this instant.

UPDATE: What was it I was saying about getting names wrong? I'm told The Sun website's gone and done it. (No idea if it's genuine). Blood on the carpet at Wapping, I fear. (via Harry's Place).

Dear Sir, I wish to protest in the strongest possible terms

SIR – I find it intensely humiliating to be asked by airport security staff if I have packed my own bag. This forces one to admit, usually within earshot of others, that I no longer have a manservant to do the chore for me. Gentlemen should be able to answer such questions with a disdainful: "Of course not! Do I look like that sort of person?"

Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume, Guildford, Surrey

This letter was even good enough to make it into the Telegraph's letters page; but fear not. There's a book out of unpublished letters to the editor.

The thing I like about letters to the editor is that they are an early example of what is know called "user generated content" - a phrase beloved of the spivs, charlatans and bullshitters who distressingly dominate the debate about how the media can adapt to new technology. It's also a good way of building a community and enhancing the value of your brand and all the rest of it.

There's a paradox at the heart of the letters page: one the one hand the wit and intellect of the readers can vastly surpass that of the journalists. On the other hand, the enormous number of cranks, nutters, bigots, bores and weirdos there are out there: you need to ruthlessly filter them all out; which is why the letters editors' job is such an interesting one. To use Private Eye shorthand, the Guardian needs to dilute the Dave Sparts and Mike Gigglers to a palatable level; ditto the Sir Herbert Gussets and Thatcher worshippers in the Telegraph.

It's a good example of why you need people to edit stuff, even online. You'd have thought that some of these skill can be brought to bear on internet journalism; they probably will be as soon as people learn to ignore the utopians who believe the internet will change everything. You don't want everything to be like Twitter, after all.

Life imitates art

One of the best gags from The Thick of It came from a harassed Daily Mail night editor being messed around by the source of his front page splash: "It's not like we're the Independent. We can't just stick a headline saying 'Cruelty', and then stick a picture of a dolphin or a whale underneath. That's just cheating... it's rubbish".*

This is the front page of the Indie on Saturday September 5.

*NB: That scene wasn't a strictly accurate representation of how newspapers are put together. But it damn well got to the heart of what life is like in the engine room of journalism.

Behold the future of journalism

One day all reporting content generation will be like this. It meets all the Greenslade criteria: online, multi-platform, bigging yourself up, gratuitous twittering etc.

Small fire in London, no one hurt.

Yay for the future.

Update: Another triumph: Mayor of Baltimore surprisingly well-informed about British politics and Midsomer Murders – it's on the net so it must be true. Still, the ease of correcting stuff (and being laughed at if you get it wrong) is quite handy.

Turning offence into pretence

Sometimes you know you've seen something exceptional, something that surpasses what you had thought possible. For many, Usain Bolt's performances in the World Athletics Championships will have done that.

For me, though, this article on the Guardian's website tops it. It's Brit getting irate, on the behalf of his Ukrainian girlfriend, that a slightly silly advert features a meerkat doing a parody of Russian accent.

Really.

The advertisement centres on the word "market" – a word that eastern Europeans/Russians pronounce "meerkat" – using talking CGI-animated meerkats. The sole point of this African animal's appearance is, it seems, to highlight the idea that east Europeans cannot pronounce the word market properly when they speak English. It struck me how racist it was to parody what is now a significant part of the British population in this way. It also occurred to me that were the ad to use stereotypical Indian or Caribbean accents in the same way it would never be allowed on TV.

It is, I think, the Platonic ideal of Guardian style idiocy: the whiny grievance-mongering, the humourless and the overwhelming self-righteousness: all over something that is really rather trivial and harmless.

(I should put in the disclaimer at this point that it could all be a send up of the Graun at its most intolerable. If so, it is so well executed I confess it completely took me in.)

The thing that makes me suspect it is not a spoof, however, is that at a time when there are quite a lot of things people could be getting bothered about, this peculiarly British brand of pompous, right-on censoriousness seems to be enjoying something of a revival.

