Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Inside baseball ...

Aaro, he likes him some Dave Miliband, as seasoned Watchers know. I have not, frankly, the foggiest of clues here as to what the point is, except that we are told vey vey sternly that there is nothing funny about that picture of Miliband holding a banana. Stop sniggering at the back. I think that this is one of those articles that has been written for half a dozen people, of whom I am not one (that phrase attributable to Peter Jay, Aaro's old boss at Weekend World). But Patricia Hewitt is a pal of Aaro's as well - he wrote an article some while ago defending her on charges of having an irritating voice. Who cares, other than those poor souls who picked up a copy of the Times in Starbucks thinking it was free, and now find not only that they're out of pocket, but that there's no proper Aaro column to read?

8 Comments:

Blogger Chardonnay Chap said...

Could he possibly mean Melanie Phillips? And is it cynical to suppose that the pic with the banana was posed - to draw fire and make attacks on DM look both obvious and trivial?

It's a bit late to complain that ministers (and New Labour ministers in particular) like to attack each other. The Mandelson guacamole/mushy peas story was made up by John Prescott; it was probably Blair who originally described Brown as 'psychologically flawed'. I'm sure Aaro meant "unreconstructed elements" to sound ironic rather than straight; don't think that actually works.

And I love the comment that links to this. BBC bias even gets into their transcripts...

On a slightly different subject, Paul Waugh tweeted: Campbell says the postwar chaos shd have been a bigger story at the time. So that's the media's fault too. I'm sure Aaro can get behind that.

1/12/2010 04:14:00 PM  
Anonymous bubby said...

it was probably Blair who originally described Brown as 'psychologically flawed'.

I'm fairly certain Campbell both came up with it and gave the quote to the media.

1/12/2010 06:50:00 PM  
Blogger ejh said...

Pearce on Miliband

1/13/2010 09:28:00 PM  
Blogger ejh said...

Mind you, "no metropolitan conversation is complete without him"? (And he's an awful prose stylist, Pearce. Awful.)

1/13/2010 09:37:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I wonder whether Melanie has confused Milliband major with Milliband minor when she talks about climate change zealotry.

Guano

1/13/2010 11:19:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The Mandelson guacamole/mushy peas story was made up by John Prescott

I thought it was Neil Kinnock.

[redpesto]

1/14/2010 06:09:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Some say that it was actually a young American, observing for the Democrats some past election campaign, who didn't recognise mushy peas. Then Kinnock said that Mandy would make the same mistake. Then the story took off.

Guano

1/14/2010 06:40:00 PM  
Blogger ejh said...

I've always suspected Mandelson of making it up and putting it around.

1/14/2010 07:30:00 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home