(Sort of) in Defence of the Daily Mail

I apologise for (or perhaps, see below, I only regret) the intermittent service at the moment. I am just incredibly busy with work stuff. Which I don't talk about here as a matter of policy - but lets just say i) not enough hours in the day and ii) fairly major expectation gap.

So I have just grabbed five minutes while I have a sandwich and, rather than looking out of window at sunny Croydon, I thought I'd drop in a few words.

I'm not really sure what is going on in the world right now (due to general busy-ness). But I saw one of those wretched interviews on Newsnight where Harriet Harman and Laura Kuenssberg got all semantic about "apologise" as opposed to "regret". Whilst I don't think that we can hold Harriet responsible for things she had little influence on 30 years ago, I was left thinking "oh just answer the f**king question" - my loathing of the political class generally has now evidently come so far that they have lost all sympathy.

Not (as if you would ever think it) that I have any time for the Dai1y Mai1 - how ironic for a paper that printed the famous Charlotte Church "all grown up" story to say anything about paedophilia (and if you say "that's different" then the answer is that legally, no, it isn't really). But of course it must not be the case that we disregard a story merely because of the vile rag it is printed in. Let's face it, if ten years ago we had been asked "which newspaper will break the MPs expenses scandal?" who would have said the Telegraph? That's as typical a Guardian (or even Eye) story as you would ever see.

So it is troubling when I here people say "ignore it, because it's in the Mail", knowing they would get all serious if it was in the Independent.

Print journalism is hugely under threat. Why buy a paper when the internet is free and mobile? And then to seek to limit freedom to publish reduces them to pictures of kittens and drunk slebs. But when it comes to the next expenses scandal equivalent - who else is going to break the story? Some blogger writing whilst eating his sandwich? A free press with some power (and integrity) is needed to hold governments to account, and like it or not, that does mean you have to put up with the Daily Mail.