I blame, well, not one particular group but that vast coalition of the prissy, the self-righteous, self-important – many of them religious and/or a certain type of left-winger it has to be said – who regard their right to not be "offended" as trumping all others. If it does nothing else, the meerkat piece exposes the vacuous and self-regarding nature of that particular argument.

The slightly worrying thing is that this brand of nonsense appears to be gaining traction. You remember all those stories from the Eighties about councils banning songs like Baa Baa Black Sheep because they were racist? And how this turned out to be something of a tabloid exaggeration? Yup. Well, we now have quangos telling their staff not to use phrases like "black sheep" and "right-hand man".

Note there is no evidence of anyone actually being offended. But with the perfect combination of bureaucratic arse-covering and grievance-mongering we get this mildly sinister attempt to enforce correctness in every aspect of the language. Frankly, they'd be far better off tackling the acres of jargon that infect public service literature. There really is no excuse for that.

Trollied Tuesday: My Dark Places

Summer heat and the British drop the stoicism the better to display their collective inability to cope with this unexpected weather, a failure typified in attitudes to pub going.

The ideal summer pub, you see, is a darkened place where sheltered from the heat and the light and the frenzy you can transcend the physical here and now of summer. It should be calm and quiet too - at least all the silly sods will be out in the open air.

The problem is that soon as it gets warmish, the newspapers love to produce guides on the best places to drink in the summer; here is one from the Guardian, for example. I don't mean to pick on the Graun, much, because the publication doesn't really matter; you can pretty much guarantee that anywhere named in a newspaper as the ideal summer drinking spot will soon come to resemble no such thing.

Leaving aside the question as to whether you really want dozens of Guardian readers over-running an agreeable riverside boozer (of course not), these things are written under a flawed premise: that what you really want to do is spend hours out in the sun drinking.

A bit of sun's okay - fine if you're out for a swim or a stroll, and it's good that it draws out the young ladies flushed radiantly in their flimsy summer dresses; but for every one of those there will be a good half dozen lobster-red men who should know better in flip flops and shorts or women displaying acres of flesh that should be discreetly covered. People become fractious and loud. And as for dogs and children in the heat, words fail me.

For reasons that should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of self-awareness Britons, booze and hours of sunshine are a bad combination. Partly because it's so many people overdo the wrong stuff - strong, chemically enhanced lagers, white wine with the taste chilled out of it, or cheap cider. Mostly though it's a failure to understand that the pub is a shelter.

So just as in winter the sensible thing to do is hunt down somewhere with a fire, in summer the drinker's natural instinct is to find somewhere cavernous, dark and calm. Ideally you want a place of marbled stillness, or else a pub with dark wooden walls and high windows that only allow the odd sunbeam to pierce the still air. An old Victorian gin palace would be ideal (perhaps something like the Crown Liquor Salon in Belfast). The walls should have the patina and nicotine stains acquired through decades of serious drinking. (Alas that the smoking ban prevents one shrouding oneself in smoke the better to provide a barrier between the pub and the summer heat).

In other words, you want a place in which time is temporarily suspended, in which you can contemplate the graver mysteries of life, love and drinking. Naturally, you want the company to be small and select (not least because you do not want the busy, foolish clamour of the silly sods who will be spending hours out in the sunny swilling booze). If you cannot find anyone like minded, look for a place where the clientele understand the value of silence or who, through their dedication to the drinker's craft, have been temporarily rendered speechless. (These will at least be roused into life should any affected Guardian-reading tossers enter).

As for what to drink. First a practical note, any fool can serve beer in the winter, the summer heat will winnow out the pubs that can't keep a pint of beer in good cask condition. You could do worse than go for a summer special ale (Adnam's Regatta for instance), but why not follow the example of those who live in places like Africa and the Caribbean and drink stout? Guinness is great in the summer, just don't bother with that extra cool shite. You can't glug it, true, but that's probably a good thing, and its sweet, refreshing taste will restore your energy and enthusiasm when you feel sapped an enervated in the heat. It's dark and cool qualities encapsulate the attributes of the ideal summer pub.

