Russell Brand was a creation of television and the tabloids, not the comedy circuit

Until last night's Dispatches, I had never seen Russell Brand's comedy act. I now look back on those days with affection. 

But that doesn't mean I wasn't aware of him. As I complained in 2013:

Russell Brand turned up writing on football for the Guardian. He guest edits the New Statesman. He's interviewed on Newsnight. I can’t get away from him.

He wasn’t much of a sportswriter and his political views on Newsnight were ridiculous – a bunch of media-left slogans and a call for unelected officials to tax us all.

But then why should he be expected to be an expert on these things? He is a niche comedian.

Brand’s trouble is that he has become a symbol of youthful cool and everyone wants to be associated with him.

Jonathan Ross’s exit from the BBC arose from his inability to grow middle aged gracefully. He wanted to show how young and hip he still was. And the way to show that was to demonstrate to us that he knew all about Brand’s love life.

And two years later Owen Jones fell under Brand's spell too. And have a look at the Guardian's contributor page for Brand to see just how much the paper loved him.

The extent to which Brand was a media creation was brought home to me by something Simon Evans tweeted this afternoon:

Brand is not now and never was a comedian. He was never on the 'comedy circuit', which is now being traduced as an unreconstructed sewer of nodding, winking, pawing, leering predatory men, with a code of silence to match their coercive behaviour.

He's a TV/tabloid/PR construct and that is the sewer you need to navigate if you want to understand the culture that allowed him to thrive. Pretty much the exact same one that allowed his illustrious precursors in disgrace to thrive before him.

I was a stand up from 1996 and gigged hard on the circuit until 2010 or so. I didn’t see Brand on a bill once. I’ve been in multiple dressing rooms with everyone else from that era, however quickly they elevated to TV and tour shows. That’s how it works. I’ve never even met Brand. 

The only time I saw Brand at a show was  standing at the back of a one off gig being hosted by his friend Simon Amstell. I am not guilting Simon by association, I don’t know him. But that’s who he was there with. 

Brand is (or rather was in those years) 100 per cent the product of the very culture that C4 deliberately cultivated like a pseudo left wing Daily Mail sidebar of shame, with a dash of Eurotrash. I found it nauseating but they loved his bad boy shock factor.

My honest gut feeling was that he would have been despised in 90 per cent of 'dressing' rooms on the circuit. They were old fashioned enough on the whole and If nothing else he showed a good deal of self awareness in steering clear of the place and booking himself on the fast track to notoriety via Big Brother and Bizarre.

And for some sharp analysis of the way the media kowtowed to Brand, read Evans on his appearance on Newsnight in the video above.

He says of it:

It’s not a masterpiece (and I cringe at some of the boosted “laughter track”) but then it was written and performed in a 48-hour period. And the hat was misjudged. I did not quite understand the format. 

But I will assert that my chosen take on Brand was driven through against the prevailing perception of his having spoken truth to power in that Newsnight interview. Prevailing in the SUFTW offices at any rate. And particularly among… but no. I’ll leave it there. 

GUEST POST A tour of some top political podcasts

Ruth Bright listens to some of the most popular political podcasts so you don't have to.

Is anyone else addicted to political podcasts? Is help available for this addiction? While I look for a cure, here is an affectionate tribute to a few favourites. Perhaps you will recognize them and love them too.

First we go live to The Rest is Politics:

Nicey: It’s been a super-duper week for us at politics podcast HQ. Yet another sell-out gig for us at the Palladium. Did I ever tell you about the time I walked barefoot through Kazakhstan...?

Gritty: Yes Nicey. I met Princess Di you know.

Nicey: Yes, yes.

Gritty: Fiona thought she fancied me. It’s in me diaries. There are eight volumes.

Nicey: Yes, yes Gritty. But as I was saying. When I was a civil servant I nipped out for a sandwich at Pret on Victoria Street, but did a detour to walk barefoot through Kazakhstan instead. It taught me much about many juxtapositions.

Gritty: You are a nice guy Nicey, but let’s face it: you're a bit posh. As Tony said during the Iraq war... 

Nicey: Yes Gritty you are Greggs to my Pret. We're chalk and cheese; that’s the secret of our success. Anyway… back to my time barefoot in Kazakhstan…

Over at the Lib Dem Podcast: 

Presenter: I collect nerdy facts about the Lib Dems. Fortunately many others like my nerdy Lib Dem facts so I am a big success. 

