Did David Miliband’s dithering blow Labour’s election chances?

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Thursday, 3 June 2010 at 10:39 am Number 333 in my series of Questions to Which the Answer is No is asked by frequent contributor Mike Smithson at Political Betting. Easy to misremember in retrospect, but the Foreign Secretary’s resignation would never have dislodged Gordon Brown, much as it should have done. Brown would have …

Half way round the world and back again

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Friday, 3 September 2010 at 10:32 pm They only do it to pay homage to some dead French poststructuralist, I know, but all one can do is marvel at the Daily Mail. Today it has a report (“The publishing world was plunged into chaos last night …”) about some of the stories in Tony …

How Journalism Works, pt 102

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Saturday, 11 September 2010 at 3:45 pm Today’s innuendo special in the Daily Mail about the former Prime Minister (right) has an eye-catching third paragraph about a hotel in Abu Dhabi in which Tony Blair sometimes stays: Its proud owners have recently announced the acquisition of the world’s first gold bar vending machine, so its …

End of the “pinned against the wall” myth

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Monday, 18 October 2010 at 2:25 pm Chris Ames did not agree with the use of military force in Iraq, but I am consistently impressed by his fairmindedness and the thoroughness with which he compiles information on the British decision to join the US-led invasion at his Iraq Inquiry Digest. He has …

Eighty-five per cent of new jobs go to British workers

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Saturday, 3 September 2011 at 6:08 pm There is an important post at Coffee House by Jonathan Portes, an economist who is Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, which thoroughly debunks the fallacy implied by the Statistic of the Week, that 90 per cent of the net increase in …

“Yo, Blair” and other untruths from the archive

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Wednesday, 9 November 2011 at 6:42 pm How transient and fleeting is that solid-sounding thing, a blog. The early version of this one was called Open House, on which I started blogging in November 2007. It moved a year later to Independent Minds, which is still there [minimally preserved on the Internet …

“One of the greatest disasters ever to befall European civilisation”

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Saturday, 14 July 2012 at 9:52 pm I thought that I had blogged about this before, but I cannot find it, so I’ll do it again. Zhou Enlai did not say it was “too early to say” what impact the French Revolution had. In the Financial Times in June last year, Richard McGregor …

Debunk Special

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Thursday, 3 January 2013 at 5:17 pm The highest form of journalism, I like to think, is debunking. I do enjoy a good debunk. In The Independent on 27 December, for example, I tried to report the surprising evidence that Britain is not becoming a more unequal society under the Coalition Government (and might …

“I exist only to serve”

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Tuesday, 12 February 2013 at 9:59 pm I thought I had heard Peter Mandelson say it, and have used it with attribution for years. It was one of his catchphrases, as was, “I must return to the people whence I came,” which was his way of saying he was going to …

“Intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Thursday, 14 February 2013 at 9:55 pm Following my post on Tuesday about the etymology of  some of the Sayings of Mandelson, a correction. The earliest instance of Peter Mandelson saying that the New Labour government was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” was in a report for the Financial Times by David Wighton …