I’m delighted to announce two new roles I have this week agreed to take on in addition to my editorship of The Kernel.

Firstly, I am now The Catholic Herald’s Chief Feature Writer, focusing my efforts on a monthly interview slot for the paper. I’m looking forward to developing my interview technique and landing some big names, as well as writing more regularly for the paper.

I’ve helped the Herald out in the past with some digital work and written for it on-and-off for some years. It’s a wonderful paper with some brilliant people on its staff. I’m thrilled to have the chance to work with them more often.

Secondly, Adam Baker, founder of citizen journalism news service Blottr, for whom I have been a columnist for a while, has extended an invitation to join the company as an advisor. I’ll be helping the editorial team develop their content strategy over the next few years. I will also continue to write my Thursday column for the site.

Don’t worry, I won’t be losing my focus on The Kernel. But I’m really happy to have some fun projects running alongside it.

But a newly independent Scotland of the kind currently being discussed would be forced to rediscover her zeal for innovation and enterprise, because there would be no more subsidies from the British taxpayer to prop up public institutions that are branded “Scottish” but which are paid for by the English.

That is why I believe this once-great nation needs a chance to shine again. And now is the time to act. Alex Salmond, Scotland’s current pug-faced First Minister and by far the most impressive political operator in Britain, is probably the only man who could pull it off.

After all, a country that loses no opportunity to paint itself as independent, despite being the recipient of largesse from across the border, and which never shuts up about its distinct identity and rich history, to the point of psychosis, should really be given the chance to go it alone.

Of course, there would be some challenges. A new independent Scotland would no longer have any money spare for the lavish, English-funded subsidies that have kept its arrogant but largely talentless artistic community in comfort for many years, and which have allowed screamingly self-important harridans like Kirsty Wark to indulge their pet projects. (Rumours that Wark’s childhood heroine was Elena Ceausescu persist to this day.)

After independence, Scotland would have to take some hard decisions. Particularly: what currency would it use? It might have to establish its own, if the Eurozone doesn’t want it. That’s assuming the Eurozone even exists by then. But think of it this way: a Scottish currency would be sufficiently devalued that the country would be compelled to identify imaginative new export markets for its goods.

The bigger picture is that although the Scots have an unparalleled national genius for misery, they also an innate national resourcefulness and cunning. Give them something to be really miserable about – say, the need to slash government spending to within an inch of its life – and that entrepreneurial vigour might just reappear.

A further advantage of an independent Scotland is that it might entice back the legion of Scottish broadcasters who have made listening to Radio 4 such aural torture over the last twenty years.

Even more excitingly, the return of Scottish broadcasters would mean that the Scots could reclaim their most remarkable cultural artefact of the past century: I refer, of course, to the Tango-coloured hair-weave cum transplant cum toupée that sits atop the head of Andrew Neil and so nearly won the Turner Prize last year.

Relieved of its burdensome Scottish misanthropy, England would experience an almost immediate burst of gaiety. Imagine our city centres free of garrulous Glaswegian drunks slurping dirt-cheap Buckfast tonic wine, or English literary festivals free of those sour, spiky-haired Caledonian lesbians hawking their latest grim thrillers about child abuse. What bliss!

And here’s one last, even more delicious prospect: right-on Scottish stand-up comedians permanently banished to Edinburgh, where their ancient jokes about Thatcher (or the Pope) will make their equally ossified Stalinist audiences laugh so bitterly that Scotland’s famously dedicated healthcare workers will be left mopping up the anal leakage.

So it seems to me that the matter is settled. There remains, admittedly, the intractable problem of the north of England. Therefore, here’s a modest proposal: give the Scots Liverpool to sweeten the deal, and see if a taste of the Calvinist lash might not persuade that feckless and conceited community to get off its arse – disability benefits permitting, of course.

Johann Hari, in a hastily-written and poorly spelled blog post has announced his decision not to return to the Independent. Instead, he will be jetting around the world to write a book “on a subject I believe is important and requires urgent action”. What scandal is he about to uncover? The pimping of underage boys by their incestuous older brothers, perhaps? We can only guess.

The other thing we don’t know is who is bankrolling this vanity project by a liar and suspected pornographer who has yet to apologise personally to any of the people he viciously libelled. Because, if Johann Hari is actually at Columbia “retraining”, as he claims, he will have needed to conjure up $50,000 just for the tuition fees.

The only celebrity currently associated with Hari is Sir Elton John. The singer should be warned: this act of “gay solidarity” may come back to haunt him.

Years ago, Sir Elton was grossly libelled by The Sun newspaper, which accused him of using the services of rent boys. He should ask himself: does he really want his name to be linked with that of a self-confessed character assassin – and one suspected, moreover, of writing repulsive dirty stories about rent boys?

If Hari had shown genuine remorse for his crimes – and they were crimes, which could easily have landed him in court – people might now feel disposed to forgive him.

As it is, his latest conceited and incoherent piece of self-promotion will ensure that his name remains synonymous with plagiarism, mendacious fantasy and outright deceit.

And that’s before we even get to the subject of Hari’s finances, which Inspector Knacker might find repay close examination.

Oh, and Sir Elton: perhaps you ought to warn your chambermaids about your young visitor’s less-than-sanitary toilet habits. The brilliant young writer is apparently too preoccupied with exposing injustice (or thinking about donkey-dicked black teenagers) to remember to flush. Wire hangers at the ready!

But whatever your view of Britain’s greatest peacetime Prime Minister – actually, let’s make that greatest ever Prime Minister – if you have an ounce of human sensibility in your body you can’t but be appalled at the callous abuse of a woman in her twilight years for such shallow dramatic purposes.

I say shallow because there is no artistic purpose whatsoever to the depictions in this film of Maggie as an aging half-wit. They only serve to reduce the time available to its admittedly sublime highlights: those moments during Thatcher’s leadership – her triumphant acceptance speech on May 3, 1979, her fearlessness and clear thinking during the Falklands conflict – that the film manages to re-enact with almost their original grandeur.

The unnecessary and discomfiting diversions into her overwrought, dotty present eat into time that ought to have been spent recreating some of the more apocalyptic moments in her career. Where was her fateful “No, No, No”? Or even “The community charge will be very popular?”

Instead, we have a rambling and incoherent movie that cannot perform as a biopic on its own terms and relies on our knowledge of Thatcher’s life to sustain itself. It proves entirely incapable of keeping a narrative of its own going for more than five or ten minutes. (This is, of course, one of the risks of getting in a female director.)

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to us that the liberal hegemony of the movie industry would have debased a living conservative icon in this way, but, every time The Iron Lady snaps back to the present and we’re again treated to the vision of a barking mad old pensioner chatting idly to her dead husband, it does.

Sorry to bang on, but this cannot be repeated often enough: it is a scandal that a biopic of Margaret Thatcher should depict her as a demented old codger, desperately clinging to fantasies that her husband is still alive and weeping as his spectre leaves her for the last time. It is disrespectful and it is offensive.

And it reminds me why it is so utterly essential that Baroness Thatcher should be awarded a state funeral when the unhappy time comes. It’s the least we can do, after her humiliation at the hands of over-rated barbarian harpy Meryl Streep.

There is a sliver of a silver lining. Those portions of the film that depict the Baroness as she allegedly is now (close friends protest that the film overdoes it enormously) at least provide an opportunity for the ridicule of her comically incapable daughter, Carol. Poor Carol. She’s portrayed, viciously but brilliantly, by Olivia Coleman as a hapless, lisping, brain-dead and self-regarding Sloane only slightly less neglectful than the grocer’s grandson, Mark.

Coleman captures perfectly an egotistical, out-of-touch and air-headed daughter, a woman who is, scarily, otherwise known as the Hon. Carol Thatcher, and who was most recently seen on our screens in such productions as I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here and Most Haunted.

Aside from Coleman, the casting in this film is sloppy. Dodgy, even. Anthony Stewart Head should stick to playing eccentric librarians. John Sessions is a ridiculous Edward Heath. Richard E Grant as Michael Heseltine? And the less said about Jim Broadbent the better.

There was a way in which this biopic might have navigated the politically sensitive line between eulogy and humane biography. That was not the direction The Iron Lady’sproducers elected to take.

Don’t watch this film. Don’t buy the DVD. Don’t pirate it, don’t watch it at a friend’s house. No. Boycott this spiteful, directionless, morally bankrupt and narratologically hopeless hate-fest.

Send a message to its actors, its producers, its directors and its backers – surprise surprise, that leering cesspit of luvviedom the UK Film Council figures prominently in the opening credits – that such foully exploitative fiction should never have been released in the great lady’s lifetime, if ever.

Our moral arbiters have been forced either to concede, through gritted teeth, that without that other newspaper’s brilliant campaign to bring Stephen Lawrence’s killers to justice that all five of the thugs would still be swaggering around south-east London or, perhaps worse, shut up entirely and miss the best opportunity in a decade to trash the working classes they despise so much and take up their harps for the causes of diversity and multiculturalism.

Had the paper not published that front page, and taken up a ferocious campaign thereafter to bring the killers to justice, the extraordinary chain of events that followed would never have come to pass. Stephen’s parents would never have had justice for their son’s brutal stabbing.

It was, of course, that paper’s valiant gamble on 14 February 1997, when it branded Gary Dobson, Neil and Jamie Acourt, Luke Knight and David Norris as murders, that gave the case a new lease of life after an initial failure by the police to secure a conviction.

And, as the paper’s editor said this week, it was an enormous commercial and editorial risk. Had the any of the five won a legal action against the paper, it could have landed him in prison and cost the owners vast sums of money. So, under normal circumstances, the paper would now be the toast of Fleet Street.

The problem? It was the Daily Mail. Worse, this week’s court judgements were a personal triumph for Mail editor Paul Dacre, fount of all malevolence in the eyes of Islingtonian prudes. The finger-wagging Left hates the Daily Mail in ways that can’t be explained entirely in terms of the paper’s appeal to a despised “Middle Britain”. No: behind the bile-spewing fury of Guardian journalists lies their own shameful secret.

They read the Mail voraciously themselves. Admittedly, they’re careful to invent excuses for the habit. Just as upper-class French families used to insist that they only owned a television “pour les bonnes” ­– for the servants – liberal Left commentators say they buy Dacre’s hated rag “for work” or for the amusement of their Ukrainian housekeepers.

Whatever. The point is that the Mail set out to expose and bring to justice a group of racist scumbag murderers while the worthies of the Guardian were still agonising over the “responsible sourcing” of their coffee beans.

A word of advice to Guardian and Indie hacks: if you want to pull off a remarkable triumph of this sort in future, you might just have to tear yourself away from your comfy offices – and the Nespresso machine.

As for Guardian figurehead Alan Rusbridger, I know that it’s difficult paying for investigative journalism when your newspaper makes less money than the average parish magazine – but perhaps a little more time actually “editing”, as I believe it’s called, and a little less time trying to pass yourself off as a concert pianist might one day allow you to gloat like Dacre.

Still, the Guardian’s hissy fit over the Mail’s coup won’t last for long. The paper’s hacks – including its spoilt socialist aristocracy – will soon have to start worrying about redundancies again. Word reaches me that the sports coverage is about to be decimated, while the much-lauded Friday arts review will be quietly relegated to G2. And as for the paper’s decision to pack off loads of hacks to cover the US elections, it’s not looking like such a brainwave now that the Guardian is turning into Fleet Street’s equivalent of Greece, is it?

Meanwhile, there is no corresponding wave of redundancies planned at the Mail titles. All the best hacks are too busy exposing racism – you know, the sort of thing Guardian journalists did before they discovered that King’s Place serves such deliciously frothy lattes.

For all the Guardian’s incessant and preposterous whining about equality and diversity, their achievements, if they can be said to have had any, have been irrelevant. It is the Mail, object of such lunatic hatred, which has done more both to bring racist killers to justice and to tackle institutional racism in the police force. Man, that’s got to sting.

As for the poor Independent, I gather that most of its hacks can’t even afford to visit the coffee machine these days, let alone Starbucks. Still, they shouldn’t be disheartened: surely there are still racist scandals to be exposed. Why, just a couple of months ago the internet started buzzing with rumours of a particularly disturbing piece of racist gay incest porn whose author, it is rumoured, is not only a professional writer but possessed of Orwellian cunning.

This could be the Indie’s chance to expose yet more of the dark underside of drug-addled British street culture so brilliantly illuminated by the Daily Mail.

Times were that you could pick up a copy of the Wall Street Journal and be simultaneously educated and entertained by their informative infographics, which were lovingly crafted from authoritative data and accompanied by judicious analysis. The key to success with these graphics was that they explained something about the data you might not have gleaned simply by looking at a column of numbers. The Economist, too, was pretty good at revealing trends and interesting correlations with clear, unfussy graphs.

Then something odd happened. The nationals started getting a taste for these fancy ways of explaining data. But in imitating the method, they forgot the purpose, and began to drizzle their pages in useless, stupid pie charts that added nothing to the written stories beside them. Were they just filler, to paper over declining ad sales? The question was asked at the time, and continues to be pertinent.

More likely is that the hubris of the newsroom – the “Who can do me one of those?” you so often hear from editors – led to generalist publications over-reaching themselves. Pick up any newspaper today – particularly, in the lst half-decade, the Independent, and you’ll see that the results can be gruesome.

The apotheosis of the trend toward explaining everything as if to children is seen on the BBC, particularly during elections. You might think it normal that a broadcast medium would rely more heavily on visual help, but, apparently, the population of the United Kingdom is now so breathtakingly stupid that they cannot digest even the simplest percentage or set of figures without a gaudy illustration of it looming over the presenter. The visuals are rarely instructive, and usually distracting.

(As it happens, I have some sympathy with this view of the public as fucking morons. After all, our state schools have been overrun by evil mediocrities from the teaching unions who refuse to teach our children any actual facts or methods, preferring to endow them with vague “transferable skills” and the ability to apply a condom at age 11. It’s little wonder they struggle with visualizing numbers.)