Council leader: We win elections decade in, decade out. We win big. Anyone can do it. We Focus till we drop. 

Presenter: I don’t wish to be indelicate, but I've seen better literature. But you certainly win big. 

Council leader: We are wokers and winners. I mean workers and winners. 

Presenter: Hang on I think I have heard that before… 

 And here'sthe Newsnight alumni podcast The News Agents: 

Ems: I am simply exasperated with Boris Johnson. What a wanker. Trump? He’s is a tosser too. Right? I mean, right? I did a celebrated interview with Prince Andrew you know. 

Other Newsnight escapee: Yes, yes Ems we know. (I thought I was going to be working with Chris Mason). 

And on and on ad infinitum, while I look for that cure...

Ruth Bright has been a Liberal Democrat councillor in Southwark and parliamentary candidate for Hampshire East.

Roman altar discovered beneath Leicester Cathedral

The queue to file past Richard III's coffin passes the old song school on its way to the cathedral entrance

Archaeologists excavating the site of the old song school at Leicester Cathedral have discovered what is believed to be a Roman shrine, reports the Leicester Mercury:

The cellar of a Roman building and a 1,800-year-old altar stone have been discovered during the excavation of the site where the choir would have been practised and rehearsed, led by University of Leicester Archaeological Services (Ulas), suggesting the presence of a shrine or cult room. The cellar – now nearly 10ft (3m) below the ground – is believed to have had a concrete floor and stone walls, with decorative paintwork.

The Mercury goes on to quote the leader of the dig, Matthew Morris - its story gives his age but not his first name:

"It could be really significant. It’s an area of Leicester that we don’t get to excavate very often.

"It’s the historic quarter of the town, so it’s one of those big blank areas on the map of the city. But it’s also quite fundamental in understanding the history of Leicester Cathedral.

"Whilst it’s an iconic building in the cityscape, we don’t actually know too much about its early history and most of what you see above ground today was rebuilt in the Victorian period. So an excavation next to it was really the only way we were going to get to grips with key questions, like when was it first founded, and what was underneath it before?

"There’s always been this folk tale that there was a Roman temple underneath the cathedral. Until now, there’s been no way of being able to say whether there was or not, but we’re certainly looking at, with this excavation and the discovery of this cellar and the fragment of a Roman altar stone out of it, that there is definitely a Roman place of worship underneath the cathedral.”

The dig, which has been made possible by the demolition of the song school in the second round of alterations following the internment of Richard III in the cathedral, has also found a Saxon coin and what may be signs of the first building of that period to be found in this part of the city.

And sometimes folk tales do turn out to be true. I remember reading of an old lady who grew up in a house in Friar Lane who was told as a girl that there was a king buried in the back garden. The house backed on to the site of the Franciscan friary where Richard III was found.

It's all a reminder of what a historic city Leicester is. "Where will be be buried? Presumably not in Leicester," asked Kirsty Wark after Richard was found. Be off with you, madam.

The Reunion: Finding Richard III

In June 2012 I wrote:

Today the site of Greyfriars monastery and Herrick's garden is occupied by Greyfriars, Friar Lane and New Street. Leicester Chronicler says:

very little survives of the medieval friary; just an archway in the basement of private property and some stones incorporated into the wall of an open air municipal car park.

I suspect that is the car park behind the social services building in Greyfriars, which was securely locked when I was there this afternoon. But I did find this plaque across the road on the side of the old Nat West bank.

And, somewhere under the paving stones, the body of Richard III may well be close by.

Three months later it was found.

The latest edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme The Reunion tells the story of the dig and the research that proved the identity of the skeleton they unearthed on the first day of the dig.

There is no participant from the Richard III Society: they seem to be like that.

I paid my respects to Richard when his coffin was displayed in Leicester Cathedral and got rather carried away:

It has been a remarkable week for Leicester and Leicestershire. 

When the plans for taking Richard's bones around the Bosworth battlefield and the villages associated with it were announced, I wondered if it was a good idea. But it turned out to be an act of genius and I found myself ridiculously moved.

This, I think, had less to do with Richard III and more to do with the community involvement. Councillors, ex-servicemen, Scouts and Brownies... 