I could tell you a few places that meet the criteria; but I'm not going to list them here. Don't want them over-run after all.

This again

Really that is enough enough about Twitter now. Something that is not an original idea (and which I have moaned about before) has become a vitally important piece of news content.

They identified high literature as a crucial pillar for any generation.

But they also latched on to Twitter, the website where users compress all of human experience into 140 characters. Twitter, they thought to themselves, epitomised the short attention span and info-deluge that defined the contemporary age.

So what if you put the two together? If great literature and Twitter were combined into one new form - Twitterature.

Oh sweet mother of fuck, protect us from these charlatans and bullshitters. If this is a cynical cash-in then fair play to them, I just don't see why it warrants free advertising. If it is in anyway serious then things are worse that I feared. To repeat myself, this is not an original idea, it is a fun parlour game that should not be repackaged and foisted upon the gullible nor used to appeal to the worst qualities of the verbally incontinent, the vapid and the self-obsessed.

One thing that worries is the fashionable delusion in all sorts of media circles that words, language and literature must now be reduced to mere "content" – a thing that has no intrinsic merit in itself, but which can be packaged, marketed and judged on its ad-generating powers. In other words, a triumph of the bullshitters which will seriously degrade culture, literature and thought.

------

Add journalism to that list too. There are some people who give every impression that the most important thing about the Iranian revolution is that it's on Twitter. Well no it isn't actually, though it's one faddish way of getting some people's voices heard; after all, there are multiple ways in which the net has allowed information to leak out - Facebook and Fark (of all things) have got in on the act, so too YouTube.

The trouble with the tweets from Tehran is that the stew of rumour and misinformation can obscure as much as it can enlighten. (As illustrated here - note too the claim that Moldova's authorities used Twitter to sew confusion and misinformation among the protesters there). Oh and the fact that the death of the People's Pederast has overwhelmed Twitter (sorry Iranians, you're already last week's news). There is no substitute for having proper journalists, who know the territory and the people, on the ground trying to sift through the mass of claim and counter-claim and give an accurate reflection of what is really going on. (An impossible task, of course, but one can make a decent stab at it).

I wonder if this confusion between the means and ends doesn't date back to the Reformation and the role of the printing presses in spreading Protestant ideas. Without denying the importance of technology in spreading ideas, I don't think the existence of the printing press itself explains why the Lutherans succeeded where the Hussites or the Lollards (for example) failed.

In revolutions the means in which the message has been spread was never as important as the message itself. In other words, a printing press is no substitute for having a Luther, a Milton or a Jefferson to hand; or a Lenin for that matter. If the Iranian revolution doesn't have a clearer message that a random sequence of 140-character comments, I very much fear it will not succeed.

PS: The following rather illustrates the point.

British homewares retailer Habitat apologized on Wednesday after ads for the store appeared on Twitter tagged with words linked to the Iranian election crisis.

Some Twitter users became angry after the upmarket store's messages turned up in searches for topics such as "Iran" and "Mousavi," the name of Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Events, hijacked by bullshit merchants online.

Hair of the dog bites man

Two subjects close to my heart and other vital organs: pubs and newspaper journalism. I've long thought that a study ought to be done into the effect a paper moving its offices has on the local pub trade. In the absence of that, I was delighted to stumble across the following vignette (from the Guardian's Wimbledon coverage of all things):

"All Guardian hacks are alcoholics!" That's the friendly and super-libellous-though-I-wouldn't-put-my-mortgage-on-it-in-court title of an email I've just been sent by Andy Underwood. "I was on a corporate induction yesterday and the afternoon session was a rather nice guided coach journey around the local area, taking in Farringdon. The only interesting fact that our guide had about Farringdon was that since the Guardian moved offices, three pubs have been forced to shut. Comments, please."

