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We pay for this press office…
The new CEO of the New York Times and former Director General of the BBC can’t escape the scandal from the old country.
Mark Thompson has replied to a letter from Tory MP Rob Wilson confirming he will attend if asked. Thompson admits he knew the BBC were investigating Savile, but he’s already trying to pass the buck on to Entwistle:
“What did happen is that, at a drinks reception late last year, a journalist mentioned to me the existence of the investigation and said words to the effect of “you must be worried about the Newsnight investigation?” This was the first I had heard of the investigation…Although I recall hearing at the time of his death that BBC Television might do something (a tribute) about Jimmy Savile in due course, again I had not been briefed about the programmes themselves. I assume they were commissioned and broadcast by BBC Vision, the BBC’s television arm, in the usual way.”
Developing…
Via Esme Wren
Departed Tory Chief Whip gave a coded hint about stress being brought upon his family if he carried on fighting, but it seems he’s having his own problems. A senior CCHQ source coughs this afternoon that Mitchell ‘is going bonkers’.
Apparently he’s been going around ‘mumbling about suing everybody.‘
You would have thought he’d learnt his lesson about where mumbling gets him…
Star reporter Clark Kent, aka Superman, has sensationally quit the Daily Planet to set up his own blog. DC Comics have revealed that Superman is making the print-to-digital shift because he has “too much journalistic integrity” to carry on working for the newspaper. The saviour of the world says that he doesn’t want to become a “grizzled ink-stained wretch”, and has become disillusioned with the dead tree press because he “believes news should be about, I don’t know, news?”. Desperate colleagues attempted to convince him to stay but were forced to admit that “times are changing and print is a dying medium”.
Superman is tipped to “come into his own in the next few years as far as being a guy who takes to the internet and to the airwaves and starts speaking an unvarnished truth”.
Guido welcomes the competition…
The rent-swappers who own one London home are bad enough, but it takes a certain kind of trougher to bill the taxpayer for hotel stays when he already has two properties in the capital to choose from. Back during the original expenses scandal David Amess hid in a hairdressers after being doorstepped over his greedy second home claims. Once again the Tory MP has been caught red handed.
Amess owns a flat in east London which he rents out, claiming over £7,000 in expenses for the rent on a south west London flat in which he lives. But being a rent-swapper who makes money from the taxpayer isn’t enough for Amess. Despite charging us for the rent on the home he is registered as living in, the Tory MP has claimed another £8,000 expenses to stay in London hotels over the last year. All the while his taxpayer-funded rented home is left empty. Amess has been in parliament for nearly thirty years. Now would be a good time for him to announce his retirement…