What we saw on BBC News and heard on BBC Radio Leicester was the sort of civic England you fear had been lost to modernisation and the turbo-capitalism.

Because the day was not about celebrating Richard III or the monarchy: it was about celebrating our pride in Leicester and Leicestershire. In the end, the day was about ourselves.

And then Richard's returned to Leicester in triumph, rather than naked over the back of a horse.

Let no one tell you that history cannot be rewritten.

I recommend this programme, though Kirsty Wark neglects to mention that when this story was first covered by Newsnight she asked one :participant:

"Where will Richard be buried? Presumably not Leicester.

Vicargate made me remember when the BBC did pay actors to pose as members of the public

My first reaction to Vicargate - the appearance of a woman on Newsnight in a dog collar when she is not ordained in any recognised church - was that it was extremely funny.

When I could see its serious side, I reflected that it was an unfortunate event that the BBC would wish to avoid in future.

But I reckoned without Auntie's unwillingness ever to admit that she has made a mistake.

Here is what Newsnight tweeted in response to those who questioned this incident:

Claims that Lynn appeared on #newsnight as a paid actor are false. Lynn is a pastor and was a genuine participant of our Brexit debate. She carries out work as an extra using her middle name but this is not relevant to the capacity in which she appeared. #VicarGate

— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) November 29, 2018

It's true that some people noticed that Lynn is also an actress and has also appeared on several other news programmes, but that was not my concern. From my point of view, it looked as though the BBC had invented a conspiracy theory only to knock it down.

But I was reminded of a BBC News story from 1999, the era when Vanessa Feltz was being promoted by the corporation as a British Oprah Winfrey:

Talk show host Vanessa Feltz is to work on new shows for the BBC after the scrapping of her daytime programme. 

The Vanessa Show was at the centre of a row over fake guests earlier this year, after allegations that actors were booked to appear as genuine guests. 

Four production staff are no longer with the BBC and another was given a formal warning after the show was accused of featuring bogus models, actresses and strippers, and two total strangers posing as sisters.

Makes you think, doesn't it? Though you could be kind and take it as an index of how seriously the BBC takes such deception.

"Pastor", to return to Vicargate, is a conveniently loose word. Lynn turns out to be ordained in an internet-based church dedicated to making its adherents rich and to have a history of tweeting against Islam.

That's her in full fig in the photograph above. If she appears on the BBC yet again, she should me made to dress like that.

Newsnight thinks Wasim Akram is about to become President of Pakistan

Take a look at the first few seconds of this video.

That's not Imran Khan, who was a right-arm bowler, but Wasim Akram.

I suppose all seam bowlers look alike to the bright young things at Newsnight.

Later.  Newsnight have deleted their tweet, but someone captured the vital seconds.

“Is Imran Khan, the British-educated former cricket player about to become Prime Minister of Pakistan?”

- probably, but the man in this clip is WASIM AKRAM. pic.twitter.com/Dbyj782Zw0

— Tina Daheley (@TinaDaheley) July 26, 2018

Scott Walker: On Your Own Again

I have spent the past week in Shropshire with the songs of Scott Walker going through my head.

Before I left I watched the BBC Prom devoted to those songs and I thought it was wonderful.

I had heard it on the radio, but the staging in the Royal Albert Hall added magic. Without it, on the radio, you missed Scott Walker's voice.

But then the fact that Walker devoted himself to these songs when, with that voice, he could have done anything he wanted in music was somehow a statement of their importance in itself.

On Your Own was at the Prom by Susanne Sundfør. You can see her performing it in a preview of the concert for Newsnight.

I have sometimes been a little sceptical of the new emphasis on accessibility at the Proms - or at least of the BBC's insistence on promoting those concerts above all others.

But the Scott Walker Prom reminded us that the important difference is not the one between classical and popular music but the one between good and bad music.

I find I have chosen four Scott Walker songs for my Sunday music video before:

• Jackie
• The Amorous Humphrey Plugg
• Farmer in the City
• The Girls from the Streets

So it's no surprise that I enjoyed this concert.

Welcome to the new Liberal Democrat bloggers

The Liberal Democrats are not dead and neither is blogging. In March three new blogs appeared on the LibDemBlogs aggregator in March. Thanks as ever to Ryan Cullen for sending me the details.