It would perhaps be too delicious were one of those pubs the notorious Griffin "Gentleman's Bar And Club" (as if gentlemen worked at the Guardian anyway). By contrast I have it from a highly reliable source (an Irish hack in the pub, if you must know) that a number of boozers in Victoria were facing the axe until the Telegraph moved in nearby.

But this is anecdotal. As I said, a proper study is needed. I am not sure that my A-level in economics would be quite sufficient to get funding (then again, it was a few years ago. It's probably on a par with a degree now) but I feel I should look into this matter further.

There's always someone, somewhere with a big nose who knows

For some reason the Telegraph website decided to mark Morrissey's 50th birthday with a piece that includes the following howlers.

Dr Gavin Hopps of St Andrew's University said the former lead singer of the band The Smiths was not truly appreciated for his literary abilities, despite his fame.

Best known for such songs as 'Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now' and 'Kill the DJ', Morrissey was actually a "bookish" singer-songwriter and a fan of Oscar Wilde, said Dr Hopps.

I could make an obvious and rather boring point about why its a good idea to get people to edit things before they are published; I might even add in passing that Smiths fans are one of those groups that will turn on you if you display a less than reverential - and accurate - attitude towards the object of their affection.

But let me make a more subtle and interesting point. The type of journalist who would be concerned with getting the title of Smiths songs right would be the type to end up as a sub (or actual) editor, of course. However - in my experience - this sort would also be far more likely to be someone who likes The Smiths.

I do not think the media would be improved by getting rid of people who like The Smiths. That it is all.

Cultural cringe

When looking for the world's worst pundit, it's so easy to be parochial and stick to all the obvious British candidates. But it's a salutary and sobering thought that Her Majesty's Press is often forced to look across the Atlantic should it wish to provide its readers with a truly magisterial dose of wrongness.

One newspaper even employs on a regular basis a barkingly mad American woman who somehow manages to out-crazy its stable of homegrown eccentrics and nutjobs. But the Guardian now surpasses itself with the latest offering by the Canadian Naomi Klein

In it she employs her remarkable talent for stating the bleeding obvious, affecting shock at it and then drawing precisely the wrong conclusions to observe that the presidency is a difficult job that often involves messy compromises and the current president will not, in fact, stick it to The Man.

Klein is one of the most valuable intellectual figures of age. I am not sure that she doesn't deserve to be regarded in the same light as figures like Noam Chomsky or Ayn Rand, with whom you know infallibly that you can disregard the opinions of anyone who cites them in support of their views.

At the risk of developing a cultural cringe, why is it that our own homegrown pundits don't achieve the same level of ineffable error?

Seasonal Booze Ups

It is testament to how far Fleet Street as fallen from its inglory days that I was until now only dimly aware of the old journalistic tradition of Wayzgoosing. In those days newspapers did not publish on Good Friday, allowing printers and, when they cottoned on to the idea, the hacks, to indulge in spectacular piss ups.

Roy Greenslade has a fine overview of the tradition, and also links to some splendid anecdotes from the Gentlemen Ranters (this one is worth a read, not least for the picture). His own stories aren't too shabby either.

I also recall a Sun/Daily Mirror subeditorial wayzgoose that did make it to France, with embarrassing consequences. The good burghers (of Dieppe, I think) had been wrongly informed that a group of important British journalists were due to arrive and duly turned out the mayor and the town band to greet them off the ferry.

Sadly, by the time the wayzgoosers arrived, they had been drinking non-stop for many hours since leaving London and were only able to walk by leaning against each other.

Pity today's hacks – sorry, make that "content providers" – hard at work as usual today and often unaware of this custom.

It's Good Friday tomorrow, when another Easter drinking spectacular is in the offing across the water. You see, it is the one day (bar Christmas) when every pub in Ireland is forced to close. It is one of the last reflexive genuflections made towards the Catholic Church in the country; a ritual devoid of any real meaning or purpose (you may wish to develop this metaphor) and naturally, treated by all right-thinking people as the chance for a monstrous piss-up.

