Nick Cohen: Writing from London

Beware the ferret-faced heresy hunters

Nick Cohen — Tue, 15 May 2012 10:18:32 +0000

I fell in with bad company while I was on a story in Oslo last week: American conservative journalists. I am glad to say confirmed the public’s stereotype of reporters by enjoying their drink. (They make it their first task after landing in a new city to find the best bar, an example that should inspire us all.) But they bore no resemblance to the European stereotype of the ignorant, right-wing yank. They were cosmopolitans who were at ease in Europe. They were well read. Although they would hate the label, they were also crusading journalists, who had made the cause of the dissident opposition to Putin and Lukashenko their own. They had no time for social conservatives, who wanted to police private morals — but, I told them, they had ended up in the same political camp with know-nothings who thought that dinosaurs roamed the Garden of Eden and conspiracy theorists who thought that Barack Obama was a secret member of the Mau-Mau.

How could they stand to spend a minute in such company?

The viciousness of the American left drove intelligent men and women rightwards, they replied.
Carry on reading

Autocrats step in as the west’s money runs out

Nick Cohen — Sun, 13 May 2012 09:41:30 +0000

For a moment at the Oslo Freedom Forum, it was possible to believe that Pyotr Verzilov was the coolest guy on the planet. Breathless and unshaven, the young performance artist arrived in Norway from the street protests in Moscow. With the élan of an exultant radical, he explained the personal and political reasons for taking on Putin’s kleptocracy.
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Greed and fear: Why Cameron dare not dump Murdoch

Nick Cohen — Sun, 06 May 2012 10:46:35 +0000

When all else fails, greed and fear explain otherwise inexplicable behaviour. Understand their power and you will grasp why the apparently tough-minded David Cameron and Alex Salmond still defend Rupert Murdoch. The ordinary rules of politics say they should abandon him without a moment’s regret. Base survival instincts ought to tell them that the scandals around News Corporation are a disease that may never be cured.

A by no means exhaustive list of the horrors ahead begins with Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks appearing at the Leveson inquiry this week. The non-Murdoch press will not shirk our duty to recall the fabulous social whirl that was once the “Chipping Norton Set”. We will remind you of how Brooks, Elisabeth Murdoch and Matthew Freud slapped and scratched the backs of David and Samantha Cameron at country homes, while Jeremy Clarkson flitted in and out of their parties – gambolling through the Cotswolds like a portly court fool.
Carry on reading

The Haves and the Have-Some-Mores

Nick Cohen — Thu, 03 May 2012 10:55:44 +0000

The New Few, or A Very British Oligarchy: Power and Inequality in Britain Now
By Ferdinand Mount (Simon & Schuster 305pp £18.99)
If you want to imagine the Prime Minister at seventy, gaze on the features of his cousin at several removes, Sir William Robert Ferdinand ‘Ferdie’ Mount, 3rd Baronet, of Wasing, and one-time adviser to Margaret Thatcher. As so often, distant relatives look more like each other than close kin. To a disconcerting degree, Cameron and Mount share the same moonish face, the same soft skin and contented look. Not the smallest of the good lessons The New Few teaches is that appearances deceive.
Carry on reading

The Dirtiest Book of All

Nick Cohen — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:44:17 +0000

Self-censorship is, in many ways, Cohen’s real thesis, which makes me wonder if his title wouldn’t have been better as You Don’t Want to Read This Book. His chapters on the credit market implosion and the Hobson’s choice faced by institutional whistleblowers are among the finest in this book because they examine both antiquated and self-defeating
statutes as much as ingrained human psychology. Conservatives can appreciate Cohen’s description of contemporary corporate culture as a kind of velvet dictatorship where thunderous egos reign in the boardroom and underlings are too terrified to say that the boss is talking utter nonsense, lest they should first lose their jobs, then be reputationally boxed out of their inustries altogether. Whatever kind of enterprise this is, it is not “free.”
Read it all

Pure Malice: Why the Times destoryed one of Britain’s best blogs

Nick Cohen — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:51:17 +0000

n Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day, Milne, an idealistic journalist, describes the limitations of newspapers, and then gives the best argument for press freedom I know of. ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ he says to Ruth, the bored wife of a mining tycoon. ‘I know it better than you — the celebration of inanity, the way real tragedy is paraphrased into an inflationary spiral of hackneyed melodramas — Beauty Queen in Tug-of-Love Baby Storm… Tug-of-Love Baby Mum in Pools Win… Pools Man in Beauty Queen Drug Quiz. I know. It’s the price you pay for the part that matters.

‘Junk journalism is the evidence that society has at least got one thing right, that there should be no one with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.’
Read on

Beware PR Men Bearing Gifts

Nick Cohen — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 09:47:51 +0000

The Panglossian wisdom is that the web allows access to new sources of information and blogs, tweeters and online journals will replace the old newsrooms. But the pinpricks tiny sites can inflict on a target do not begin to match the cudgel blows the mass media of the 20th century could deliver. Of course, an oligarch or leader of a dictatorial regime would prefer that no criticism appeared anywhere. But he can rest easy if the criticisms are hidden in obscure corners of the web and do not enter the mainstream. The PR with the resources of a state or oligarch behind him is there to maintain a cordon sanitaire.

Read the whole thing

Wanted: Artists for hard times

Nick Cohen — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 09:02:42 +0000

“Both Our Friends in the North and White Heat stop in the early 1990s. Coincidentally or not, that is the moment when former leftists veered off into irony, nostalgia, kitsch and parody; when they all but disappeared in a fit of giggles and hid any message they might hope to convey with knowing winks and “playful” references.”

Carry on reading

Rupert Murdoch and the revival of the Labour Party

Nick Cohen — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 07:59:50 +0000

The old American definition of an honest politician is that ‘once he’s bought, he stays bought’. The same does not apply to the Dirty Digger. Hunt is the latest in a long line of ministers to find that you can’t buy Murdoch. You can only hire him. He’s going down, and is determined to take with him all those in the London and now Edinburgh governments who offered him favours in return for propaganda.
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Élysée 2012: le score de Marine Le Pen vu de Londres

Nick Cohen — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 08:22:35 +0000

Par Franck Guillory – 23/04/2012
Un point de vue de Londres, celui de l’éditorialiste britannique Nick Cohen. Les Français ont voté. Le 22 Avril ne remplacera pas le 21 Avril dans l’imaginaire politique national et ce sont bien les deux favoris, Nicolas Sarkozy et François Hollande, qui s’affronteront en « finale », le dimanche 6 mai prochain. Pourtant, vu de l’étranger, l’évènement de ce premier dimanche électoral en France semble bien être le score record atteint par la candidate du Front National, Marine Le Pen.
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