Challenging Journeys (Phase 2) is written by Helen Belcher and offers "a short wander through the mind of a probationary politician".

Here she writes about Nick Clegg's Newsnight film about Ebbw Vale:

"Investment needs to be better targeted. If you don’t think you’re going to get a good job, there is little incentive to get a good education. So it’s jobs that are needed, together with investment in schools and colleges to train up a workforce in the new skills that will be demanded."

Lib Dem Books (and anything else from Amazon) is an Amazon Affiliate  account set up by Merton Lib Dems (and Simon McGrath in particular): "That means that if you use a link from this website to go to Amazon we get a % of everything you spend (and it makes no difference to the price you pay)."

Here it is on 'No More Champage: Churchill and his money':

He came very close to ruin on a number of occasions, particularly after losing huge amounts gambling on US shares in the late 1930s when he was rescued by Sir Henry Strakosch, without which he may well have gone bankrupt and lost his seat – and the history of the world would be very different.

My Electronic Soapbox is written by Alex Wasyliw. He writes about the government's refusal to confirm that EU nationals will have the right to remain in Britain after Brexit:

The government could, if it wanted, end this debate right now by simply agreeing to protect the rights of those who have already done so much for our country. But they are not, and likely won't until they have what they want - complete unfettered control over the Brexit negotiations, a blank cheque from parliament and a lack of exposure on just how difficult and damaging these negotiations are likely to be for us, and just how unprepared they are for them.

If you have a new blog you would like to appear here next month, please add it to LibDemBlogs.

A graph makes Nicky Morgan look even more surprised than usual

On last night's Newsnight Evan Davis ambushed Nicky Morgan with the facts about who will suffer from the government's attempts to reduce the deficit.

The BBC, Jimmy Savile and other child abusers

View image | gettyimages.com

In his Observer column today Nick Cohen writes about the scandal of the BBC's sacking of Meirion Jones and Liz MacKean, the two journalists who made the Panorama programme about Newsnight's abandonment of its investigation into Jimmy Savile.

Not only that, writes Cohen:

BBC managers have shifted Tom Giles, the editor of Panorama, out of news. Peter Horrocks, an executive who insisted throughout the scandal that the BBC must behave ethically, announced last September that he was resigning to “find new challenges”. 

Clive Edwards, who as commissioning editor for current affairs oversaw the Panorama documentary, was demoted. The television trade press reported recently that his future is “not yet clear” (which doesn’t sound as if he has much of a future at all).

I doubt the BBC is worse than any other great hierarchy, but Cohen's conclusion is right:

The power of hierarchies is hard to break. But if you want to fight fraud in the City or the rape of children, it has to be broken. A start can be made by insisting that everyone from John Humphrys in the morning to Evan Davis at night tells the truth about the purge of the BBC’s truth tellers.

And the BBC does have previous.

In an extraordinary London Review of Books article from 2012 Andrew O'Hagan looked at the corporation's long entanglement with the subject.

Take the case of Derek McCulloch, 'Uncle Mac', the man in charge of Children’s Hour, and the voice of Larry the Lamb in Toytown.

O'Hagan writes:

In his book Strange Places, Questionable People, published in 1998, John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor, writes about his early days there. In 1967, he was given the task of preparing the obituary of a famous children’s presenter. He calls him "Uncle Dick". In 1998, and still today, Simpson felt he shouldn't name McCulloch directly: but it is now clear that Uncle Dick is Uncle Mac. 

In preparing the obituary, Simpson rang ‘Auntie Gladys’, who had worked with him, to get a few quotes. 'Week after week,’ Auntie Gladys told him, ‘children from all over the country would win competitions to visit the BBC and meet Uncle Dick. He would welcome them, show them round, give them lunch, then take them to the gents and interfere with them. If their parents complained, she said, the director-general’s office would write and say the nation wouldn't understand such an accusation against a much loved figure.' ... 

When Simpson reported her remarks to his boss, the man rounded on him and told him he was an ‘ignorant, destructive young idiot’. The boss then rewrote Simpson’s copy; McCulloch, the obituary now said, ‘had a wonderful way with children’. The Corporation turned a blind eye to what was being said about McCulloch just as it later would with Savile and some of the others. 