The greater availability of off-sales (closed on the day, of course) has helped greatly. Maundy Thursday is a boom day for retailers; as for their customers, I still recall one Good Friday party in Cork which left me feeling far worse than anyone who partakes of that curious bit of Filipino piety whereby they nail themselves to a cross would. However, in the days before off licences were so common, there were several ingenious ways by which people could get a drink.

Ferries were exempt, so trips to Wales or the Isle of Man were popular. Some people even went to the North, because if ever there was a fun place to be it was Belfast circa 1922-97. Train journeys, too, had no constraints, so many people would spend the day in a diurnal course of journeys with no end in sight and a constant stream of booze (shades of the great Moskva-Petushki there).

But the most curious exemption was the dog show held on Good Friday in the Royal Dublin Society. The bar there was the one place allowed to serve alcohol (one suspects the powers that be thought that only irredeemable West Brits would go to a dog show on that day, a similar mindset to the people who bombed the La Mon, you might note). The event was a great favourite of the likes of Brendan Beehan, Patrick Kavanagh and various other riffish and raffish sorts.

If only the Irish hacks had gone in for wayzgoosing.

Bounder banned

Say what you like about George Galloway (actually don't; he's the most litigious figure in public life since Lord Archer) but you cannot deny his rhetorical talents. His description of Christopher Hitchens as a "drink-sodden former Trotskyist popinjay" was a classic. As the target of the jibe himself admitted, it was only a little bit unfair.

But an equal zinger has now been attached to the man himself. In justifying the decision to ban Galloway from Canada, a government spokesman Alykhan Velshi described the supporter of Hamas as an "infandous street-corner Cromwell".

Here I detect a distinct and ironic echo of Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard ("Some village Hampden that with dauntless breast/ The little tyrant of his fields withstood,/ Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,/ Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood."), whether it is conscious or not.

Nor do I know whether Velshi is aware of, or cares about, Galloway's Irish Catholic background. But it gives an added sting to the jibe about his cheap demagoguery , and is as good a summary of the man as any. As for infandous, meaning - as you must know by now - unspeakable, you've probably made your minds up about the man by now.

Mocking this rather Spode-like figure probably harms him far more than banning him from, in another one of Mr Velshi's picturesque phrases, "peeing on [Canada's] carpet".

Incidentally: the New York Times, of all papers, has a nice take on the whole business: Canada bars 'indandous' British politician, journalists reach for dictionaries.

PS: So far as I can recall the British MP to banned from a North American country, for somewhat similar reasons to Galloway, was Gerry Adams. Adams, however, was not lacking in friends in the US Congress. (I'm not crazy about this banning of elected politicians from Western democracies, incidentally. Congressman Peter King, a dyed in the wool Noraid supporter - until 9/11 obviously, was never banned from entering Northern Ireland, for instance. I can't see how that would have helped matters at all).

Brought to book by De Paper

Newspaper proprietors don't have anything like a tough enough time of it (until they end up like Conrad Black). But at least they are forced, occasionally, to suffer the sort of people who work for them. So well done to my former colleagues at the Irish Examiner. I'll let Media Monkey take up the story:

It could be the plot of a rubbish airport novel. Having endured the imposition of cost cuts and a wage freeze, the staff of two Irish newspapers were outraged at their owners' choice of speaker for the company's annual dinner - Lord Archer. The journalists' union at the Cork-based Irish Examiner and the Evening Echo sent a letter of protest to the papers' owner, Thomas Crosbie Holdings, reasoning that a convicted criminal - particularly one who was jailed for perjury in a libel trial against a newspaper - was an unfortunate choice of speaker to address a newspaper publishing group.