But the cult of the infographic, patronising and infuriating though it may be, is only the tip of the iceberg when you begin to examine news reporting on the internet. Glance at any story that might conceivably be jazzed up for the simpletons with a splash of colour and a few gradients and, sure enough, you’ll find an invitation to “download the data” yourself. And, suddenly, we’re all journalists! Analysts! Researchers! Except, of course, that we – by which I mean you – are plainly not.

The devastation wreaked upon the fragile minds of amateur bloggers cannot be overstated. What a tizzy they get themselves into, desperately trying to wrap their heads around these mysterious and interminable sheets of figures! One need only perform a few cursory searches on Twitter to see the mental health case for discontinuing such services – not to mention the secondary benefit of denying ammo to tiresome Ben Goldacre wannabes.

Predictably, the newspaper that has embraced this awful fad most enthusiastically is Goldacre’s own, the terminally nerdy Guardian. Barely a national news story passes without some self-important twerp in coke-bottle spectacles popping up to trumpet a bizarre, tenuously-wrought socialist conclusion from his banal spreadsheet of already publicly available data on the newspaper’s hilariously misnamed Datablog.

Let us cast our eye over a few recent stories in this laughable arena. “Bestselling books of 2011: the top 5,000 listed,” offers one Datablog headline. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’d get bored well before I got to 100. Who could possibly want this information? “UK plastic surgery statistics: breasts up, ears down,” says another. (I’ll admit to being mildly drawn by that one. But who knew there even was such a thing as verified UK plastic surgery statistics?) And from earlier this month: “Arctic swans arrival: when did the first Bewick’s [sic] get here?”

Riveting stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree. Seriously, though: just who are these people downloading metadata about swan migration? Why should they care? And why is the general public being bothered with this nonsense? Well, the answer is quite simple: those responsible for producing it are invariably third-rate spreadsheet monkeys with comical pretensions to journalism: they rarely have sound judgment when it comes to newsworthiness.

Data reporters are the chartered accountants of the newsroom: snotty, spotty, uppity misfits, regarded disdainfully by their colleagues for their ludicrous sense of self-importance and the ease with which just about anybody could do their job. Dare, of course, to disagree with the inevitably right-on “interpretations” garnered from their facile number-crunching and these gargoyles take to Twitter like a flock of disfigured seagulls, squawking furiously at anyone with the temerity to “defy the data”.

Put simply, it’s a problem of education, as with so many things. The glib exegeses offered up by our friends with the high prescriptions are worthless because the reporters in question haven’t had the training of their American counterparts. That’s partly because the people who read British newspapers are themselves a bit dim and rather poorly educated, compared to the average reader of the Journal or the New York Times. So they’ve never demanded better.

It’s certainly a pity that the quality of data-driven journalism is so risibly poor in the mainstream press, because at a time of economic crisis I for one would appreciate a bit of help in understanding the intricacies of global economics. But I’m not going to get that from the British media, which is hopelessly in hock to the pitiful, attention-seeking cult of superficial data journalism.

I’m coming to the end of a restful long weekend in the countryside, riding horses, shooting small animals and drinking real ale. (OK, just kidding. Obviously I don’t drink ale.)

A few yards from the bottom of the drive to my mother’s house, in the no man’s land between east and west Kent, there’s a railway crossing. For three days, a silver saloon has sat at the crossing. The car has a single, hi-vis jacketed occupant.

When we returned from the East Kent hunt meet in Elham on Boxing Day, my mother wondered aloud who he was, and what he’d been up to. A curious type by nature, this morning I decided to go and ask him.

The chap’s name is Jerry. “I work for the railways,” he says. “Testing the line.”

I point out to Jerry that my mother has quite a good view of his car from the first floor of the house, and that she’s never seen him get out of it, except to use the portaloo that has been unceremoniously dumped on the side of the road. “Well, I’m on triple time, see,” comes the cheerful reply.

Jerry, along with many other employees of Network Rail, does this six times a year. While he is sat in his 2008 Nissan, smoking and listening to Radio 1, no trains can pass that signal point.

I ask Jerry whether the majority of engineering work closures were down to “testing” or whether there were serious bits of remedial work being done. “Out here? Nah, we just come and hang about for a few days.”

Doesn’t he get bored? “Not really.”

What about all the people whose travel will be affected at weekends? Jerry shrugs. Some of them are travelling to and from work, I point out.

“Gives the coach drivers something to do, dunnit,” he says, absent-mindedly.

I wanted to get the train back to London today. I couldn’t: the line was closed. The minicab would have cost me £180. Merry Christmas.

No sooner has he acquired a cool wife than Prince William risks falling back into the tragically uncool bad habits of the Windsor family. One of which – as observers of Prince Charles will be painfully aware – involves “spontaneous dancing” with young women, usually of a different ethnicity.

One likes to think that Prince William, at the peak of his sex appeal as an Eton sixth-former, watched in horror as his father swayed uncomfortably in some tribal township, patches of sweat clearly visible under the arms of his Anderson & Sheppard suiting.

But the photograph of William dancing with Vanessa Boateng, 18, at a charitable shelter makes me worry that the Windsor impulse to make an awkward fool of oneself in public is overtaking him.

While jolly Vanessa seems to be swaying naturally to the rhythm of her “swag dance”, William is adopting the effeminate pose associated with young men who wore green carnations in the 1890s. It’s not a good look. (Either that, or he had given his detectives the slip and joined Ms Boateng in a guided tour round her herb garden.)

Let’s be brutal about this. If William had kept his hair, he could have kept up the cool clubbing routine well into his fourth decade. But nature has left him with no choice: he has turned into a Hanoverian of the most conventional variety. King George V, of blessed memory, didn’t “swag dance” and neither should he.

Actually, my reference to George V isn’t entirely frivolous. For several years now, the British media have been keeping a secret about the Duke of Cambridge, and it has nothing to do with the discreet deliveries of Rogaine to his private apartments. (And now to Prince Harry’s, too – there’s a good reason why Harry is no longer the vivid redhead of yesteryear, and that’s his so-far unnoticed but really quite striking thinning pate.)

No, the one thing most people don’t know about William is that he’s as solemn, prickly and generally self-possessed as his grandfather, the Duke of Edinburgh. For those very reasons, he may well prove to be an effective Monarch – especially if, as we must all devoutly hope, he succeeds his grandmother when his energy is still at its peak.

There is, admittedly, still the frightening prospect of Prince Charles becoming King. But who knows? When the time comes, the current Prince of Wales may well be engaged with his most intimate conversations with flowers to date – that is, pushing up daisies at Highgrove.

What the British Monarchy needs, it seems to me, is the nearest possible male equivalent to our beloved Queen. King William may not turn out to be an entertaining head of state, but he will do the job properly, without dragging his subjects into the apocalyptic vegan cult envisaged by his father.

He will be a sober King, undoubtedly a very bald one, and if – like many middle-aged men – he decides to abandon his contact lenses, a bespectacled one. That is a prospect that our current Monarch would find entirely satisfactory. As a lady of formidable equestrian skills, she wants above all to be succeeded by a King who does not frighten the horses.

And if that means skipping a generation – well, these things happen.

On Monday, the first issue of The Kernel will go live. I say “issue”, but as a digital magazine we’ll be publishing articles throughout the month. Our big pieces and many of our features – the flagship essay, interviews and our digital “agony aunt” column – will, however, appear monthly. In the intervening periods, you can look forward to sharp, entertaining analysis from guest experts, who will attempt to explain how technology is changing our lives, and pieces by our regular columnists. Don’t expect a packed publication schedule right away: we’re about quality, not quantity.

Breaking news isn’t really our thing, which is why you won’t see a news section on the site. We think that market is crowded enough already. Instead, The Kernel will offer comment, reports, analysis and thoughtful and amusing writing about technology, media and business: long-form, high-quality content that gets people thinking. Some of our content is for those in the technology industry; other pieces have more general appeal. You can help us as we find our voice by letting us know which pieces you’re enjoying and which you’re not.

We’re big on entrepreneurs. Not just those in the Silicon Roundabout beauty parade – though we’re certainly covering them too, with tongues planted appropriately firmly in cheek – but the businesses and inventions you don’t hear so much about that promise to revolutionise industries, and the social, political and personal ramifications of technological innovation. We’re also about the people, places and ideas behind the headlines, which is why you’ll find a cheeky and irreverent Scene section about the individuals and events helping to usher in those disruptive ideas and products. There’s also an Editors’ Blog – a place for snappier, short-form content which will be updated more regularly by our senior writers.

The Nutshell

But the website is only half the story. Our email bulletin, The Nutshell, is where much of the action will happen. What were the biggest stories this week? Who’s had a good week? Who’s had a week they’d rather forget? Who was spotted where, and with whom? The Nutshell comes out every Friday afternoon and contains intel, rumours, tips, sightings and speculation, as well as a round-up of the best content on the web, our own and from other blogs, newspapers and magazines.

There’s nothing else like The Nutshell in Europe. We think it’ll rapidly become the must-read weekly bulletin for anyone working in or interested in technology in Europe – which is why, in the future, The Nutshell will be a paid subscription. But if you sign up now, you’ll get it for free for the first three months and you’ll get the option of a discounted rate when we switch to a paid subscription model. We’ll also keep you posted on developments back at The Kernel. There’s no obligation beyond your first three free months, so go ahead and pop your email address in the box below.

You’ll be able to submit tips for inclusion in the newsletter if there’s something you’d like to see appear, whether it’s a brilliant article you’ve read this week or something juicy you’ve overheard at the office. Look out for the tips box on the website on Monday. Of course, everything you submit to us will be treated with the utmost confidentiality.

Mission statement and values

We believe that much of the purpose of journalism is to hold the powerful to account and to reveal facts and express opinions about which those in authority may be apprehensive or uncomfortable – not to act as a mouthpiece for others or a redrafting service for corporate press releases. We will scrutinise those in power, fairly and without fear or favour, but always with a consideration of public interest.

We will be transparent about our methods and honest about our mistakes. Our deep and excellent connections in the emerging technology industry mean that writing about people we know will be unavoidable, but we will disclose relevant conflicts and let readers decide whether our opinions are trustworthy. We encourage you to write to us, to comment on what we publish, and to write responses of your own, which we will point readers to if we consider them valuable contributions to the debate.

We also believe that scepticism and rigorous enquiry are central to the practice of journalism. Some of our writers hold very strong opinions. We see no shame in occasional contrariness when it is thought-provoking and well-argued, so we will encourage them to make their case forcefully, but with care, supported by appropriate evidence. No single writer or column should be interpreted as reflecting the opinion of The Kernel, and no writer is exempt from our exacting editorial standards and processes.

That doesn’t mean The Kernel has no opinions of its own: where there is consensus among our editorial board on a particular issue, we will use leading articles and editorials to express our view.

Finally, we believe that having a sense of humour is important. You can expect send-ups, satire, gentle teasing and even the occasional bit of coarse language from our columnists and on the Editors’ Blog. Technology is often not, in itself, a particularly enlivening subject, but we aim to make our writing entertaining as well as informative. As Kingsley Amis put it, “There’s little point in writing if you can’t annoy somebody.”

What you’ll see at kernelmag.com on Monday is a snapshot of the kind of content we think is lacking elsewhere. Much remains to be added and we look forward to soliciting the advice and contributions of our readers. Over the coming months, we will be adding new columnists, more staff writers and we will be listening to readers’ responses to our content. We are open to critiques of all kinds and we will be responsive to them.

So dive in on Monday, take a look around, and let us know what you think. In the meantime, follow us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook to be kept up to date. And if something inspires you to write an article of your own, do get in touch.

Stephen Pritchard, Managing Editor
Milo Yiannopoulos, Editor-in-Chief

It’s the object of widespread ridicule from those not endlessly flattered and sucked up to with invitations to swanky drinks parties. It spent £55,000 on a website everyone hates and which fails to meet even the basic standards of modern web design. It is coming under increasing fire for shameless appropriation of others’ achievements.

But Tech City, the wasteful pet project of trendies in Downing Street that has so successfully used internet businesses in east London as PR for the Government, has already burned through at least £1million.

I was surprised at how small that number was, initially. But of course it doesn’t include all the other bits of Government chipping in to help, the extensive schmoozing going on overseas and God knows whatever else they’ve charged to someone else’s budget. Nor does it include the investment fund. So the real total cost is probably something like three times that amount. Think what three million quid would have done if simply given to Seedcamp to invest in start-ups!

Thanks to a Freedom of Information request I submitted in November, the annual budget of Tech City has been revealed today as well. £150,000 is set aside for marketing and communications. £250,000 for events. £220,500 on employing civil servants elsewhere in Government. And a little under £1.2million in staff and consultant costs.

These are staggering sums. How much of that is chief executive Eric van der Kleij’s salary, I wonder? (Tech City wouldn’t say: they’ve come up with an ingenious way to dodge FoI requests, and public accountability, by muddying the employment arrangements of their staff with contracts from PA Consulting and Grant Thornton.)

I ask again: what, precisely, has been accomplished with this massive splurge of cash?

We’ll be in open beta until January, at which point more content will drop, we’ll announce the full line-up of columnists, the design will be finalised and we’ll have a party. That’s all for now. See here and here for background.

Now, you might say that the Mail appeals to the worst side of human nature. That it plays on our jealousies, our insecurities, our most antagonistic impulses. But that, of course, is precisely what makes it so fabulously readable. That, and the fact that the comment pages are packed with some of the best writers in the country. Who in their right mind would sneer at a full-page op-ed by Max Hastings, one of Fleet Street’s most distinguished editors? Or the eminently readable Stephen Glover? Who can resist a glance at Ephraim Hardcastle? And who can read one of Quentin Letts’ fantastically bitchy Commons sketches and not quiver with delight?