Yet people knew. The Times obituary of McCulloch was written by the poet Geoffrey Dearmer. ‘Children of all ages were always comfortable in his unseen company,’ Dearmer wrote. ‘There was something of Larry the Lamb in him, and Larry could get away with murder.’

To end on a slightly lighter note, O'Hagan mentions meeting Dan Davies, Jimmy Savile's biographer:

He always said the story was seedy and strange and that when the book was published he would call it 'Apocalypse Now Then'.

Iain Sinclair on Edge of the Orison

This is a film Iain Sinclair made for Newsnight about his book Edge of the Orsion, which was based on a walk he made retracing John Clare's steps from Epping to Peterborough.

You may also enjoy The Straw Bear takes a stroll through the streets of Peterborough.

Jonathan Meades and platform 1 at Market Harborough

BBC Newsnight Feature: Maglev from Amirani Media on Vimeo.

Jonathan Meades made this film on the case for ultra high-speed railway for Newsnight in 2005.

Take a close look at the still before you play the video. It shows platform 1 at Market Harborough station, but sadly I do not think it is the great man standing there as a train speeds past. That scene can be found at 1:04 in the video.

Showing trains in Midland Mainline livery running into a pre-Eurostar St Pancras, it already has period charm.

Thanks to @PrimedMover on Twitter.

Newsnight's forgettable memory man

The close of this evening's Newsnight, featuring the world memory champion, was strangely reminiscent of this...

Russell Brand won't leave me alone

Russell Brand is a comedian who appeals to the young. I don’t like him, but that’s fine. I’ve reached the age when I am not meant to like that sort of performer.

The trouble is, he won’t leave me alone.

Compare him with another of “those Russell comedians they have nowadays” (as Stewart Lee put it), Russell Howard. I don’t like him either. I have complained about him on this blog. But these days I don’t watch the programmes he is on, so we get on just fine.

But Russell Brand turned up writing on football for the Guardian. He guest edits the New Statesman. He's interviewed on Newsnight. I can’t get away from him.

He wasn’t much of a sportswriter and his political views on Newsnight were ridiculous – a bunch of media-left slogans and a call for unelected officials to tax us all.

But then why should he be expected to be an expert on these things? He is a niche comedian.

Brand’s trouble is that he has become a symbol of youthful cool and everyone wants to be associated with him.

Jonathan Ross’s exit from the BBC arose from his inability to grow middle aged gracefully. He wanted to show how young and hip he still was. And the way to show that was to demonstrate to us that he knew all about Brand’s love life.

Hence those bullying phone calls to Andrew Sachs. As my mother said at the time, he and Brand behaved like two teenagers making dirty calls from a phone box.

For all I know, Brand may be a good comedian. I have never seen him in that role.

But my views on him from all the other appearances I have been unable to escape are well summarised in this tweet…

i'm choosing not to be infuriated by russell brand's prose by imagining he writes it in the same spirit that les dawson played piano.
— euan mccolm (@euanmccolm) October 24, 2013

I am sure I once read an article making very much these points, but I cannot find it online - perhaps I dreamt it? Anyway, I am writing it myself.

Russell Brand to edit the New Statesman

You may have seen the embarrassing interview with Brand on yesterday's Newsnight.

The New Statesman's decision to ask him to guest edit an issue reminds me of this column I wrote for its website in the magazine's glory years:

I liked the Statesman in the 1970s. Under Anthony Howard’s editorship, the back half was written by the hip young gunslingers of the day: Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens and Julian Barnes. Those in the know called them “The Hitch”. “Mart” and “Julian Barnes”. 

Further forward it was all politics. They even printed the leading article on the front cover, which made the magazine appear wonderfully serious. 

Today, after 30 years of educational advance, the Statesman has to put a colour picture on the front or it wouldn‘t sell at all. 

And if you open it today you find that every comedian in the country has a column. And Julian Clary has a big one. 

It wasn’t like that in the seventies. The contents page didn‘t read: 

Freddie "Parrot-Face" Davies on the future of the Common Market; Dickie Henderson on the Palestine Question 

And coming next week: 

Mike and Bernie Winters debate the Bullock Report on Industrial Democracy.

Just because you murder someone, it doesn't mean your views are worth hearing

The front page of today's Guardian is the worst I have ever seen on any newspaper. Why the Guardian wants to turn itself into a propaganda sheet for a murderer, I cannot imagine.