TCH got off relatively lightly this time. A few years ago they invited Henry Kissinger to some jamboree they sponsored. On the day of his arrival the Examiner, as it then was, carried a column by Ryle Dwyer about their honoured guest. Curiously I can't find the actual article (NB: this could well be down to incompetence rather than anything more nefarious) but it was either the one with the headline "Time to put Kissinger in the dock with Pinochet" (reaction to it here) or maybe it was the piece (quoted here) that included lines such as:

Even if the IRA were responsible for everyone killed in the North's troubles - that would not be remotely near the number of deaths in which Kissinger was implicated in Cambodia, Chile and East Timor, not to mention his conniving treachery in prolonging the Vietnam War.

Then again, it says something in their favour that Dwyer remains a columnist on the Examiner.

NB: If anyone can correct the gaps in my account, I'd be most grateful

Not worth the effort of a proper headline

Something truly indefensible from the Guardian:

So today, in an attempt to satisfy your dog show yearnings, The Guardian launches Grufts, the search for the World's Leading Liberal Dog.

Quite apart from the ik factor, the very idea of a liberal dog is an affront. Your average dog, you see, is a servile parasite. They'd do very well under feudalism, communism or any ideology which involves a strong leader. But liberal? Not at all.

Timing is everything

World Finance magazine's January/February edition awards its coveted man of the year award to... Sir Allen Stanford.

World Finance’s 2008 Man of the Year award was bestowed upon Sir Allen Stanford as he clearly stood out when, two years ago, he began cautioning those in the financial services industry that an impending global economic storm was brewing. His ability to lead the Stanford Financial organisation through this current turbulent environment unscathed and his commitment to philanthropic causes in the cities around the world where Stanford conducts business were the deciding factors in selecting him as this year’s award recipient.

Up to a point, at any rate. As the editor explains:

In the light of the accusations made against Sir Allen Stanford by the SEC we have received a significant response regarding the following article and the associated award which was decided upon in the fall of 2008. When we took the decision we felt we had to discount unproven accusations from various sources that were in the news at that time. We determined that if those speculations had come to nothing it would have been an error to count them in our decision. It was a calculated editorial risk.

If the accusations prove to be substantiated, then, with the benefit of hindsight, it will have been the wrong decision - though either way it now stands as a record of the two faces of the financial industry in what was a horrible year for global markets.

We could of course have removed the article but have taken the decision instead to keep the unedited original text of the article on the site in order to document the company message and as a gauge of opinion at the time... However, the article should be read in light of recent events, and not taken as a continued endorsement of Stanford Financial Group.

If it seems too good to be true...

Well, yes.

(Thanks, Portfolio)

Sometimes you really do have to tell the customer he is wrong

Someday, if I can formulate a suitably entertaining way of expressing it, I might offer my thoughts on why the old print media's desperate rush to embrace all manner of interactivity with their readers – even the comments that, in the past, would have been binned and then burned by the letters editor – is such arrant folly.

In the meantime, let's amuse ourselves with a practical demonstration from an online publication (Yank of course) that knows how to produce something readable and financially viable from the web. It's Slate's "questions we never answered". Quite apart from their inherent comedy value you can discern the subtlety of Slate's own editorial policy. Whereas, say, Comment is Free, or the Telegraph's own web mnokeys (semi-in joke, sorry) would rush over themselves to encourage this degree of reader interactivity, you may spot a certain discernment in Slate's own policy. It's the difference between spotting the friendly cove who wants a chat at the bar and the dangerous nutter whom one should back away from at all costs.

Admittedly, Slate sugar-coats the laughing at our loopiest readers game that all journalists enjoy by asking which of the questions are most deserving of an answer. So in that spirit, here are my favourites (with added comment):

Why don't humans have a mating season?
(I believe there is an actual biological answer to this. Never mind that: we have a wonderful capacity for prolonging our own misery and frustration).

If one gets a personal e-mail from a very famous or important person, such as the president, or the queen of England, or the Pope, or Paul McCartney, can that e-mail have monetary value? I guess not. It's just an electronic transmission on a screen. There's no original. There's no way to buy or sell it. Seems a shame tho.
Note the use of capitals there. And the order of precedence. Whoever asked that question really ought to be living in Liverpool, willingly or not.