It is, by a considerable margin, the best serious newspaper in the country. (Indeed, one of the reasons the Telegraph’s news coverage is so good these days is that the paper is run almost entirely by ex-Mail executives.) And yet, if you spend any time at all on the internet, you’ll know that this marvellous organ, this brilliant commercial product, this superbly well-crafted and expertly targeted editorial proposition is the subject of the most appalling daily abuse.You know the sort of thing. Toe-curlingly unfunny Daily Fail-esque puns. Hijacking of reader polls. Silly references to the paper’s politics in the 1930s. Charlie Brooker’s Daily Mail Island. Retweets of the endless stream of Radio 4 and BBC2 comedies in which the mere mention of the Mail is enough to prompt titters. That software that allows content from Mail links to be shared but denies the website pageviews. (A scummy strategy thankfully now ended by the Mail’s lawyers.) It’s getting so bad that several Mail journalists I know now feel the need to apologise when introducing themselves to new people.

Of all the tiresomely self-satisfied rituals played out daily on social networks, competitive Daily Mail-hating is surely the most fatuous and infuriating. But why do the chattering classes hate the Daily Mail so much? The reasons they give – its xenophobia, its materialism, its supposed bigotry – are much less compelling than the real reason: the Mail routinely mocks employees of the BBC, the liberal press and the public sector and makes a speciality out of revealing their salaries and expense claims. That is unforgivable – the Primrose Hill equivalent of what the Catholic church calls the Sin Against the Holy Ghost.

True, the abuse you see on social media is partly thanks to the suffocating influence of humourless literalists as well. In the aftermath of Jan Moir’s Daily Mail article about the death of Stephen Gately, which asked tough but pertinent questions about circumstances that may have contributed to his death, Nick Cohen wrote that the manufactured outrage and complaint culture emerging from humourless Twitter mobs threatened democracy and free speech. His warning has not been heeded. Today, things are worse than ever: Jeremy Clarkson was lambasted just last week for making what was clearly a joke about public sector strikers: he was, in the space of 60 seconds, tried, found guilty and executed by the court of Twitter opinion. Any excuse, I thought at the time, for the earnest liberal mob to cry foul when presented with a differing viewpoint and – shock, horror – a sense of humour.

But, really, it’s about a small and self-interested group of people ignorant about the real world. For example, Lefties love to pour scorn on the Mail’s attitudes to immigration and asylum seekers without the slightest acknowledgement that the paper’s readers, who are much less wealthy than their metropolitan counterparts, have just cause to care about an unchecked tide of immigrants packing coastal towns to the gills. It’s the Mail’s readers who actually live in them, after all. It’s they who suffer from the crime waves, watch their communities fragment and disintegrate and see local services stretched to breaking point. It’s easy to scoff from a nice bit of Kentish Town, but try living in a nasty bit of Kent.

The tide of snobbery and ignorance bandied about on Twitter on a daily basis, directed at the Mail on account merely of its existence, serves only to underline the intolerance of the Left, its point-blank refusal to engage with alternative points of view and the foul class hatred festering under the surface of their supposedly well-meaning diktats.

In a way, the Daily Mail is a victim of its own brilliant marketing strategy: by appealing to so many middle-class anxieties, it has become shorthand for a whole range of gauche impulses that the snobbish Left likes to sneer at. Mock the Mail and you are mocking the entire value systems of its brassy, aspirational readers – in a manner every bit as mean-spirited as the paper’s own supposed attitude.

There’s just one problem with all this posturing. In order to sneer at the Daily Mail, you have to know what’s in it. That’s why you’ll hear those Primrose Hill supper conversations punctuated by self-conscious excuses like: “I have to read it for work!” One suspects that these Guardianistas would love to lay the blame on their cleaning ladies, but given that the black market domestic staff who keep Primrose Hill ticking over rarely speak a word of English, that option is sadly unavailable.

Originally posted at Blottr.

Current Indie editor Chris Blackhurst would like nothing better than to sack Hari – but his hands have been tied by Kelner, who apparently promised Hari that he would be welcomed back after “retraining”. Matters weren’t helped by Andreas Whittam Smith’s geriatric “inquiry” into Hari’s behaviour, which appears to have overlooked any piece of evidence that might force the star columnist’s dismissal.

Kelner’s foundation could well be in a position to employ Hari, thus allowing Blackhurst to quietly let him go. It’s no secret that, if the editor does welcome Hari back, he’ll have a newsroom mutiny on his hands. The real mystery is why figures as self-regarding as Baroness (Helena) Kennedy would allow themselves to be associated with a venture run by someone as discredited as Kelner.

Let’s see how long this silly venture lasts – and what use Johann Hari makes of it.

I guess you’re wondering about the principles and philosophies behind this esteemed new organisation. Well, thanks to my trusty spies at the Independent, I can exclusively reveal the first ten lectures to be delivered to lucky grant winners:

1. Covering up for sociopaths: an editor’s perspective

2. How To Succeed In Left-Wing Journalism Without Ever Really Telling The Truth

3. A Rose by any other name: choosing your sock puppet

4. They’re coming to take me away!: How to work the crowd for sympathy about your fragile mental health

5. Rose-tinted spectacles: how playing to the gallery over Israel and gay rights gets you off the hook for serious breaches of professional standards

6. The Liar, the Witch and the Orwell Prize: calling on influential friends in times of need

7. Gone with the Wind: basic sanitation for recently suspended hacks

8. Black Beauty: spice up your day off by penning racist gay incest porn

9. Headless: how to create harrowing but falsified narratives from war zones

10. The Joy Of Sex: how to seduce imaginary Nazis and Jihadists

Seriously, though: do Baroness Kennedy, Lord Fowler and Sir John Tusa – all listed as trustees of this new foundation – realise what they’re getting themselves into here?

It goes without saying that West’s toxic outpouring was reprehensible, and that she deserved to be silenced. But that, I think, is all she deserved. Because, while there’s no doubt that West was obnoxious, it’s worth considering the environment that produced her – and the millions of people in Britain who feel resentment at being unable to find a job – and to ponder what might make a young mother feel so angry that she would direct abusive language like this to strangers in the presence of her own child. (And don’t say alcohol: there’s no evidence she was drunk when the video was filmed.)

First, let’s consider some numbers. Over the past year, while the number of UK-born workers in the British economy has plummeted, 500 foreigners a day landed jobs in Britain. And as unemployment hit a 17-year high earlier this month, we were told that the number of foreign-born employees has leapt by 181,000 in the past year. There is a stubborn 5 million long-term unemployed in this country who, despite the new jobs being created, are failing to find employment. Many of these people are feckless, work-shy layabouts. Most of them, surely, are not. The majority of them, however, are unavoidably white and working class.

The conditions for their frustrations are easy enough to identify. The backdrop to this human catastrophe is poor education: the quality of teaching in most state schools is abominable, and getting worse. It has not given people in low-income communities the intellectual tools, the social skills or the aspirational will to achieve better and to provide for their families. Pride in such areas is low. Many young British adults – and let’s use Ms West’s definition of British for a moment: the white working class – are totally unemployable. An example of that ignorance was on display in the video circulating online: Ms West, struggling with her geography, is heard to say, “Go back to Sib – err – Nicaragua” to a black woman.

The present-day scandal is the welfare system. Employers’ organisations report the same problems with British workers time and again: not only are they poorly qualified, compared with their eastern European or Subcontinental peers (and I don’t mean they don’t have certificates: our discredited and hopeless education system dishes out pieces of paper to kids for little more than writing their own name properly these days), they’re lazy and unreliable too. Poles, to pick an example at random, get up earlier, work harder and do their jobs better. They can be relied upon because they have families to support, and, for them, feckless insouciance about their contribution to society is still a shameful taboo.

Successive generations of white working class families have been reared on a welfare system that rewards them for staying out of work. That is simply inhumane: it robs them of their dignity and of their potential. I don’t mean to dehumanise these people into miserable wretches with no control over their own lives, however badly they have been failed by the state, because plenty rise from humble beginnings to achieve greatness, and all must take personal responsibility for their actions. (Actions like screeching “You ain’t English!” on a crowded public tram to someone with just as much “right to be here” as the speaker.) But it’s inevitable that when you mix the four toxic ingredients of mass immigration, poor education, largesse from the state and a globalised workforce in which unskilled workers at the bottom of the pile become economically useless, you end up with Emma West.

“Are you British? Are you British? You ain’t British. Fuck off. You ain’t British; you’re black,” yelled West to one of her black fellow passengers. Depressing, isn’t it. Not the racism so much as the sheer, comical ignorance of it. And yet, despite her language and her ignorance, West does not belong in the very worst, most fetid depths of the underclass. Not even close. She at least has a job, as she tells her fellow passengers in that video. Presumably she was either on the way to or the way from it when she had her meltdown. But she is a product of a lazy and entitled white working class culture that, when it sees harder-working and better-motivated people from other backgrounds doing well, seeks not to emulate them or even beat them but instead to deride and resent.

It doesn’t surprise me at all that the person who had to remind West of her manners was an older black woman. The problem with modern Britain isn’t the immigrants, it’s people like her: angry white men and women with paltry professional opportunities who cannot express their rage in any other way. Labour politicians should hang their heads in shame for allowing such an unsustainable number of immigrants into the country, who now fill jobs that Britons are unwilling to consider because they are disincentivised by the lavish benefits that same Government handed out simply to secure votes. Because this is what they have created.

It is imperative that they be held to account for this betrayal because it is perfectly plausible that Labour might worm their way back into power at the next election. David Cameron is a horrific failure as Tory leader: he has foolishly chosen the middle ground as the area in which to do battle politically, at a time when properly Right-wing governments are being elected all over Europe. He is opportunistic and his beliefs, insofar as they can be discerned at all, are chimeric and fatuous. The electorate knows this and will punish him at the ballot box in the next election as they did in the last.

And I don’t know about you, but that prospect – of an even more disenfranchised, feral underclass, with all the racial and class hatred that it is guaranteed to engender – fills me with greater dread even than the thought of being trapped in a tram for half an hour with the likes of Emma West.

Originally posted at Blottr.

But recently I have been thinking about a more complex system that will enable me to define clusters of friends and their relative closeness to each other. A 3D rendering of my friend network would help enormously: I could pick particular geographies on the network for individual events. I imagine flicking between friend cluster view (in which I do not feature), which would appear like a spider web, and a flat spine-based layout with connections determined by, say, my ten closest friends. This isn’t another social network: more like a guest list tool on steroids. You’d have to enter a lot of data initially, but think how amazing the result would be. For example: when I fell out with someone, I could demote them or pull them from the network entirely and watch the whole map adjust in real time. Likewise, after a holiday that brought me closer to a particular person, I could up their ranking and the spine-based view would change.

This all sounds a bit high school, I know: but isn’t that how we all still operate really? And what a brilliant way of never forgetting important people, which those of us who plan lots of dinners and parties do all the time. Note that this web is created manually, by me, so I have control, unlike Facebook and the associated attempts which try to infer relationships and always get it hopelessly wrong. It’s more than worth my while to keep something like this up to date, and I’m willing to bet plenty of people would do it for the sheer hell of it. So why does this not exist? If it does, who’s building it? Do you want to help me put this together? If so, get in touch. The first network we build can be mine and I’ll happily publish it here as a social experiment.

Who am I to talk, right? I mean, who’s been more of a thorn in UKTI’s side than me, with the embarrassing Freedom of Information requests, the patronising “how it could have looked” pieces and the cattiness on Twitter? While my colleagues and friends got invited to swanky dos at the palace, I stayed home, uninvited and unloved because – as I imagined – I was the only one with the platform and temerity to say: hang on a minute. Is this really what Silicon Roundabout needs? It’s a shame UKTI don’t deal well with criticism, but given the awful circle-jerkery of European technology journalism, I can’t say I blame them for being a bit shocked.

But here’s the thing. While few have been more vocally critical of the Government’s Tech City Investment Organisation, its Tech City-branded website and events, the people, economics and philosophies behind it and the amount of money it spends, I have at least done so in articles published under my own name – even though it has not served my interests to do so. I don’t point this out to be self-congratulatory (as if!), but to make a point.

Yeah, I’ve been tough. I’ve been bitchy and sarcastic, too, because I think some of the claims made by UKTI are risible. That 600 figure is a joke, and it deserved to be mocked. But the bile streaming out of this new, pseudonymous @TechShitty account, set up last night, of which I am but one of many victims, is neither constructive nor even entertaining. It’s just trolling, from someone with neither the wit and wisdom to make devastating critiques, nor the courage to identify themselves. The tweets from this account are sufficiently wide of the mark that you can tell this person doesn’t really know any of the people or businesses he’s sniping at. Thus, while some valid points might be made about the Tech City initiative, gratuitously vicious remarks like the one above render the whole account impotent.

So, if you give a damn about making things better, about reducing unnecessary Government expenditure and dialing down the media spin, overblown rhetoric and outright lies through constructive – even if sometimes harsh – criticism and dialogue, do what I just did, and unfollow @TechShitty. Then log in to your own blog, or Tumblr, or whatever, and write something that expresses what you really feel. Because only when we’re more honest about what the Government is really achieving with our money in east London, and have the courage to put our own names underneath what we write, is there any hope of change.

Horrific though the revelations are about Christians being persecuted abroad, and frustrating though it is that David Cameron seems focused on denying aid to countries intolerant of homosexuality, as opposed to those in which believers are being murdered, there are just as many reasons to be depressed about what Christians – and Catholics in particular – are suffering at home.

We recently reported on the case of Veronica Connelly, the Catholic grandmother who refused to pay her licence fee because she was so appalled at the output from our state broadcaster, the BBC. Her principled stand should be applauded. Though she is likely to lose her final appeal in the European Court of Human Rights, Mrs Connelly’s brave actions reflect a growing consensus among the silent majority of Britons concerned about the secularisation of our culture and the increasingly debauched values of this taxpayer-funded media organisation.

On these pages, I have often praised popular culture, while drawing attention to its occasionally pernicious influence. But for the BBC to broadcast Jerry Springer: The Opera, a worthless and blasphemous epic of smut and disrespectfulness, showed – as long ago as 2002 – that its values are now entirely at odds with those of the British people, and that it no longer takes its commitment to public service broadcasting seriously, preferring to sneer at religion and trample over the boundaries of decency. And there was me, thinking that’s why we have Channel 4.

