Meedja on the Insanity Pills
A sad day
Westmonster is sad to report, officially, the Death of Political Journalism on the BBC. This follows last night's edition of the BBC's flagship political news programme, Newsnight, which chose to cover the LibDem leadership election with a useless analogy to the X Factor and which was then followed by a ludicrous interview between Paxo and Nicky Clegg. Paxo's opening question: "Tell us 10 interesting things about you."
Westmonster can confirm that, with one exception, at no point during this broadcast did we learn a single useful thing. The exception was a comment by a former media wonk for the LibDems, who suggested that the party might have to jettison its policy of being "all things to all people" as a means of fighting both Labour and Tory targets in different parts of the country. This chap suggested that the LibDems might need some national policies that they might, you know, stick to, regardless of who they were fighting locally. This seemed to Westmonster to be politically interesting. It wasn't referred to again in the Newsnight broadcast, which was too busy asking Clegg "tell us 10 interesting things about you."
So we can only assume that last night's episode was a spoof, a valedictory satire on all previous Newsnights used to celebrate the BBC's strategic shift to being a publisher of children's comics. To aid Paxo in his no doubt drooling retirement, here are 10 Interesting Things About Nick Clegg:
1. Like David Cameron, he used to write a column for Guardian Unlimited.
2. His father is half-Russian, his mother is Dutch.
3. His great-great-grandfather was the Russian nobleman Ignaty Zakrevsky, who was Attorney General of Senate in Imperial Russia.
4. His great-great aunt was the writer and suspected spy Baroness Moura Budberg-Bönningshausen (born Zakrevskaya) who was also the mistress of R. H. Bruce Lockhart, Maxim Gorky and H.G. Wells.
5. As an exchange student in Munich, he was charged with arson and had to do community service.
6. He worked as an intern under Christopher Hitchens in the States.
7. His wife's father is a member of the Spanish senate.
8. While an MEP, he led work on unbundling local telecommunications loops. Why is this interesting? It's one of the reasons you can download porn so fast on your cheap broadband, stoopid.
9. He launched a conference in 1993 which led to the opening of an air corridor across the former Soviet states in Asia, which has since been called The New Silk Road.
10. And the absolute clincher: he's a distant relative of Barry Took.
In fact, Nick Clegg is almost comically interesting. And we're sending the editor of Newsnight a link to Wikipedia as his retirement gift. So long Paxo - we'll miss you (not)!
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1 Comments
"This chap suggested that the LibDems might need some national policies that they might, you know, stick to, regardless of who they were fighting locally. This seemed to Westmonster to be politically interesting."
Does Westmonster also believe in Father Xmas perhaps?!