If someone with DNA from the Stone Age were born today, would they be normal?
In Somerset, yes.

Context is everything

Lost your job, lost your home? Life becoming intolerable? Well there's always the option of joining the French Foreign Legion. Neil Tweedie, writing in the Telegraph, has the run down of what you need to know if you're considering taking this option. (You'd best learn to swear in French, you've got to be physically fit and not too worried about the fact that an inordinate number of Germans want to join to do proper military stuff.)

The article concludes:

Improved conditions and greater professionalism have in recent years resulted in more middle-class recruits.

Cpl Buys Francois, 43, a South African legionnaire who joined 11 years ago, says: "We call the new entrants Generation PlayStation because they’re so soft. Now we’re taking the ex-husbands running from alimony, and all these guys with university degrees."

Which is just as well. As it looks like some of the people most likely to be thinking about joining up are the Telegraph's current and former employees. They'd probably be treated better in the legion. Personally speaking, the German army sounds more like my sort of thing. Is it possible for foreigners to join that?

Paul Dacre: a cunt but correct

In some cases doesn't pain me to say that I agree with the editor of the Daily Mail. In this instance Paul Dacre's argument that the Human Rights Act and its provisions about privacy allow judges to interpret the law in ways that can and will inhibit newspapers' freedom of speech and their ability to investigate what people get up to is perfectly correct.

The British press is having a privacy law imposed on it, which apart from allowing the corrupt and the crooked to sleep easily in their beds is, I would argue, undermining the ability of mass-circulation newspapers to sell newspapers in an ever more difficult market.

If you want to hear a lawyer's take on the matter, you can read one here. My concern is more practical. It's not that there is an overwhelming public interest in reports about Max Moseley's amusingly colourful leisure activities; but any law that starts off by making activities in the bedroom off-limits won't end there (what about a politician who gives public money to someone with whom they are sexually involved, for instance?). Really it's the nebulous concept of "privacy" that worries me: Dacre is a case in point.

It is thanks to the press freedoms he defends that Private Eye, and others, can report that he is a foul-mouthed bully; an obnoxious and hypocritical thug who addresses his underlings in terms he would never allow in his newspaper (amusingly these tirades are known as the vagina monologues). Is that private behaviour? Should it be private? His underlings consent to these verbal batterings in exchange for money, after all.

Anyway, abusing Dacre, though it is both a fun and proper way to exercise freedom of speech, is rather beside the point. The intolerable moralising with which he makes his arguments does tend to weaken his case somewhat. He believes that Max Moseley's spanking sessions should be exposed because they are "acts of unimaginable sexual depravity" and that society benefits from the moral condemnation of such acts.

What pitiful tosh. Apart from the fact that Dacre is obviously a man of staggering limited imagination (I can think of several more depraved acts than that), I have also been grateful to the freedom of the press for exposing several more depraved acts (it was thanks to the Guardian that I first heard the phrase Cincinnati Bow Tie, for instance).

Where he does weaken his case is the suggestion that the law should be there to protect us from the consequences of others' depravity: "the very abrogation of civilised behaviour of which the law is supposed to be the safeguard". Nope. Civility (which is really what he's talking about) is no concern of the law: its primary duty to civilisation is prevent us from harming each other.

By my moral standards the Daily Mail's relentless coarsening of public discourse, its promotion of ascientific ignorance (MMR being a good example of the dangers of this) and its utterly vile bullying of some of the weakest and most vulnerable members of society is something that should be utterly condenmed under all the values of civilisation. All of this yellow journalism does, I think, do real harm to people. Dacre should be an object of public odium, a pariah in all polite circles.