One wonders how many people at the BBC found Jerry Springer: The Opera in the least offensive. Perhaps they were silently cheering its writers on. Because over the last few decades, the Corporation has become a mouthpiece for the sort of people it employs: young, trendy Lefties, disproportionately gay and from ethic minorities, who see nothing to be learned from institutions, from history, and from religion in particular. (Unless it’s Islam, of course. I’ve lost count of the number of gushing documentaries about the Prophet Mohammed churned out over the last few years, replete with “authentic” pronunciation of Arabic terms and the occasional “peace be upon him” thrown in for good measure.)

I spoke to Veronica Connelly on the telephone a few weeks ago. She has strong views about what’s appropriate for our screens. But, when you think about it, she represents the country – even those without faith – better than any privileged metropolitan journalist could ever hope to, doesn’t she? Perhaps that’s why her refusal to pay obeisance to the cult of politically correct, morally vacuous programming that eminates from Broadcasting House touched many of us more deeply than Telegraph and Spectator columnist Charles Moore’s similar stunt.

I’m particularly taken by the subtlety of her lawyer’s argument. He told the ECHR judges that the requirement made of her to pay the licence fee breaches Mrs Connolly’s right to religious freedom. That freedom, he thinks, which appears in Article 9 of the Human Rights Convention, precludes any coercion by the state that infringes on private beliefs. Veronica herself is realistic about her chances of winning the case. But wouldn’t it be nice if those awful human rights laws actually did something positive for a change?

And just think of the possible consequences. They make me giddy with glee! If Veronica won her case, Christians all over the country might start refusing to pay their licence fees, too. The last time that sort of mass civil disobedience occurred in relation to a compulsory tax, Margaret Thatcher’s community charge, the tax had to be abandoned. That might not be such a bad thing for the Beeb, which is now, by pretty near universal consent, regarded as way too big.

The engorged BBC of the twenty-first century produces too much content across too many channels, particularly on the internet, where the colossal resources it devotes to online reporting make it difficult for commercial competitors to keep up. With a guaranteed income, the BBC can invest vast sums in excellent technology like the iPlayer, but it also stifles innovation from other players. And toppling other media groups is in no one’s best interests – least of all the BBC’s. For one thing, what on earth would they do without the Guardian there to tell them how to think?

Mrs Connelly accuses the BBC of “anti-Christian bias” and a “systematic promotion of secular values”. Most people reading this column will probably agree. It may be wishful thinking, but imagine a world where the BBC, subject to mass refusal to pay a hundred and fifty quid a year from a public tired of being misled over the Iraq war and patronised for attending church, is forced to pay a bit more attention to what ordinary people care about? Because a few token Sunday morning shows don’t come close to making up for a poisonous institutional bias at the Corporation that leads it to, for example, produce wildly inaccurate reports about the numbers of protesters who show up when the Pope visits.

For much of the last ten years, when the bizarre cult of new atheism was in ascendance, it was acceptable – even trendy – to criticise and ridicule Christians publicly – a bit like climate change realists and those sceptical of the European Union. But just look how those few brave dissenting voices in the media were eventually shown to be in tune with popular opinion – in both cases. Isn’t it time Lord Patten, the new chairman of the BBC Trust, used his influence not merely to scale back the hubristic ambitions of the Beeb, but also to redefine it as a proper public service? (Incidentally, how true to the BBC’s remit is it for them to be employing a “comedian” called Brian Limond who has publicly wished Margaret Thatcher dead on Twitter, as Louise Mensch revealed in her new Telegraph blog last week?)

Let’s be realistic: the licence fee isn’t going anywhere any time soon. But if brave people like Mrs Connelly, who has said she would rather go to prison than subsidise the dissemination of profanity and the grotesque mockery of religion, start speaking up a bit more often, it might be just the push Lord Patten needs to cut the BBC down to size and teach it to once again become the global gold standard of broadcasting it once was.

While he’s at it, perhaps he could have a word with whoever runs the thuggish TV Licensing outfit, too. Because if I get one more demand for money I don’t owe them through the door – strategically designed to be as embarrassing as possible, with red ‘warnings’ peering out of windowed envelopes – I might join Mrs Connelly in saying: enough is enough.

Colette’s firm has added several prestigious clients to its roster lately, including Twilio, Eventbrite, Evernote, Seatwave, Ostrovok, Marin Software, Care.com and goBalto, rapidly establishing itself as one of the leading emerging tech PR firms in Europe. Recently the company’s focus has shifted from start-ups to higher-growth businesses.

Silicon Alley Insider, which broke the news, quoted Colette as saying the acquisition was “a nice liquidity event”. (But no, she wouldn’t tell me what the deal was worth either.) What she neglected, out of modesty, to say to SAI is that this was the second exit in two weeks for the European technology power couple she is one half of – Colette’s boyfriend Max Niederhofer sold his company, Qwerly, to Fliptop three weeks ago.

So lovely news all round in the Ballou-Niederhofer household. I can’t wait to see what they get us all for Christmas!

Disclosure: Colette and Max are friends of mine. Her firm has represented me in the past and I once briefly consulted for them.

“I have access to some of the most important people in Government,” says Brian Paddick. “In order to get London a good deal, I want to call in some favours. And I’m telling you: they owe me big time.”

Last week, LONDON24.com published the results of a poll that placed Paddick, the gay ex-cop turned politico, ahead of both of his rivals. It turns out that only 775 people voted in the poll, and that the second choice of LONDON24’s visitors was the Green Party’s also-ran Jenny Jones, so I doubt Boris and Ken will have lost much sleep over this particular show of hands. But Paddick is optimistic about his chances to make an impact on the election, and when I sat down with him at the Liberal Democrats’ London headquarters last week, he was at pains to stress how seriously he is taken by political commentators of all stripes and that, even if beating Boris will be very difficult, he might well come second in the 2012 race, given the number of second-preference votes he is likely to get.

That would be deliciously embarrassing for Ken Livingstone, but many will find the prospect of Brian Paddick a hair’s breadth from the mayoralty troubling. This, after all, is the man who bared his buttocks, in a queasily exhibitionist display of gay triumphalism, on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here. He was the only contestant to shower naked, and his explanation, “I had a shower like I always have a shower,” does not – to coin a phrase – hold much water. He is surely not that naïve about life in the public eye – particularly if his exquisitely thorough media training is anything to go by. Rather, it was surely a deliberate, publicity-seeking stunt, and one that, rightly or wrongly, has harmed his electoral prospects – as did the slightly grotesque snog-fest with his boyfriend that we were treated to after his eviction. Paddick’s appearance on the show did not do the sort of reputational damage that loveable old slap-head George Galloway’s did after Celebrity Big Brother (who can forget that cat impression?), but it is hardly edifying, in retrospect, for a man who would be mayor.

One gets the sense that Paddick enjoys seeing his name in the papers. But such conceitedness can backfire: while the Mail on Sunday stories that appeared about Paddick in 2002, alleging drug use and making lurid claims about his sex life, are unlikely to bother the majority of metropolitan electors, there are plenty of family-oriented voters in London that will be put off by his unconventional lifestyle. For one thing, voters tend not to like married men who later come out of the closet; they usually sympathise with the wives.

Paddick likes to dismiss criticism of his public antics as churlish media misrepresentation, and rarely passes up on the opportunity to rail against “the Right-wing media”, even as he enjoys the notoriety the Mail, Express and so on have given him. But there are a few truths he cannot escape with these distraction tactics: true, he has appeared on “only” two reality television shows, next to some 200 appearances on more serious political programming, but, as he was defending himself vigorously to me against charges of frivolity, I couldn’t help but wonder: would Richard Daley, Rudy Giuliani or even Boris have thrown themselves into the tabloid spotlight with such reckless aplomb? That, after all, is the world city league in which Paddick wants to play as Mayor of London, and I find his aspirations and pleas for serious regard hard to square with the sort of needy, fame-hungry D-listers one normally sees on reality television shows.

And he perhaps needs to learn to be a little more statesmanlike and a bit less bitchy. A week ago, I tweeted that the greatest embarrassment to the country during the Olympics is likely to be a shambolic service from TfL. When I suggested this to Paddick, he snapped back with: “I think probably the greatest embarrassment, based on previous experience, is seeing Boris Johnston, hair in a mess, totally overweight, with his jacket undone, holding the Olympic flag. I think that will probably be the most cringe-making moment. I think I’d cut a much better image for London, than either [him or] Ken Livingstone, poor thing, who might not even be able to hold the flag.” Meow!

Camp as tits would be over-stating the case, but there’s definitely something… arch, shall we say – something a tad de haut en bas – about the gym-honed Lib Dem candidate, and it can occasionally tip over into cruelty. To give an example: while I’ve encountered a fair few politicians and celebrities in my career as a journalist, I’m pretty sure none of my interviewees has ever started ripping the piss out of my hair before, as Paddick did – twice – during this interview. I’ll be charitable and assume it was his version of flirting, because he must surely know that camp bullying like that goes down very badly, even with Londoners. His tendency towards waspishness, even under provocation, has always been a severe handicap and must be curbed if he wishes to play in the big leagues. (Remember how narrowly George Osborne escaped after likening Chris Bryant to a “pantomime dame”.)

The majority of voters, not to mention MPs from the major parties, understandably see the Liberal Democrats as a bit of a comic turn. So Paddick’s willingness to align himself closely with “my friend Vince Cable and my friend Nick Clegg”, as he puts it, is a little odd. Rather than, say, forging an occasionally uneasy alliance with his hosts, as Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone have both done, Paddick seems to be nailing his credibility to the mast of a spectacularly unpopular parliamentary party. That said, because there isn’t exactly a surfeit of talent among senior Liberal Democrats, you have to give them credit for fielding a candidate more electable than Labour’s. (Not exactly a Herculean task, given Labour’s candidate, I grant you.) And to be fair to Paddick, when he’s “on duty” he at least suits up and dons – if somewhat unnecessarily severe – spectacles.

Which leaves us with the question: what does he actually believe? Here’s where Paddick’s on slightly firmer ground. He comes across as pleasingly and fiercely pro-business, pro-law and order and anti-public sector wastefulness. All three positions will serve him well in light of the necessary economic recovery, the aftermath of the riots and the state of the public purse bequeathed to us by the last Labour government. He’s also a man of firm principles, having famously quit the Metropolitan Police over the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. “I left the police because I fell out with the boss,” he explains, “And because my version of what happened in the aftermath of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes was different from the official version of events.” That sort of plain speaking will play well in a country increasingly mistrustful of the establishment.

So too will Paddick’s convincing arguments about rising public transport fares. And he does have a point when he questions how much Boris Johnson has really achieved for London: “The Barclays bike scheme was something that was set up and ready to roll under Ken Livingstone,” he says. “All [Boris] had to do was implement it. The bike super-highways, which in most cases just involved splashing blue paint on the roadway, which actually makes it quite slippery and dangerous when it’s wet… well, I wouldn’t count that as a great success. His walkway on the Thames appears to have been scrapped. The cable car across the Thames, his plans for something akin to Tracy Island from Thunderbirds in the Thames Estuary… I mean, sorry, what is it that we should be proud of that Boris has achieved?”

Paddick is persuasive and realistic about what he can achieve in this race. “My role as candidate for Mayor of London,” he says, “Is to ensure that the public hear the good news stories about what the Liberal Democrats are doing [in Government] … they have put the brakes on what is a very Right-wing Tory party.” You can argue about that last description, but what’s clear is that he sees himself as a sort of coalition partner in the mayoral elections, calling out the worst excesses of the other two players.

And so, despite a tendency toward cattiness, Brian Paddick strikes one as a fundamentally decent man who would work hard for the city. What he lacks in political experience he makes up for, I think, in integrity, even though it’s apparent that his colourful private life may be in too great a tension with the requirements of the office he aspires to hold. Because, you know, if I were him, I think I’d be hoping to come second in this race, having acted as a useful check on the other two candidates. If only because, given his partying past, God only knows what sort of photos the Daily Mail will get slipped if he ends up at City Hall.

So here’s our boilerplate.

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Pitches must be submitted by Friday, 18 November and you must be prepared to work to some quite tight deadlines to make the launch edition. Pitches received after Friday, 18 November will be placed into our contributor queue for inspection at a later date.

This comes hot off the heels of Skimlinks’s acquisition of Atma Links in October. I couldn’t be prouder of my Leithy and her awesome co-founder Joe.

I don’t understand how anyone can use an iPhone as their primary mobile phone. You can’t type on it, the apps are a hideous time sink, the call quality is dreadful (I like to phone people), the battery life is non-existent and iOS 5′s messaging service is a very poor imitation of BlackBerry Messenger. This bitch is going data-only.

Despite RIM’s recent and embarrassingly mismanaged service outages, at least I get a usable signal with a Bold. And BlackBerry remains the only credible choice for those of us who have to type thousands of words a day away from a computer: the keyboard is unparalleled. So there you go. Friends can re-add me to BlackBerry Messenger with the usual email address.

The production was a triumph, even though some of Fabio Luisi’s musical decisions were a little odd. (He raced through the last few dozen bars at breakneck speed, robbing the final, throbbing harmonies of much of their dramatic clout.)

But what really fascinated me was how confused the audience were about how to deal with noisy neighbours and, especially, applause. Were we in the cinema? Or ought we to have been pretending to be in the opera house? Judging by the furtive glances round the auditorium, no one seemed quite sure to begin with. But after spending the best part of six hours with this discerning metropolitan crowd, I distilled what I guess must be the accepted norms of behaviour for these events.

Don’t feel obliged to applaud. It’s self-serving and, more importantly, they can’t hear you. Do, however, feel free to cheer the performers on in other ways. Debrett’s advises conventional opera-goers to avoid whooping, whistling or braying. “Feet stamping is a definite no-no,” they say. But you can safely ignore this injunction. After all, cinema is an interactive experience, right?

