Shami’s Surprising Defence of Freedom

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Sunday, 2 December 2012 at 12:37 pm Shami Chakrabarti has been so wrong about so much for so long, and is so given to easy posturing, that it is scarcely credible that she is opposed to state regulation of the press. Yet the director of Liberty, who was one of Leveson's “assessors”, wrote …

Ed Balls on Andrew Marr Show

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Sunday, 2 December 2012 at 4:10 pm Not up on the Marr programme website yet, so as a public service and in my role as the Shadow Chancellor’s assistant press officer, the transcript: THE ANDREW MARR SHOW INTERVIEW: ED BALLS, MP SHADOW CHANCELLOR DECEMBER 2nd 2012 ANDREW MARR: And so to …

Abraham Lincoln, war criminal

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Sunday, 2 December 2012 at 6:06 pm Adam Gopnik in his review of Lincoln, the film, deals squarely with a question that has long interested me: Was Abraham Lincoln a war criminal? There is another side to the film that needs some airing, though. The movie is inspired by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s much and …

Harriet vs Shami

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Monday, 3 December 2012 at 11:25 am The BBC1 Sunday Politics sends out transcripts of its interviews to journalists, but does not put them on its website. In the interests of transparency, truth, goodness, accountability, all that stuff, here is Harriet Harman, former legal officer of the National Council of Civil Liberties, disagreeing …

Chris Grayling vs Ken Clarke

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Monday, 3 December 2012 at 12:07 pm Also on BBC1 Sunday Politics was Chris Grayling, Secretary of State for Justice, explaining how his predecessor Kenneth Clarke is a good Conservative but got it wrong on the European Convention on Human Rights. Grayling also suggested that legal advice might be that he could not …

Leveson and the Use of English

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Monday, 3 December 2012 at 5:34 pm As a denizen of the Ethical Vacuum,* I hasten to correct an error I made in my column in The Independent on Sunday yesterday. I said that, under Lord Justice Leveson’s proposals, Ed Richards, who once worked for Gordon Brown, and who was appointed head of …

Top 10 Most Interesting Politicians

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Monday, 3 December 2012 at 10:23 pm Possibly unwisely, I described Nicola Sturgeon, the deputy leader of the Scottish National Party, as one of the 10 most interesting politicians in the UK. She gave a speech today that Severin Carrell, one of my former colleagues, analysed well. Inevitably, I was asked who …

Free the Press, Free the Judges

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Tuesday, 4 December 2012 at 10:18 pm There is just one tiny problem with we brave freebooters of the Ethical Vacuum, the “Nice” people on Guido’s little list, the defenders of the freedom of the press. Which is that when we (I) point out that having Ofcom or another government-appointed body “verify” a system of …

Facts Evasion II

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Wednesday, 5 December 2012 at 9:33 pm Here is a complicated fact in George Osborne’s speech today: Here is a simple fact: the richest will pay a greater share of income tax revenues in every single year of the coalition Government than in any one of the 13 years of the …

Ed Balls: “Sometimes my stammer gets the better of me”

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Thursday, 6 December 2012 at 12:01 pm The Labour Party’s Media Monitoring Unit is brilliant. I much prefer to read stuff like this rather than to listen to the audio or watch on YouTube. Here is a transcript of Ed Balls on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning. Sarah Montague: You did …