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| Columnists |
| Issue 1361 |
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| With Bio-Waste Spreader: “A modest wildlife conservation measure that could help stop the long-term decline of UK farmland birds took a knock last month when Peter Kendal, retiring president of the National Farmers Union (NFU), called it ‘utter madness’ and said it should be scrapped at ‘the earliest opportunity’…” |
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| With M.D. “The classification of Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool as ‘potentially unsafe’, after it failed to meet four out of five standards of quality and safety in an unannounced inspection by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), will not surprise Eye readers. The CQC acted after it was contacted by operating theatre staff and found failures to report serious adverse incidents, near misses, very worrying staff shortages and problems with essential equipment…” |
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| With Dr B Ching: “Two decades after the Tories legislated to put shareholders at the centre of the rail network, the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR) quaintly thinks passengers should come first. ‘Passengers must be at the heart of the rail industry… We want to see that passengers are treated fairly,’ said chair Anna Walker, as ORR revealed that only 11 percent of passengers always or usually claim compensation for delays. ORR also found that more than three-quarters of passengers know little or nothing about their rights to compensation, and 74 percent reckon train firms do little or nothing to tell people about those rights…” |
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With Doofer: “It’s a measure of Mr Selfridge’s grasp of the mechanics of primetime Sunday TV that, at barely a year old, the series already feels like a post-garden centre/pre-News at Ten tradition. So attuned is it to the timeslot’s unique rhythm – the reverent rustle of nostalgia, the bovine thud of exposition, the muffled roar of character actors scrabbling for the chance to say ‘ma’am’ in a cravat – that the period drama is virtually indistinguishable from any of its similarly attired predecessors.
[Review of Mr Selfridge (ITV1) and The Musketeers (BBC 1)]”
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| With Piloti: “Never leave anything beautiful or valuable to a local authority: they will only neglect it or flog it. Further proof of this can be seen at Grant Lodge in Cooper Park, Elgin, originally the town house of the Earls of Seafield...” |
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| With Lunchtime O’Boulez: “The Guiting Festival, an idyllic rural music fixture which for 40 years has drawn star performers to a picture-postcard Cotswold village in a civilised and charming manner, is being torn apart by rows. Since 1986 the festival’s music director has been respected musician Duncan Westerman, who also conducts the nearby Cheltenham Philharmonic Orchestra. So it was with surprise that festival supporters learnt from a recent newsletter that he had resigned, with pianist Joanna MacGregor stepping forward to replace him. But Westerman has now hit back, revealing that he hadn’t resigned at all: he was sacked, in what he calls ‘an unexpected, humiliating and callous way’ after falling out with the festival’s chairman…” |
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| With Bookworm: “In crime and other commercial fiction, last Thursday saw the publication of novels by Benjamin Black, Mo Hayder, Cathy Kelly, Erica James, Jojo Moyes, SJ Parris and Yrsa Sigurdardottir. In literary fiction, there were books appearing on the same day by Jill Dawson, Hugo Hamilton, Susan Minot, Eshkol Nevo, David Park, Helen Oyeyemi and Joanna Trollope. Add paperbacks, and the flood of competing titles becomes even crazier… [And] it was a big day for paperback non-fiction, too… Why the literary car crash, mimicking the pile-ups that occur in the run-up to Christmas? Because publishers and booksellers remain inexplicably convinced that books have to come out on Thursdays, and because no one wants to appear in the dead zone of January and February…” |
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| With Slicker: “The surprise decision of Guernsey chief minister Peter Harwood to resign, in the wake of criticisms in the last Eye of the conflicts of interest inherent in the looming scandal surrounding the Channel Islands Stock Exchange (CISX), suggests there is more and worse to come from the investigation by the Guernsey Financial Services Commission (GFSC). The CISX was riddled with at best gross incompetence and flagrant protection of vested interests, or at worst influence peddling and possible corruption…” |
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Letter from Ukraine
From Our Own Correspondent: “The funny thing for Ukrainians reading foreign press coverage of our revolution and now invasion by Russia is how much nonsense is being written. It really can’t be underestimated. It’s all very well to bang on about the ‘ethnic divide’ here, but – despite appearances – that’s not the cause of the revolution; and anyone who thinks it is probably hasn’t been to Ukraine since the days of the Czars. The true cause is far simpler: it’s more than 20 years since the USSR collapsed, yet still we live in poverty, we have no rights, our courts are a joke, our hospitals are appalling and the country is run exclusively for the benefit of a few thousand gangsters…” |
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To read all these columnists and more in full, you can buy the latest edition of Private Eye - or subscribe here and have the magazine delivered to your home every fortnight.
Next issue on sale:
18th March 2014. |
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Only In The Magazine
Charge of the Lightweight Brigade as Hague Is Sent to Kiev… Putin Reveals Plans to Commemorate Start of WW1… Simple Simon Denies Affiliation with Pie Man, by Sybil Liberties… RBS Announces No Bonus to Shareholders… Maddy Arrests: Another Article Predicted ‘Any Day Now’… Curse of Strictly Strikes Again… Laurie Penny’s Diary, as told to Craig Brown
And also...
- Paedo-filler information: Why the Mail’s attack on Labour luminaries is old, old news
- Hospital cover-ups: More on the shameful neglect at Wales’s own ‘Mid-Staffs’
- PLUS: Yentob and Savile; Letter from Ukraine; sweaters in Guernsey & more!
For all these stories you can buy the magazine or subscribe here and get delivery direct to your home every fortnight.
Next issue on sale: 18th March 2014. |
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