To that end, you may wish to consider the use of props. A well-placed HONK from a hand trumpet can add a delightfully unexpected dimension to a tender love duet. Those foam hands with the single finger outstretched you sometimes see at baseball games? Another connoisseurs’ favourite.

Why not try “conducting along” during the preludes? There’s no better way to show off your love of Wagner than waving your arms wildly above your head while others are enjoying the music. No need to observe the time signature too closely: it’s the enthusiasm that counts.

Operas are long and complicated and it pays to do your homework. So bring along a heavily annotated libretto (or, even better, the full score) and use your mobile telephone to illuminate the pages, which you should turn as loudly as possible, to advertise your erudition. Humming along to your favourite aria, like squealing ‘There it is!!!’ when you spot a leitmotif you recognise, is warmly encouraged.

Speaking of mobile telephones, don’t be put off by outdated rules about them at plays and “proper” operas. They can’t really expect you to go a whole 90 minutes without texting, tweeting, checking your email or playing Angry Birds! Flight and silent modes are for grandmothers and civil servants.

Although you should be relaxed about chatting during the performance, try not to be rude about host Renée Fleming by, for example, laughing at her wide-eyed Michele Bachmann impression. I know she sang for Obama in 2009 – ick – but she used to be a pretty good soprano. And just think! If her presenting goes down well with the punters, it’s only a matter of time before she gets a place round the table on The View.

(So what if Fleming is doing a Barbara Walters, bidding farewell to her interviewees – the exhausted and flustered stars who evidently just wanted to crash out in their dressing rooms between acts – with a hilarious, “Toi, toi, toi!”, bouncing up and down in a bright red suit and expensive hairdo and looking more like a coked-up ABC anchor than a celebrated opera star?)

Inevitably, there will be a few killjoys in the audience who are reluctant to embrace the fun and fellowship of the occasion – like the douchebag in the front row who hisses ‘Shhhh!’ at the slightest rustling of a crisp packet. So much more offensive and disruptive than the original offence, isn’t it? The appropriate response is to construct a popcorn catapult with your programme and an elastic band. Patience, and a twenty slipped to the usher, can pay dividends: funless types tend to flounce off in a huff quite readily, which will provide endless amusement to your fellow patrons.

Alcohol can help relieve any anxiety you might have about the evening. Good sense dictates knocking back half a bottle of house white during the intervals. The people next to you will enjoy the rejuvenated fragrance on your return.

Finally, your choice of attire is important. If in doubt, go with the noisiest synthetic fabric you can find and clogs so that your twice-hourly trips to the loo are triumphantly announced to everyone you pass.

To misquote Loyd Grossman, what kind of a person would be tempted by a flyer like this?

Because the emerging technology industry is small, there’s a shortage of brilliant, opinionated writers with the wit and intelligence to make people smile, and, more importantly, think. The ones who are out there, for whatever reason, are not getting jobs. Instead, we have a glut of rather embarrassingly illiterate bloggers who, in their competitiveness for pageviews, feel pressurised into churning out rewrites of press releases and other people’s posts, occasionally over-reaching themselves to pen opinion pieces.

Start-ups have become conditioned to this cult of the mediocre, but it’s time to snap them out of it. Entrepreneurs who aspire to refashion the world around them deserve writing just as audacious and thought-provoking as their own ambitions. Unfortunately, as the technology sector in Europe has expanded, the quality of commentary around it has failed to keep up.

Depressing, isn’t it. Where are the columnists, the brave iconoclasts? The people who can make insightful links between technology and other disciplines, draw distinctions, see revealing connections? Why aren’t they being given platforms? And who is providing founders and venture capitalists themselves with a platform to share their expertise in pieces whose appeal reaches beyond the tech blogosphere? (Such an endeavour admittedly requires a patient editor. I’ve tried to do it once before, and it went down exceedingly well, but it was for a one-off project.)

Where, too, are the sketch-writers, the gossip columnists, the people writing about the people, places and events that shape the headlines? Fundamentally, people are interested in people, and we don’t hear nearly enough about the faces behind the technology that is so rapidly changing our world.

One of the reasons I’ve been writing slightly frivolous features recently is that I had wrongly concluded that there was no appetite for anything better. But when I put my mind to it, I know more than enough articulate, intellectually curious people who would devour more thoughtful pieces. Plenty of VCs would too. But, at present, almost everything these guys read and enjoy, beyond the basic task of keeping abreast of what’s going on in their local market, is from America.

What do we do about all this? Well, first, I’m signing up to write more, better content myself, for a variety of new places. I’ll share these new gigs with you as and when I can. An immediate consequence for me is fewer catfights on Twitter and more time spent thinking and writing – a development that is sure to come as welcome news to everyone I know!

Second, I’ve been toying with the idea of starting something of my own for a long time. The sticking point, predictably, has been the economics. But while I’m toying with business plans, working out what, if any, of this kind of content can make money, there’s a blossoming technology scene urgently in want of compelling magazine and broadsheet quality writing. Perhaps obviously, I don’t think anyone else out there is getting it right.

That’s why I’m about to embark upon the mother of all soft launches: I’ve no idea what it might eventually become, but the new publication I’m about to flip the switch on will showcase only the very brightest and best original writing, particularly from entrepreneurs themselves, but also from journalists, academics and big thinkers looking to share fresh ideas: visionaries who want to inspire, educate, enrage and amuse others with their experiences, opinons and insights. People who can place what’s going on in technology in a much broader context. This is your opportunity to articulate a vision of the future at length and to people outside the technology world.

The economics can wait. I’m primarily interested in the editorial content right now. What I do know is that we will include fewer but better pieces from anyone who chooses to contribute. I’ll be happy to publish as little as two pieces a week to start off with. But they will be two pieces you will not want to miss.

We don’t care who you are, only that you can write well and that you have something interesting to say. Everyone who writes for us, including me, will be free to write wherever else they like: I’ll continue to share amusing gossip, call out the charlatans and generally fight from the entrepreneurs’ corner in my columns for other people. This new site is a place for longer, more academic writing. And, yeah, OK, the occasional bit of frothier stuff too.

We’ll be there for you when you have a weightier piece that other websites, who want to chop up your paragraphs and dumb down your arguments, decline to step up. Submissions will be edited by someone who not only understands your subject area, but is also a gifted and judicious wordsmith in their own right.

New contributors will normally be unpaid. We want these ideas to spread, and our writers’ contributions to be read as widely as possible, so most of our content will be free to read and indexable on the web. (I’ve seen what Paul Carr is doing and that’s not what we’re about.)

We will, however, experiment aggressively with ways to financially reward our writers. We may, for example, have subscription-only premium content or one-off article fees for the really thrilling stuff – such as our Special Reports, the first of which will be a comprehensive survey of the European tech PR industry.

There will be no pageview-chasing; no annoying multi-page articles. Our only target will be excellence and originality in quality of thought and writing. In addition to general comment, we will look to start offering authoritative software reviews – particularly video reviews that explain what you need to know in two minutes rather than 2,000 words – and a developer channel with reviews of new frameworks and developer tools, written by the most articulate and accomplished engineers we can lay our hands on. We’ll also run the occasional start-up post mortem, which we think could be extremely valuable.

We will have a mix of regular columnists and guest writers, and we will aim to become the destination for intelligent – initially European – commentary about the way in which technology is changing our lives, run by a crack team of the sharpest young writers and thinkers around. (I’ll be sharing the names on our editorial and tech team in the coming days.) I see this as complimentary to, rather than in competition with, current players.

This is the technology industry explored, celebrated – and sometimes, yes, debunked – for those who work in it, but perhaps more crucially, for everyone else too. This is the sassiest, smartest and most compelling content to explain why all this tech stuff matters, presented as a gorgeous online magazine. The Vanity Fair of European tech. So: who’s with me?

The fat fraudster has deposited more than one foul-smelling mess in his old newspaper’s offices. For a start, there are more revelations of his near-psychotic fantasising to emerge. What will happen, for example, if a particular African charity chooses to tell the whole story of Johann’s dangerous and histrionic hissy fits in war-torn territory?

Second, Blackhurst has to face the protests of his own journalists, who feel insulted that they have been left to clear up the aforesaid messes made by the paper’s grossly overindulged wunderkind. Just this week, star Indie columnist Julie Burchill wrote a final article for the Indie in which she referred sardonically to Hari. It was censored, of course.

Third, and potentially most troubling for Blackhurst, questions are being asked about Hari’s relationship with UK Uncut, the “radical protest” that degenerated into thuggery and looting a few months ago. We do not know the whole story, but the police would be well advised to question UK Uncut about any potentially illegal advice it received from power-crazed young hacks.

Meanwhile, do not discount the possibility of legal action by the victims of Hari’s sock puppet David Rose, a libellous schizophrenic with a taste for racist gay incest porn. None of it appeared in the Independent, but the association is embarrassing, to say the least.

Blackhurst is by no means the true villain of this piece. Former Indie editor Simon Kelner has so far declined to explain why he patronised and flattered a young journalist about whose probity questions had been raised by Private Eye years earlier. As for Andreas Whittam Smith, he probably now realises that his “enquiry” into Hari’s bizarre fabrications and internet vandalism was laughably inadequate. He is reportedly mortified by his own naivety. So he should be.

What will happen next? Independent insiders suspect that Blackhurst would be delighted to see the back of his own Jayson Blair. The question is: will Hari be able to invoke employment law in order to barge back into the Independent after his “retraining”? If he does, watch out for fireworks – and further episodes of this gruesome reality show.

Actually, we may find the Hari story appearing on our screens before too long. There are plans (I can’t say by whom) to make a film revealing the full details of this squalid business. Presumably, it will be a no-holds-barred documentary – but there is plenty of material here for a TV drama or feature film. And if that happens, who on earth should take the role of Johann Hari? I reckon this is a challenge for Pauline Quirke…

Today I had a visit from a g2i representative. In her introductory speech, she claimed that g2i had raised £18 million since the programme began. I immediately pulled her up on this, saying that I don’t think the companies who have spent months of meetings, presentation writing and contract negotiating would agree to that claim. I also pointed out that 50% of that money probably relates to Huddle. The Huddle guys are friends of mine and I really couldn’t imagine them handing over credit for their funding to g2i.

Seconds later, the woman pulled out a tissue and began to cry. The crying continued for the rest of the meeting. I apologised and pointed out that I was merely providing feedback, and that I value initiatives like g2i and Tech City. Who wouldn’t want help with presentations and the funding process if they were new to this type of thing? I just didn’t like the way they positioned themselves or the claims they made.

She replied: “Who are Tech City?”

I realised I was giving feedback to the wrong person and apologised again. But the crying didn’t stop.

She then pulled out a form asking for my wage bill and funding amounts. She said she also required “proof”. My funding was undisclosed at the request of the investors, although, as their anonymity is now out of the bag, I did tell her their names. But I now have to write a letter confirming the company’s wage bill with supporting evidence. I don’t want to, but, since she was crying, I promised I would.

I don’t want to largely because I am sceptical about how this information will be used. We’re currently planning a series A round which will ultimately go public. I’m interested to see how much credit they’ll want to take for that.

Like I said, I think g2i is a valuable programme and has great alumni events (for which I’m almost certainly off the invite list now!). But I think that if g2i want to make bold claims they need to use stats from people who really believe g2i was the main contributor to gaining funding.

There’s also a presentation problem. When I joined the programme, I was told it would include mentoring from the likes of Brent Hoberman and Melanie Hayes (then of 4iP). That was the main factor for me signing up, in fact.

The sessions ended up being run by companies earning a commission on finding you funding. This was still not a major issue until I got to my first mentoring session and was told that there wasn’t really much they could do to help me and that I had it all in hand.

The session lasted around 10 minutes and a week or so later I received a ‘subsidised’ mentoring invoice for £352.50. (To give some credit, the lady did point out that the consortium of companies running the programme – Quotec, Pembridge, E-synergy – have done so at a loss.)

With that, the publicly-funded princess wailed, “I’ve got a sick husband! I didn’t come here to be attacked!” and fled back to her office.

With stories like this circulating, is it any wonder curmudgeons like me are so vocally sceptical of Government-subsidised programmes?

Ben has never been invited to SVC2UK, which is perhaps why he doesn’t realise that it is, by a considerable margin, the heaviest-hitting and most impressive initiative currently operating in Europe to connect Silicon Valley elites to European founders. So I worry that Ben, whose journalistic pedigree is better than most of his peers, might be feeling pressured into sucking up to the new kid on the block at the expense of accuracy.

For one thing, the Valley gurus who travel over for SVC2UK are of a different order to those Paddy Cosgrave manages to snag. It’s the sort of crowd you’d see at Brent Hoberman’s Founders’ Forum (which I didn’t see Ben at either), Davos or at private parties in San Francisco and it includes luminaries such as Reid Hoffman, who co-chairs the whole thing with Sherry.

SVC2UK starts off with similar gimmicks to F.ounders: a whiskey tasting followed by a meeting at the Palace of Westminster. But from there things get serious: an audience at Downing Street with the Prime Minister followed by a reception at the top of the BT tower. The following day, 250 CEOs from across Europe are brought together, before a whistle-stop tour that takes in some twenty events across the UK and which even includes stops in Spain and Portugal. Some 10,000 people will have benefited from the programme by this point. By that metric, SVC2UK is over three times the size of LeWeb.

Cambridge is a particular highlight of the trip. I moderated a panel at Judge Business School last year and enjoyed several of the fanciest elements, including a supper at the oldest college in Cambridge and one in the masters’ lodge of a college that has more Nobel Prize winners than the rest of Europe combined.

Exhausted but exhilarated, the delegation this year will end up at the Science Museum for the final send-off.

All of which makes Ben’s verdict that SVC2UK has “nothing like the support” that F.ounders does faintly preposterous. Does a washed-up, tax-avoiding rocker and the outgoing president of Ireland (a ceremonial role with zero executive authority) really compare to what Sherry and Reid put together each year?