When you are over the anger, two possible explanations suggest themselves.

One is that this is an example of the sort of self-hatred that Western liberals can fall prey to and that Christopher Hitchens used to complain about. Hurt us because we deserve it, the paper thinks its readers will say.

The other is that we tend to assume that their must be something remarkable about someone who commits such a grotesque crime and that his view must therefore be listening to.

That is a fallacy, as Munira Mirza showed when writing of the videos the 'martyrdom videos' the 7/7 bombers left behind them:

What we see in these videos are not soldiers in a war, but self-righteous young men who believe that their own moral certainty absolves them of the need to explain themselves properly. 

Nobody elected Khan or Tanweer. As far as we know, they did not have relations with anyone in Palestine, Bosnia or Chechnya. Indeed, these two men did not even bother to ask their family, friends or neighbours what they thought. 

At the local mosque near where three of the bombers grew up, one of the committee members, Muhboob Hussein, reacted with anger to 7/7: ‘This is not Islam, this is not jihad, these people are not Muslim. This man [Khan] never came to our mosque....’ 

Obviously, Khan or Tanweer did not show much interest in trying to win people over to their worldview - they thought that ‘democratically elected governments’ had less claim to act on behalf of people than they did.

And we saw just the same contempt for democratic government from the idiot presented on the front page of today's Guardian.

When I blogged about Mirza's article at the time, someone left a comment reminding me of a prophetic piece by Ian Buruma that began:

Does masturbation lead to suicide bombing? One would think not. There is no more direct link to suicide bombing than there is to blindness or schizophrenia. But there may be a connection between sexual inadequacy or frustration and the pull towards violent extremism.

Almost as depressing as the Guardian front page was the discussion of the Woolwich murder on Newsnight yesterday evening. One participant, the impressive Maajid Nawaz, spoke of the need for a Western narrative to challenge the world-view of Islamism. But you only had to look at the people with him to see there was little chance we would hear it last night.

There was John Reid who, as a Communist while the Soviet Union was the greatest tyranny on this planet, never bought into the Western narrative in the first place and is now employed by the security industry - though Newsnight never reminds of us during his frequent appearances. And there was Alex Carlile, a Liberal Democrat who long ago threw in his lot with the most repressive elements of Labourism.

And, sure enough, both Reid and Carlile told us that the most important thing is that we give the state more power to inspect the affairs of law-abiding citizens and weaken the safeguards for those it accuses of crime.

If that is the first reaction of those we are supposed to regard as statesmen, then you can see how weak the West's belief in its own values has become.

Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary behaves better than the BBC over Savile

Sir Peter Fahy's report for Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary on how much police knew about Savile before he was exposed as a sex offender in 2012 was published at midnight.

But embargoes copies were sent out to journalists before that, allowing them to write stories for this morning's papers. Some even tweeted the findings in the small hours of this morning.

That, you might think, is pretty remarkable. It is what you do with any report likely to be of wide interest.

But it is certainly not what the BBC did when it published the Pollard Review into its own decision to drop a Newsnight investigation of Savile's crimes.

As Niall Paterson complained on the Sky News site at the time:

The Savile scandal has been a low point, perhaps its lowest ever, but it is not, despite what some BBC critics will say, representative of the whole. 

Which is why the Beeb's handling of the release of the Pollard Review evidence has been so utterly, utterly infuriating. 

First, they chose to dump it on their website this morning, rather than giving it to everyone under what's known as an embargo. 

An embargo means that journalists get sight of a document but promise not to use the information, either in print or on TV, before a certain date or time. 

It allows reporters to spend time digesting and analysing the data, before putting pen to paper - or head in front of the camera. 

Frankly, the BBC would be the first to complain if a public inquiry released its findings without using an embargo, or at the very least a "lock-in" - where journalists are "locked" in a room with the report for a few hours. 

Second, rather than releasing the evidence in plain text or searchable PDF as is usual, they scanned thousands of A4 sheets of paper and uploaded it to their website. 

This perhaps sounds like a petty complaint, but it makes a reporter's life so much more difficult to search for key phrases, to cross reference quotes or details. 

You essentially have to read the entire document - which, when it's more than 3,000 pages, is easier said than done. 

