✒ More woe in Wapping, where News UK hacks face the prospect of having to pay for story-getting lunches or drinks without being able to claim them back on expenses. That’s because a decree came into force this month requiring them to name the sources they entertain – and recent experience of things they thought were confidential ending up in the public domain has made them understandably reluctant to risk getting contacts into trouble by committing their names to paper or screen.
✒ Could Robert Peston be a shoo-in for a different job? When he blogged last week that Lord Coe was “a shoo-in” to head the BBC Trust, he left his own economics turf to sort-of scoop political and media correspondents, as well as equally oddly reporting on the BBC as if he didn’t belong to it. This fits with other recent signs of Pesto becoming restlessly semi-detached since switching to being economics editor: that speech complaining of the Daily Mail’s influence on TV news, for example, or the appearance on Radio 4’s PM – his first to discuss GDP figures in his new role – in which he jokingly or half-jokingly said the way GDP stats were calculated was so open to criticism that (“as I’m on the spectrum”) regularly having to treat them as credible might risk his sanity. “Economics editor for the BBC – allegedly” is how he intriguingly describes himself on his Twitter feed.
✒ At Private Eye’s leaving party last week for Ian Hislop’s long-serving PA Hilary Lowinger, Monkey hears Hislop’s speech included a memory evoking Lowinger’s coolness in handling the mixture of phone calls from the mad and the bad that the satirical magazine attracts. Arriving one morning, Hislop was told there was nothing special he needed to be aware of, oh, “except a man did leave a death threat. But I shouldn’t worry, it’s only someone in Coventry.”
✒ How to conduct a reverse-ferret, Daily Mail-style. On Wednesday, just a day before its apology to George Clooney, the paper’s splash and an inside spread used stills from footage of Angelina Jolie allegedly taken by her drug dealer (15 years ago, although the headlines implied by omission it was more recent) – a baffling decision in visual terms alone, as the scruffy, sneakily shot image apparently showing a misbehaving celeb made the Mail’s front look like a red-top’s. Since then, and since the Clooney grovel, Jolie has become the Mail’s favourite person: visit Mail Online and you find offerings from the remainder of the week included the trailer for Jolie’s film Unbroken, a piece publicising Unbroken, a very un-Mail article in which “Angelina Jolie opens up to friend Marianne Pearl about the camaraderie she feels with fellow activists”, and (also in the paper) a lengthy Friday dispatch in which Jolie’s wild past became part of a redemptive narrative – “How Angelina went from heroin to heroine”. The video, meanwhile, didn’t disappear but was sheepishly re-headlined as Jolie “during her ‘dark’ days in the 1990s”. The fact that she is reportedly suing the paper may, perhaps, have had something to do with this sudden flip-flop into gushing supportiveness.
✒ Monkey’s quote of the week: “Television advertising is for the stupid people whom the internet has left behind, who need to be shouted at and talked to like children” – possibly suffering a protracted post-Cannes hangover, adland veteran Gerry Moira complains in Campaign magazine that “sophisticated entertainment” has vanished completely from telly, though it can still be found in online ads.
✒ Monkey’s mysterious moment of the week: “Vote BBC!” – Tony Hall’s final words, accompanied by trademark jazz hands, when walking off stage after his call for a second Birtist revolution. Presumably he was comparing himself to a party leader holding a rally or making a conference speech – but why?
✒ A year on from the appearance of Lucy “Lipgloss” Adams (and her designer coat and sunglasses) at the public accounts committee, what’s the former BBC HR chief up to? She now runs the start-up Disruptive HR, “putting the ‘human’ back into human resources”, and tailored to the “so-called VACU world: volatile, ambiguous, complex and uncertain”. As Disruptive’s partner firms include Fizzpopbang (“combining a strong brand – fizz – with a nurtured culture of high-performing people – pop – to create amazing results – bang”) and Complete Coherence (making business leaders “literally smarter, faster and 10 years younger”), there has been speculation that it’s either a spoof, or the website is an online teaser for a spin-off from W1A, centring on Siobhan Sharpe’s bonkers branding agency Perfect Curve. But interviews suggest it’s real, in which case Monkey has a suggestion: replace “ambiguous” in VACU with “unhinged”, and you get a punchier (and possibly more Adams-like) acronym.