As for his claim that it has “nothing like the atmosphere” either, I’d politely ask: how on earth does he know? I realise the two events are very different beasts, but it’s disheartening to see glib dismissiveness toward SVC2UK and uncritically lavish praise for F.ounders from a publication known for its more authoritative perspective, especially from a reporter whose expertise doesn’t yet come close to justifying such sweeping statements.

It’s a delicate balancing act when you’re a journalist fresh on the scene. On the one hand, you want to be objective and uphold journalistic standards – so you shouldn’t be afraid to write scathingly about disappointments. On the other, you’re keen to ingratiate yourself with your new contacts and demonstrate your gratitude at being invited to fancy events.

The state of tech reporting in Europe is woeful. But for those of us who have been around for a while and were hoping for more from the WSJ Europe‘s entry into the market, it’s disappointing to see such bold statements being made from a position of such ignorance.

I can’t help but think the WSJ is slipping into habits more commonly seen in worthless churnalist tech bloggers who fail to provide insightful analysis and lose critical distance. (I make no extravagant claims for myself here, by the way: I am irretrievably compromised by my close personal friendships with so many people in the industry, which is why I’ve always preferred to remain a columnist and feature writer.)

Its correspondent is thorough and clever enough, if not yet well enough connected or well enough versed in the technical side of what he writes about, to fill at least part of the vacuum in quality coverage. But judging by the latest 20 or so posts on Tech Europe, there’s a hell of a way to go before the paper can claim any meaningful authority on this subject.

It will be an unconventional marriage, to say the least, but I am confident we will make each other very happy. I hope you will join me in celebrating soon.

Savile, star of children’s television favourite Jim’ll Fix It, sued the Sun in 2008 over a series of articles linking him to Haut de la Garenne, the Jersey children’s home where human remains were found and children were allegedly tortured and sexually abused. He initially denied ever visiting the home, despite photographic evidence to the contrary.

In fact, Savile had close links to managers at the home. A journalist who reported on the case told me there are gruesome revelations waiting to surface that no newspaper felt able to publish at the time, given UK libel law.

And then of course there’s Savile’s reported friendship with Gary Glitter. (A case for phone hacking if ever there was one.)

Now that Savile is dead and no longer able to issue writs, how long before people start talking?

5. MARGARET BECKETT

Nicknamed ‘Rosa Klebb’ by Private Eye and others – no doubt an appreciative nod to the good looks she shares with Bond’s 1963 nemesis – Margaret Beckett is best known for destroying British farmers’ livelihoods while at Defra, championing Labour’s insane climate change buffoonery and enjoying kooky caravaning holidays with her husband. More than egregious enough, I’m sure you’ll agree, to earn her a place in this year’s list – despite the fact that she’s now, thankfully, in Opposition.

4. JOHN BERCOW

Charlie Brooker recently used his Guardian column to call David Cameron a “lizard”. I’m guessing that’s because he doesn’t know much about politics, because John Bercow is surely a much stronger candidate for that nickname. Drenched in goo like the most frightening beast of your imagination, and with spectacularly bad taste in ties, the Speaker of the House of Commons is as loathed by his party as he is by his own wife, who only narrowly missed appearing in this list herself. This year we’re carving our jack-o’-lantern into a mock-up of the Squeaker’s slimy visage.

3. POLLY TOYNBEE

Toynbee is by a considerable margin the most hypocritical and irresponsible journalist in Britain, spewing forth dodgy stats, vitriol and class hatred from her Tuscan villa twice-weekly for the Guardian. Dead-eyed and dangerous, Polly invariably sports Joseph-style jackets stitched together with the metatarsals of young Tory researchers from bits of hazardous waste. Toynbee is impressively, almost superhumanly wrong about everything and her columns are a useful negative barometer to what’s going on in British politics.

2. CHRIS HUHNE

People of Hampshire: lock up your children! Creepy Chris Huhne, the most unpopular man in British politics, has been accused by the wife he has since left for a jackbooted lesbian called Carina Trimingham of trying to palm his speeding points off on her. The last thing you want is for Felicity and Peter to be innocently trick or treating in the neighbourhood when Mr Huhne is anxious to get home! Huhne’s also a climate change fanatic, who refuses to investigate Britain’s game-changing shale gas reserves.

1. MICHELLE OBAMA
America’s First Lady has never quite shrugged off the humiliation of being compared to Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare’s psychotic, scheming temptress, by my mate James Delingpole – particularly since it came so early into her husband’s presidency. As for that famously natty dress sense? Hmm. Don’t see it myself. As she gets more relaxed in front of the cameras, Mrs Obama is starting to let her personality shine through, as this recent picture shows.

As of yesterday, we know that Amy Winehouse died from alcohol poisoning. Astonishingly, it seems to have been the only substance present in large enough quantities in her bloodstream to finish her off. Robert Le Fevre, celebrity addiction specialist, took to the airwaves late last night to dissuade us from remembering Amy Winehouse for her troubled end, praising instead “that voice… what a voice”. But he is wrong.

It’s important first to put Winehouse’s talent into perspective. She was a gifted vocalist, yes, but an interpreter of the human condition on the level of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday or Nina Simone she was not. For one thing, she didn’t have enough common ground with normal human psychology. She then squandered what gifts she had by embarking on a selfish and reckless lifestyle, condemning herself and her intimates to a toxic downward spiral of dependence and misery from which she eventually found herself incapable of escaping.

And we bought her records, didn’t we, anxious for a window into that pain; desperate for a sliver of that gaping maw of emotional devastation. We flattered ourselves into thinking that we too, in fleeting moments, knew what it was to be Amy. Because she could sing, the myth of “helpless Amy Winehouse” sprang up around this feckless drug addict, and with it the romance of her haplessness and powerlessness in the face of a brutal sickness.

And yet, according to the latest – though unfashionable – research into addiction, nothing could be further from the reality of Winehouse’s condition. Scientists are increasingly turning away from the so-called disease model of addiction, which absolves sufferers of responsibility for their dependence, particularly in the case of substance abuse. It is no longer seen as an adequate explanation of why people destroy their lives with drink, drugs, gambling, sex, shopping and all manner of other indulgences.

It seems horribly callous, I know, and antithetical to everything taught in AA meetings and on 12-step programs and everything you read in the papers, to expect addicts to be held accountable for their behaviour. But, although the availability of pleasurable substances has expanded enormously – a crucial factor in the rise of drink, drug and food related addictions and deaths – increasingly, experts are relocating the responsibility for self-destructive behaviours back with the addict. They point, among other things, to the high rate of successful and permanent reform among heroin users who start young and realise the consequences of their actions early.

That is why it is a tragedy that Winehouse’s awful parents were permitted to safeguard her: they failed to either reduce the abundance of choice around her or to shellshock her into realising the ramifications of her lifestyle choices. (One of the characteristic features of the addict is his failure to understand the causal relationship between short-term pleasure and long-term pain.) It is also why we, as consumers of her music, have good cause to be ashamed. Amy Winehouse found deification in death because it excused her from the filth and decrepitude that was her daily life. But we ignore the reality about her end at our peril and we ignored it to her detriment, because we robbed her of the ability to renegotiate the conditions under which her disorder flourished.

There’s nothing more devastating about her loss than that of any other withering drug addict, tottering mindlessly off a north London pavement into the path of oncoming traffic, or expiring slowly, in terrible agony in some gutter, having misjudged his dose. Because she should never have been allowed space in public life in the first place. So if we’re to take any lessons at all from Winehouse’s life, they should be about how we permitted and encouraged such destructive behaviour in the public sphere, and how utterly reprehensible it was of all of us to buy into the fiction of Amy Winehouse the “troubled singer”.

This wasn’t just a moderately talented artist with a louche and dissolute manner; it was a broken human being who should never have been permitted anywhere near a camera or a newspaper. The gruesome whirligig of self-pitying excess that is sure to once again saturate the newspapers this week is irresponsible and sinister, because it perpetuates the poisonous fantasy that Winehouse was some sort of tragic hero. She was not.

So we should be concentrating on flagellating ourselves for enabling intemperance like hers and for giving troubled individuals influence they ought never, for their sakes and ours, have on our culture. We certainly shouldn’t be hung up on self-indulgently mourning another loathsome, albeit talented, old drunk. We should bury her, not praise her, because she wasn’t a role model: she was a warning.

Regular readers will know that I leave serious reporting to the likes of Tim Bradshaw at the FT and the inimitable Mike Butcher. Love those guys. But frankly, for me, slavishly reporting on funding rounds and acquisitions and paying obeisance to the cult of UKTI is just too fucking tedious.

So I like to write about what’s going on around the edges of the technology scene in Europe: the people, places, events and ideas that are behind the dry reportage and which silently shape the headlines.

Who’s hot? Who’s not? Who’s in? Who’s out? Who should you keep an eye out for and who’s a hapless wannabe? And what’s going on at all these swanky dos?

I also like to call people out when they’re talking crap or up to no good. To my mind, European tech coverage needs a bit more rigour, bite and bubble-popping and a bit less press release recycling and illiterate blogging. That can sometimes make me unpopular, and occasionally means I get uninvited from the best parties, but I think it’s important to say what you really think – even if you get it wrong sometimes – in an industry swamped with worthless churnalism. For such an over-reported on sector, the quality of writing and analysis in emerging technology is atrocious.

I also, from time to time, like to shine a light on the unsung heroes, and that’s the point of this post. Service companies, and in particular public relations firms, are central to the start-up ecosystem, but no one ever covers them. Why? Sure, they’re not as – sigh – “sexy” as the latest geolocated crowd-sourced social food-spotting app, but they’re a crucial part of the social and business landscape, connecting start-ups to journalists, throwing parties and generally supporting what entrepreneurs are doing.

That’s why I’m putting together a comprehensive guide to the best PR firms in Europe for start-ups and high-growth tech companies. It will be ranked, and it will be based on interviews with clients past and present, account managers and journalists. I’ll also include some top tips – for PRs, for journalists and for start-ups – about how to deal with each other, based on the most commonly cited irritants.

Yes, I am looking for your dirty laundry.

It will be ruthless. It may be ugly. But it will be fair. And I will disclose any and all conflicts of interest.

So if you have something to contribute – or even if you just want to make sure your firm is up for consideration – drop me a line.

Update: I probably should have included a deadline above. So here it is. 5 p.m. on Friday 11 November 2011.

Update 2: This will now be published as a Special Report when I launch my new project.

I was going to write a post about how unhelpful it is to be drawing a velvet rope around some of the most influential people in the industry. But, truthfully, it isn’t: it’s brilliant, and the inaugural F.ounders was one of the best events I’d been to all year. Indeed, I said so on the three occasions I wrote about it in the Telegraph.

Wait, sorry, no. Four times.

And I was tempted to write an outraged piece about how classless and ungrateful it was for a conference I’d put together a UK guest list for, made numerous introductions on behalf of, spent two and a half days of valuable consulting time giving strategic advice to and endlessly plugging, to cut me off because I’d decided to go freelance and they couldn’t boast about a specific publication next to my name on their guest list. (At least I know not to waste my New York Times commission this month on a conference review.)

But I won’t do that. I’ll simply say this. It was a shame they knowingly misled me, failing to correct my excitement and anticipation after they knew I’d booked my flights to Dublin and stringing me along for months discussing with me whom I might interview on stage, before abruptly sending me a generic email explaining that “demand had been extremely high”. Guys, I know: I’m part of the reason.

While I wish them all the best for the future, I don’t much feel like attending another F.ounders or Dublin Web Summit event right now, and I won’t for the time being feel able to vouch for those events or any of the people behind them.

I’m sure Paddy and the team will pull off another great weekend. Though, having seen this year’s guest list, which is a mixture of impressive Americans and… well, Europe’s quite small isn’t it? I hope they find someone new to help them separate the European wheat from the chaff. Because the real character of this conference is still very much in flux, and you have to wonder what the value is for the Silicon Valley guests.

For a drink-soaked hack, it’s a brilliant boondoggle, but what, besides a hangover, are people really getting for the three days away from their companies that we don’t already from DLD and Founders’ Forum? My concern is that unless F.ounders filters more effectively and consistently, this event will become just another utterly missable European schmoozefest for US CEOs with something to flog over here.

Then again, maybe not inviting me was their first step on that process…

To be more specific, it suggests that, while the Indie is nominally sticking by its disgraced plagiarist and Wikipedia vandal, the knives are out for Johann in the newspaper’s offices.

Did new editor Chris Blackhurst order Hari’s removal from the Pink List? Quite possibly, since Blackhurst is thought to be furious at the way conniving Simon Kelner and naïve Andreas Whittam Smith virtually forced him to keep Johann on the books. Also, bear in mind that the struggling Independent titles are likely to swing a scythe through their newsrooms – sacking journalists who would never dream of telling Johann’s porkies.

The official line is still that Johann Hari will be “welcomed” back to the Indie when he has undergone a period of enforced rehab – sorry, “retraining” – but, given the many x-rated stories about Hari that have yet to surface, Blackhurst would do well to harden his heart. Otherwise, his whole editorship will be discredited by his failure to tackle the intimately related problems of Master Hari and the amphetamine-crazed pornographer David Rose.

P.S. Here’s a little titbit for Hari’s politically correct admirers: apparently, Hari vetoed a New Statesman byline picture on the grounds that it made him look “like he had Down’s syndrome”. Nice.

Thank the Lord that Adrian Smith, the man shamefully demoted and humiliated in one of the most outrageous assaults on private Christian conscience in recent memory, has plucked up the fortitude to sue his employers.

Quite right too. Smith, a housing working in Manchester, was sacked from his job and shunted down into a much more junior – and less well paid – job, because he had the temerity to suggest that marriage perhaps ought to be between a man and a woman.

He did so privately, and on his own Facebook page, but was disciplined by Trafford Housing Trust for breaching its “code of conduct”. I dread to think of the endless, politically correct garbage that “code of conduct” must consist of. No doubt if he had tweeted, “I’m not entirely sure that the Trust needs all these Diversity Support Officers,” he’d have found himself in similarly hot water.