The more cynical person would say this a tactic most commonly used when an organisation wants to make a journalist's life as difficult as possible, or where they hope a few damaging facts get lost in an overwhelming wave of information. 

Third, they released the information on a Friday. 

If you were to ask any member of the BBC's political unit on which weekday a government department would most likely release a critical report in an attempt to bury the bad news, I'm sure you can guess what they'd say. 

MPs have usually left London, as have many other commentators. Newsrooms tend to be moving on to their weekend cover, more than likely utilising fewer staff. And news output on a Saturday, particularly on terrestrial TV, is much less substantial than during the week. 

And fourth, not a single member of BBC staff, including Tim Davie the acting director-general, has been made available for interview.

You can still read all the documents from the Pollard Review on the BBC site. But it is hard not to recall the corporation's original reaction when the Savile story broke:

Whilst the BBC condemns any behaviour of the type alleged in the strongest terms, in the absence of evidence of any kind found at the BBC that corroborates the allegations that have been made, it is simply not possible for the corporation to take any further action.

New allegations of MPs involved in paedophile ring

In the aftermath of the Newsnight fiasco over child abuse in North Wales, David Hencke (since crowned Political Journalist of the Year in the British Journalism Awards) said he was working on another story about a paedophile ring. He added that he would not publish it until he was satisfied that it was secure.

He must be happy, because on his blog today he writes:

Exaro News ... today reveals that for the last two months the police have secretly been scoping a new investigation into senior politicians and their involvement in a paedophile ring, involving under age boys, that took place in the 1980s ...

They are looking again at a raid that took place in 1982 on a guest house in Barnes, south London, which appeared to be being used as a gay brothel and was frequented by prominent figures including, I am told, ministers, Tory MPs, a Liberal MP and two Labour MPs. Under age boys in the care of Richmond council and other local authorities were visiting or staying at the guest house. 

The inquiry-under the title Operation Fairbank – will also examine whether there was a cover up which meant that the Met Police at the time and when complaints about it resurfaced twenty years later never followed up the investigation. Nobody was ever charged with any offence, even though the place had been raided and people bundled into police cars.

And there is more on Exaro News (for which Hencke works), though you will have to register to read it.

This story was first broken by the Mirror at the start of the month, when it claimed:

A politician, top cop, judge and bishop are among those said to have been part of the ring between 1978 and 1982.

This one will run and run, though probably not on Newsnight.

Six of the Best 294

"Fortunately the Scottish Lib Dems have done their homework and produced an admirable document spelling out how it would work, including its possible and wholly positive implications for the rest of the UK.   It’s a huge pity that this blueprint for devo max, the completion of devolution, was not produced first by the Labour Party; but its Lib Dem parentage offers an excellent opportunity for Labour and the Lib Dems to join forces in defence of the survival of the United Kingdom." BrianBarder on LabourList is impressed by our contribution to the debate on Scottish independence and devolution.

Hoping for More than Slogans has had enough of Jeremy Paxman.

John Dickerson on Slate explains why Mitt Romney did not see his defeat coming: "Even on the morning of the election, Romney’s senior advisers weren't close to hedging. They said he was going to win “decisively.” It seemed like spin, but the Boston Globe reports that a fireworks display was already ordered for the victory. Romney and Ryan thought they were going to win, say aides. “We were optimistic. More than just cautiously optimistic,” says one campaign staffer. When Romney lost, “it was like a death in the family."

The New Yorker has a gallery of photographs showing "a divided country coming together to perform the single unifying act of going to the polls".

Did The Smiths warn us about Jimmy Savile? Cowan & The Stupid Dream investigates.

mikeyashworth on Flickr shows us some vintage advertising posters discovered in a disused passageway at Notting Hill Gate tube station.

The Waterhouse Report into abuse in children's homes in Wales

Yesterday David Cameron announced two new inquiries into abuse in children's homes in North Wales.

The was because the original inquiry, conducted by the late high court judge Sir Ronald Waterhouse, has increasingly come under question - see the post I wrote following Friday's Newsnight report.

Intentionally or not, that report has shifted the focus of public outrage from the Jimmy Savile and the BBC to shadowy Conservative grandees.

Lost in Care, as the Waterhouse inquiry report was called, can be found online over at the National Archives site. Whatever its inadequacies, it is worth looking at for the background to this affair.