And yet to suggest that the law should be involved is an absurdity. It should be there to safeguard our liberties, including those of speech, actions and conscience. Occcasionally we might do harm to ourselves, so what?; we might abuse our rights and behave badly towards others, again so what? (With the caveat about outright incitement to violence against others: horrible as the Mail is with regard to immigrants it doesn't go that far).

So let's not cheapen the debate with this moralising guffe, it only weakens the defence of free speech. It would be as absurd to expect the law to uphold my moral standards as it would to expect it to uphold Paul Dacre's rather different set of values. We don't what an endless debate about which moral vaules the law should be protecting, after all. It's all about allowing us freedom of choice. A final Dacre-ism:

Now some revile a moralising media. Others, such as myself, believe it is the duty of the media to take an ethical stand. Either way, it is a choice but Eady has taken away our freedom of expression to make that choice.

So for all that I despise what he stands for. He's right. Damn him.

UPDATE: Lots of typical handwringing on this by Guardian writers. Polly Toynbee after condemning Dacre roundly for condemning people concludes that his paper abuses press freedom. I agree the Mail abuses that freedom, but is she willing to give up those freedoms on those grounds? It's not clear whether she would.

This again

This week's Patrick Wintour award goes to Richard Alleyne, the Telegraph's science correspondent.

Here's his piece about the discovery of Alexander Selkirk's island camp:

Cast away on a desert island, surviving on what nature alone can provide, praying for rescue but at the same time fearing the sight of a boat on the horizon.

These are the imaginative creations of Daniel Defoe in his famous novel Robinson Crusoe.

But the story is believed to be based on the real-life experience of Scottish sailor Selkirk, marooned in 1704 on a small tropical island in the Pacific for more than four years, and now archaeological evidence has been found to support his existence on the island.

A bit over-written, but it's nice when reporters make an effort to inject some originality into their copy, and I'm glad the Telegraph doesn't just insist on its reporters lifting the latest from the Mail's website. But what's this now? Science Daily – your source for the latest research news has more on the story:

Cast away on a desert island, surviving on what nature alone can provide, praying for rescue but fearing the sight of a boat on the horizon. These are the imaginative creations of Daniel Defoe in his famous novel Robinson Crusoe. Yet the story is believed to be based on the real-life experience of sailor Alexander Selkirk, marooned in 1704 on a small tropical island in the Pacific for more than four years, and now archaeological evidence has been found to support contemporary records of his existence on the island.

An article in the journal Post-Medieval Archaeology presents evidence from an archaeological dig on the island of Aguas Buenas, since renamed Robinson Crusoe Island, which reveals evidence of the campsite of an early European occupant.

&c &c

In other news... (why is this news?)

1. Gordon Brown finally finds someone more unpopular than him, and urges the media to get stuck in.

2. Conclusive proof Amanda Knox is innocent: her mother says so.

3. Tinfoil sales soar as the US election nears.* Could the Republicans steal the vote? Maybe says Peter Tatchell on the Indie's website; why aren't we more worried about it? and why don't people take the suggestion that Kerry threw the last election because he was a member of Skull and Bones seriously? asks Keith Mothersson.

You can't wholly scoff at this: US politics is a dirty, shambolic and often corrupt business (à la 2000 election in Florida); but good old incompetence is often the best explanation for things, as Brett Lock argues. You can't just say that cock-ups trump conspiracies, but note that the cock-ups and are generally what allow the "conspirators" to take advantage of them. Here's Time magazine on all the things that could go wrong, there's quite a few.

But in Ohio, the epicentre of claims of wrong-doing last time, I reckon a repeat is pretty unlikely. Unlike in 2004, the Democrats now control the state (perhaps the Republicans forgot to reset their voting machines in 2006) and I think it unlikely, to say the least, that they would be in on a grand conspiracy to rob their man (although they did, amusingly, misspell Joe the Plumber's name). Were a lot of Democrat voters to be turned away from the polls this time round, that really would be the cock-up to end all cock-ups.

* Obviously if Chuck Baldwin steals it in West Virginia I will look like a fool.