“Diverse” in modern Britain is of course a funny word. One of the most toxic effects of the last government’s demented equality and diversity crusade was the marginalisation of the ordinary, hard-working Christian people who are the economic and social glue that – just about – keeps this country together.

Catholic clergy in particular are subjected to the most appalling abuse and ridicule while Christians in need abroad are barely mentioned by the press.

It is persecution, plain and simple: as Cristina Odone wrote in theTelegraph following Smith’s demotion, “Being taken for a cretin, a creationist and a chauvinist is not much better than a spell in the stocks.”

How depressing that it is only Christian journalists and popular but slightly comic figures like Ann Widdecombe who are prepared to call the government to account for ignoring the persecution of Christians both here and abroad, while withdrawing aid from countries who persecute homosexuals. And how shameful that our ruling class’s morality seems to be so easily swayed by prevailing Left-wing fashions.

So it’s right that Adrian Smith’s persecution should have made the headlines. His courage should be applauded. And bravo, too, to theMail on Sunday for sticking up for what can only be described as Britain’s last remaining persecuted minority: us.

I sense sympathy from the general public, even from non-Christians, for Smith’s plight. With any luck, the quiet but resolute fightback I have been hoping for is about to commence.

Morozov finally landed the punch we had been expecting from Andrew Keen, in the process calling Jarvis’s book “glib”, “insipid” and “half-baked” and lampooning Jarvis’s “unrivaled ability to attract attention to his diva-like self”. It’s the sort of stuff that has you punching the air, especially delicious because Jarvis really is one of those needy, fame-hungry online personalities like Julia Allison who never seem to shut up. Seriously, doesn’t the guy ever take holidays?

Morozov’s review, which outgunned Jarvis rhetorically and, more importantly, intellectually, would itself have been enough to cause heavy damage to the journalism professor’s reputation – regardless of the fact that most people, this correspondent included, are yet to examine Jarvis’s book. Truthfully, we no longer feel we should waste the time, since Morozov has so exhaustively highlighted Jarvis’s lack of basic background reading and his pitiable attempts at original thinking.

“It would be hard to exaggerate the intellectual laziness of this book,” Morozov writes. “When he is not re-phrasing the obvious, Jarvis churns out ideas that he believes to be fresh and brilliant but turn out to be stale and boring and old.” And he’s only just getting started. Later, we’re told how comical Jarvis’s superficial reading of Habermas is: “This is how Sarah Palin would read Habermas if she could read Habermas.”

You have to feel sorry for Jarvis. Admittedly, he holds himself in curiously high regard, which can be grating. And he certainly never passes on the opportunity to congratulate himself. But as he squirmed uncomfortably, attempting to discredit and dismiss Morozov, instead of addressing his opponent’s criticisms head-on, you realised that this was a populist, middle-brow author being brutally kneecapped by an academic with a vastly superior arsenal. What hope did he have? Jarvis takes great pleasure in underscoring his academic credentials, but not all professors are made equal, and this felt like Daffy Duck being decapitated by Immanuel Kant.

And so, inevitably, when Jarvis did respond – at first flippantly, in a hideous error of public relations judgement, and then, at greater length, but still inadequately – it was with a water pistol instead of the Exocet missile needed to defuse Morozov’s exegesis: two hopelessly poor rebuttals, which operated at the same level of thinking Morozov had so brilliantly exploded in his original inquiry. Jarvis whined about Morozov’s long-standing animosity (irrelevant to the arguments at hand), made weird remarks about the font size of Morozov’s piece and generally lowered himself to the sort of debating techniques one sees in the comment sections of the Guardian‘s Comment is Free and on social media sites but which one hardly expects from a university professor.

Most egregiously of all, and out of nowhere, he invoked his struggles with cancer. It was a creepy, sleazy move that would have embarrassed the most disreputable academic. Jarvis may have got used to babbling on about his health on his blog, Buzzmachine – and I sincerely hope the regular outpourings of sympathy he obviously craves and always receives have been a comfort to him throughout a painful experience – but references to his personal problems had no place in an academic rebuttal and he should be ashamed of stooping to such tactics.

There have been whispers for some time among Jarvis’s critics, usually only expressed privately, that he has been leveraging his health woes as insulation against the more robust criticisms of his work. “I hate to say this,” wrote one of his antagonists to me last week, “But why is it that every time Jarvis finds himself under attack, we’re treated to another blog post about his testicles?” Understandably, no one has had the insensitivity or foolhardiness to accuse Jarvis of such poor form publicly. But I don’t think they need to after this.

John Lettice, editorial director of The Register, remarked last night on Twitter that the death of Jeff Jarvis as thought leader will be restricted to “circles in which people actually think”. He is surely right. But even if that boundary does not circumscribe Jarvis’s legion of sycophantic fans, it certainly does his peers, his editors and the array of digital bigwigs he is anxious to ingratiate himself with and upon whom he depends for his income and status.

Doubtless his consulting work will continue to be lucrative. (There’s no word yet on whether, like his fellow utopian Clay Shirky, Jarvis was on Colonel Gaddafi’s payroll.) But his professional reputation has been irredeemably damaged by this episode, and, absent what would have to be a pamphlet-length and extremely tightly argued rejoinder to Morozov, it is unlikely to recover – regardless of the number of sophomoric “fiskings” he publishes, nor the frequency with which he dismisses his critics on Twitter as “haters”.

Because drawing attention to intellectual fatuousness is not the same as “trolling”: this is one debunking Jarvis cannot explain away as someone “disagreeing” with him. And his supercilious dismissals on Twitter do nothing to mitigate the damage done by such a devastating appraisal. Many of us had privately thought of Jeff Jarvis as a bit of a frivolous lightweight. We’ll be less reluctant to say so in his beloved public sphere from now on.

We’re all familiar with the cutesy names given to traditional Left-wing agitators. Stinky. Stumpy. Griff. But have you noticed how much the new middle-class brand of attention-grabbing troublemakers seem to enjoy masquerading in pseudonymity too? The simplest explanation is that these people are criminals, anxious to avoid identification: vandals, robbers, squatters and so on. But there are other reasons for this curious phenomenon, which I think throw some light on to the psychology of the crusties still camped outside St Paul’s cathedral.

Rent-a-nuisance Natalie Szarek, most recently seen causing trouble sticking up for the gyppos at Dale Farm, has tried to obscure her identity and background with her activist nom de guerre Natalie Fox. She’s been busted, though: her Cambridge contemporaries, whom she had alienated with her dour feminism, leaked her identity to the press. Subsequent to her real name appearing in the Mail and the Telegraph, Szarek was nowhere to be seen, even as the diggers moved in on Dale Farm. Am I alone in suspecting an angry call from Papa?

“Comedian” and activist Jonathan May-Bowles, a man most famous for getting smacked in the chops by Rupert Murdoch’s wife, has shed his double-barrelled surname to avoid sounding posh – no doubt in a bid to ingratiate himself with the limpets who cheer him on. Alas, his adopted moniker, Johnny Marbles, is the apex of Mr May-Bowles’s wit, as can be readily observed from his Twitter feed. And when an undercover Sun reporter threatened to reveal May-Bowles’s boasts about drug taking, he too fell quickly silent.

And then, of course, there’s our old friend Johann Hari, friend to and spokesperson for whatever Lefty fad is passing through this week – and Mandelsonian master of the dark arts of slander, innuendo and disingenuousness. Hari conjured up not one but several entirely fake personas in order to smear people he didn’t like, and praise himself, on Wikipedia. You’ll forgive me for banging on about Hari week after week, but reading through the edit history on the articles he tampered with makes it clear that Hari even conducted conversations with himself using these fraudulent identities, with one of them at one point offering to buy the other a pint. Talk about troubled.

Now, it makes sense that unstable people holding hopelessly conflicted views about the world would need a form of multiple personality syndrome in which to house the absurd contradictions of their existence. But the precise manner in which their personalities have splintered is revealing, isn’t it? It’s almost like they have each constructed a disposable imaginary friend to do their dirty work for them, lobbing stuff at the police and yelling obscenities at video cameras, while their authentic bourgeois identity only appears at home with mum, in the opinion pages of the nationals and emblazoned on their Oxbridge degrees.

Because, while the fractures in Johann Hari’s online identity may be representative of his fragile psychology, there’s no doubt he knew exactly what he was doing when libelling Cristina Odone and Nick Cohen, so the ease with which he cast off his second identity (and third, and fourth, etc.) suggests that he saw it as a carapace and not as integral part of himself. That way, David Rose’s sins could be disposed of along with the body when the inevitable revelation came.

Yet, though I like to think of Hari as a demented socialist version of Rod Hull, one fist poised over the CTRL and C keys of his laptop, the other jammed up the arse of a psychotic, racist gay incest porn-penning lunatic called David Rose, there was something a bit more indispensible about his counterpart. Rose was Hari’s dark side: while Johann was publicly doing little more than doctoring quotes in his articles, his evil twin was free to silently spread lies about his enemies and massage the egos – and online biographies – of his mates.

Whatever the intricacies of their individually damaged psychologies, it’s obvious these tragedy tourists are stuck in a prolonged adolescence. We can therefore think of their public performances as a mass teenage hissy fit, in which protesters indulge themselves in romantic fictions about their dispossessedness while ostentatiously aware of their role in a sort of gigantic reality television show – all the while acutely aware of the life back home that threatens to abandon them if they get too carried away with the role-play.

As a friend remarked to me over dinner last week, these kids know they’re being watched, too. They play up to the cameras with all the gusto and gracelessness of a Chelsea heiress or Essex wide boy. (Though with none of Mark Wright’s charisma, it has to be said.) Indeed, the architecture of shows like The Only Way Is Essex – “real people in modified situations” – is a pretty good approximation of what’s going on inside the protesters’ heads, as they try to navigate the paracosm the Guardian’s lies and distortions have created for them.

You see, retreating into alter egos is the only way for them to stave off the admission that all they’re really doing is letting off some steam. But while pseudonymity, more properly the domain of gossip columnists and agony aunts, serves the purposes of angry Lefty man-children by minimising the possibility of embarrassment for the folks back home, it’s a grotty, self-defeating tactic for the activists themselves, because it encourages behaviour like Charlie Gilmour’s Cenotaph-swinging. And the festival atmosphere at these protests is analogous to the mediated reality of the comment box, which rewards antisocial behaviour with attention.

So when spoilt brats take to the streets to “express themselves”, hiding behind false names and fortified by narcotics, they end up behaving like comment trolls, indulging in behaviour they would never countenance if they thought they’d be held accountable for it afterwards and which, when examined dispassionately, says nothing worthy of consideration. No one takes anonymous comment trolls seriously: we just assume they’re expressing impotent rage. So why, when precisely the same thing is happening on our streets, is anyone bothering to listen to what these petulant, work-shy pricks have to say? Because, as they prove time and again when things get sticky, they don’t even really buy it themselves.

I’ve filled out her bio (I am @Nero‘s grandmother. I’m here to keep an eye on him. Former model, now a house-bound invalid) and uploaded the picture but the tweets are all hers.

The protests at Dale Farm and the “Occupy” protests elsewhere have more in common than you might imagine. Both are evidence of a growing phenomenon: genuine grievances being hijacked by a new breed of attention-seeking and, in some cases, psychologically damaged demonstrators. These disaster porn addicts waste no time in swooping down on others’ misfortunes, using their woes as a pretext to draw attention to themselves and their asinine, sixth form politics.

But tragedy tourism isn’t for everyone: only spoilt, middle-class kids need apply. Take New Statesman blogger Laurie Penny, for example, who was tweeting from the New York demonstrations with all the embarrassing naïveté of an Essex bride on her honeymoon. Notice how she casually drops in boasts about her metropolitan lifestyle, complaining, to give one recent example, of her flat-mate coming home drunk from a Booker Prize party. Because there’s nothing these agitators like better than to flit, effortlessly and publicly, between the two worlds of showbiz and grinding poverty.

A virtuoso exploiter of other people’s misery is Johann Hari, who is currently, thanks to his own stupidity, hors de combat. Nothing pushes Hari’s buttons – besides fried chicken and racist gay incest porn – like an anguished cry for help that can be used to satisfy his prejudices and monstrous ego. I mean, is there any trendy Lefty cause he hasn’t ferociously championed? Similarly, when you read news reports of protests going wrong, you see the same names appearing again and again, often connected to wildly different movements. The people behind them are invariably Oxbridge educated, like misfit Natalie Szarek, who has popped up as her alter ego Natalie Fox at Dale Farm, a power station in Nottingham and a pro-Gaza demonstration in Cambridge.

Such ideological promiscuousness inevitably leads to contradictions. During the Oz trials in the late sixties, Colin Welch, the then deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph, observed that a surprising number of the protesters wore glasses for their court appearances. In other words, they were perfectly happy to embrace modern technology when it suited them. Nowadays, of course, it’s more than just glasses. It’s iPhones, despite Steve Jobs’s epic social conservatism and snobbery about blogs and social media, and it’s Twitter, the tool of choice for anti-tax avoidance campaigners UK Uncut, despite the corporation locating its European offices in Ireland to avoid paying UK corporation tax. Loaded with inconsistencies and hypocrisies, is it any wonder the bourgeois ringleaders of social unrest are so hilariously ineffective?

In fact, Penny, Hari, May-Bowles and Szarek may even be doing damage to their adopted causes. I reckon protest fatigue will set in very soon, both here and in the States, as the general public get fed up with endless, purposeless grandstanding by wretches who can’t hold down a proper job and the irresponsible journalists who encourage them. Because what truly outrages the public isn’t perceived injustice, as the protesters might imagine: it’s the sight of idiotic spoilt brats swinging from war memorials. There are hints this is happening already: UK Uncut threw their toys out the pram earlier this month when their blockade of Westminster Bridge didn’t get wall-to-wall media coverage.

See, the public doesn’t much care for petulant parasites. Remember loony-tune “comedian” and activist Johnny Marbles (real name Jonathan May-Bowles – I wonder why he changed it) and his self-defeating attempt to pie Rupert Murdoch? In just a few seconds, May-Bowles managed to move the entire country to sympathy for Rupert Murdoch. (He also turned Murdoch’s wife, Wendi Deng, into a YouTube sensation.) Every time one of these goons tries to “make a statement”, their endless quest for validation may be briefly satisfied by the morons on Twitter, but their ostensible cause is heavily damaged.

So I think the public will soon cease to react when the police shut protests down swiftly and brutally. And from there, it’s just a short leap to the curtailment of the right to protest and the cleansing of Parliament Square. Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Tom Paine had in mind.

When Lady Gaga rips off someone else, it’s high art; a loving homage in the finest tradition of pastiche – even when the results look more like theft than mimicry. But it appears that Gaga takes a somewhat dimmer view of her own admirers’ attempts to celebrate her all-consuming narcissism. She can dish it out, it seems, but she can’t take it.

This remarkable, almost comical lack of self-awareness deserves a fresh mention today, in light of her High Court triumph over London technology start-up Mind Candy, the company behind Moshi Monsters.

Mind Candy’s Lady Goo Goo, a parody character of the singer, has been banned from YouTube. Mind Candy isn’t now allowed to sell Goo Goo’s single, The Moshi Dance, either.

The parallels, though incidental, between Moshi Monsters and Gaga are admittedly striking: Gaga even calls her fans “little monsters”. But there is no suggestion that Mind Candy has sought to gain commercial advantage from these coincidences.

And the vacuous popstrel seems to me to have missed a trick in deploying such heavy-handed tactics. A commercial partnership with Mind Candy would have been a much smarter way of addressing any perceived trademark infringement, and a route the company would no doubt have investigated enthusiastically.

Quite what her legal team was hoping to achieve with this injunction is therefore unclear, since it seems plainly obvious that no one, not even the children to whom Moshi Monsters is marketed, could confuse the singer with her pint-sized digital imitator.

What’s more, the implications of this ruling for tribute acts and satirists, a staple of British culture in particular, are troubling. The ruling suggests that names similar to the act being imitated could cause problems for tribute artists if rights holders turn nasty.

No one wins when trademarks are so brutally enforced: the additional attention to “original” works (itself a troublesome definition) are cut off and creativity is strangled.

In any case, for a singer who makes a living doing a bad impression of Madonna, you might think it odd for Lady Gaga to be as aggressive as she is about protecting her image. (But then, she has put an awful lot of work into distracting attention from the awfulness of her music, hasn’t she?)

The image she is seeking to protect is nebulous and chameleonic at best, because, beyond her name, itself drawn from another act’s song title, there is little consistent about her from one day to the next, beyond her tiresome and commercially-oriented advocacy for gay rights issues. That and the dreary tunes.

Beneath the meat dress, there’s a plain, modestly talented and obviously very unhappy young woman desperately trying to be interesting, but with none of the world-conquering swagger of the former Ms Ciccone without which she would be impossible.

Even Simon Cowell famously branded Gaga “boring”, and, setting aside the silly but occasionally entertaining frocks, he is surely right (though Mind Candy chief executive Michael Acton Smith was quick to insist today over the telephone, despite facing what must have been hideously expensive legal bills, that he “admires her creativity”).

I have a feeling Gaga would enjoy being spoken about in the same breath as celebrated pastiche masters like Arthur Conan Doyle, Mozart and Queen. So I’m surprised that she, of all people, isn’t more relaxed about pursuing innocent parodists.

It would perhaps be going too far to call Lady Gaga the most derivative of the current pop crop; that honour is reserved for the likes of Avril Lavigne. But she is certainly more heavily reliant on derivation and imitation than pop icons of the stature she aspires to, which makes this bellicosity hypocritical and unattractive.

Surely she recognises the sincerity with which admired names, ideas and images can and should be pilfered, remixed, reinvented, reimagined and re-served. That, after all – even more so than for the burlesque tradition to which she owes so much – is very much her schtick.

For several years, I attended a selective grammar school in Kent. My contemporaries at this superb all-boys’ school came from throughout the class spectrum: at registration, I sat to the left of a minor aristocrat and to the right of a boy from the local estate. The toff ended up at Bristol; the council estate kid got in to Oxford. But despite their extraordinary success at levelling class differences, grammar schools have become politically toxic. How? Why? The answer is straightforward, though the very existence of the problem is a national scandal.

One of the most unforgivable betrayals of this country’s young people by the Conservative Party is its refusal to stand fast on the issue of grammar schools. The objections to their existence are absurd and obscene. Yet, thanks largely to the shameful manner in which debate in the public square has been hijacked by the narratives of the Left, received wisdom tells us that selection is unfair to children, on the assumption – rather, the extreme Leftist lie – that all children are equal. Almost every major news outlet in this country has been complicit in spreading that destructive untruth, and the grotesque philosophy from which it springs. On this, as on so many critical issues, the media no longer represent the people whose interests they purportedly serve.

As most parents know, what’s truly unfair to children is to maintain educational apartheid by championing a comprehensive system that consistently fails the poorest and most marginalised young people by assuming they are incapable of the same academic results as middle-class kids. What’s truly unfair to children is condemning those who do not have access to expensive private education to sub-standard teaching by unsackable incompetents.

And so we find ourselves today in a contorted position, where parents distraught with the shockingly low quality of education provided by the state are being compelled to establish their own schools, the so-called “free schools” among which Toby Young’s is the best known. This is an innovation that ought not be necessary but which is the unhappily awkward compromise resulting from an educational system unfit for purpose, whose vacuous institutional prejudices betray the hope and promise of every young person in Britain.

I am labouring this example because it is important and instructive. Education is critical to our competitiveness in a globalised economy. But, at present, our children are barely being taught to read properly (one need only address oneself to an issue of the Spectator to see the evidence). And all because language – the immoral, despicable, disingenuous language of the BBC, the Guardian and the Labour Party – has made common sense into a taboo.

You see, Tories aren’t the oppressive face of the establishment in this country any longer: now, it’s the unions and the hysterical single-issue rabble-rousers of the Left, dangerous extremist bullies who have a twisted, vested interest in destroying our economy, maintaining educational apartheid in our schools and silencing any debate that isn’t conducted in language guaranteed to ensure victory on the part of the Leftist terrorists. Examples are everywhere. The Left is hectoring, spiteful and obscene, while the Right is expected to remain disciplined, courteous and genteel. Why is no one on television at six o’clock in the evening saying this?

Telegraph columnist Graeme Archer described washed-up buffoon Charlie Brooker’s conflation of David Cameron and a lizard as “the tragedy of the modern Left”. He continued: “To describe a political opponent as a blood-sucking lizard isn’t amusing; and even if it were, it is depraved. Neither good people who vote Tory, nor their honourable opponents who vote Labour, are less than human: they are just people who happen to disagree on political objectives and tactics.” I don’t know that I agree with him that there’s a tragedy on the Left. I think instead that the tragedy is on the Right. I think the Right’s failure to present a virulent enough opposition to the hideous, abusive narratives of the Left have rendered good sense vulnerable and encouraged ever more outrageous language and actions from extremist lunatics like the UK Uncut and Dale Farm protesters. The Left has learned that by shouting louder and bullying more viciously, it wins the day.

That must change. We must learn to embrace a British Ann Coulter or Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly or even – yes, I will say it – a Sarah Palin, to restore desperately needed balance to our national debate. When the party that best represents the views of ordinary Brits is the marginalised and faintly ridiculous UKIP, it is clear that something is deeply awry.

For the sake of social stability and our economic future, the domination of the Left cannot be allowed to continue. We are a conservative country with a remarkably socially conservative population. But normal people with right and history on their side are forced every day into making disingenuous and unsatisfactory economic and social arguments in the face of liberal cultural hegemony – for example in the case of cuts in the size of government, where what they should be saying is: let’s cut; savagely, brutally and mercilessly, because it’s the right thing to do.

This is impossible, because an army of ludicrous activists claim the disabled are being attacked; that women are being targeted; that the Tories are somehow purposefully shunting children into “poverty”. (It’s ridiculous to suggest that poverty on the scale normally claimed even exists in Britain. It’s not an unreasonable position to take that there’s really no such thing as poverty within our profligate welfare system.)

What appallingly depressing bollocks it all is. Just when did we – or, more accurately, our newspapers – capitulate moral authority to cultural Marxists? I mean, since when was it more just, more kind, more humane to condemn a generation of the white working class to hopelessness and benefits dependency by massively engorging the welfare state? Since when was it the noble thing to do to deliberately engineer mass immigration for political purposes? Since when did it advance the national dialogue to engage in hysterical witch hunts after the slightest of perceived bigotries? (Witch hunts that only serve to further underline difference.)

And why aren’t people more visibly furious about the appalling injustices, lies, incompetence and wrongheadedness of the previous Government, which – can we even say this? – seemingly deliberately made the poorest poorer?

If it’s okay to call David Cameron a lizard, and I think by common consent it has now been shown to be, then it must similarly become acceptable for mainstream Right-wing commentators to call Harriet Harman a brain-dead under-sexed harpy and Jacqui Smith a joyless fascist buffoon. Each of those descriptions has plenty of merit.

There has been a systemic and catastrophic failure on the part of our newspapers and television stations to accurately reflect not only public opinion, which is invariably at dramatic odds with the political and media elites in London, but also to resist the creeping encroachment of poisonous liberal orthodoxy, and to react with appropriate astonishment and opprobrium at the self-important prats camping outside hospitals who, without even the most rudimentary understanding of corporate restructuring, claim that the Government is “destroying” the NHS through its desperate attempts to cut waste and improve performance.

I mean, honestly. Given the howls of anguish from the Left about the NHS reforms that just passed through the Lords, I wonder why we didn’t take the opportunity to just shut the bloated, useless behemoth down entirely and institute (pre-Obama) American-style, insurance-based healthcare.

This, more than anything else – more than the reinvention of business models, more than the greater adaptability to the 24-hour news cycle, more than the erosion of the lines between professional and semi-professional reportage – is why citizen journalism of the type practised here is so important. It is not enough simply to give a voice to the supposedly disenfranchised: that way lies fragmentation into lunacy and hilarious Liberal Democratic absurdity. Rather, what citizen journalism outlets ought to be doing is making an attempt to adequately reflect the consensus found outside the noisy protest groups who hijack so much time on television and so many column inches in our papers.

No more cloying obeisance to the cult of political correctness. No more kowtowing to the preposterous lexicon of “equality”. No more deference to the insane Leftist cult that bankrupted our country, widened the gap between rich and poor, allowed the banking crisis to blossom unfettered and which ruined our schools. Just clear reportage and biting response, in unadulterated language, from the everyday man’s point of view, to the issues of the day.

Most people support the death penalty in this country: let us debate it properly. Most people want a referendum on Europe: let us have it. Most people want a blanket ban on immigration for the next ten years: let us look honestly at the pros and cons. And most people accept what I would have thought an obvious truth: that grammar schools like the one I went to are the best possible chance a poor but clever kid has to become a doctor or lawyer.

If there is a worthwhile task for “people-powered” news, it is to rediscover the honest, earthy values of our great tabloid nation, and to steer our media back to once again representing the people who have little option but to read and trust those in positions of distributive power. That’s the only way the media can be saved, and the only way news can ever become a commodity sufficiently relevant and valuable to the masses that it again becomes a viable commercial proposition.

Steve Jobs, the legendary technology chief executive who finally lost his battle with pancreatic cancer last week, had some odd habits, which led to him being adopted by the Left as a liberal icon. He was a vegetarian, got married as a Zen Buddhist and dabbled in voodoo alternative medicine that nearly killed him after he was initially diagnosed with malignant tumours.

Perhaps that’s why, among the many tributes paid to this iconic business leader, few have paid adequate regard to Jobs’s commendable social and economic conservatism. He strongly disliked bad language. He admired Ayn Rand. In 2007, he railed against teaching unions. He was fabulously snobbish about journalism, speaking of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in reverential language but privately scoffing at bloggers and user-generated content. He was even a blood sports man, participating in a shoot in Cambridgeshire as recently as 2009.

Above all, he was an anti-pornography crusader. In fact, the defining moral statements of Jobs’s life were about pornography. Jobs didn’t simply object to X-rated material: he detested it and waged war against it, excluding pornographic content from his devices by including rules in his App Store that restricted what other people were permitted to sell on his devices: the iPhone, iPad and iPod.

“We do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone,” he wrote in 2010. “You know, there’s a porn store for Android [a rival variety of mobile telephone] … You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go.”

Jobs said he was championing “freedom from porn”.

A funny sort of freedom, some might think, but it’s one that Catholics will find resonant: Jobs saw porn as a pernicious, even enslaving influence on society, and was determined that it should not appear on his company’s products.

Of course, some vocal pornography consumers objected to Jobs’s rigorous moral outlook. Producers, too: fashion magazine Dazed and Confused sarcastically referred to their iPad version as “the Iran edition”, implying undue censorship on the part of Apple, which required them, among other things, to remove nipples from the magazine’s artwork.

Joshua Mercer, writing for the CatholicVoteAction.org website, noted last year how unusual Jobs’s attitude was among his peers. “This is so atypical of most businessmen,” he said. “Profit is usually the only consideration. Hotel companies, for example, love the profit that comes from selling adult movies. They hide behind language like: ‘In-room movies are a revenue stream. This is a business matter.’

“Thankfully for consumers, there is one smartphone that didn’t want to do business with this sleazy industry.”

When we examine Steve Jobs’s life, we discover a robustly conservative figure and a refreshingly moral man – perhaps surprisingly so, for one of the planet’s most prominent capitalists. Maybe it’s because his own upbringing had been so fraught with instability. (He was given up for adoption as a child and never reconciled with his biological father.)

Yet, notwithstanding Jobs’s principled stand on the family and pornography, he was less consistent on the subject of homosexuality – maybe because his company employs so many gay men. It’s true that an app called Gay New York: 101 Can’t-Miss Places was repeatedly rejected for its inappropriate content. As American journalist Dustin R Steeve put it at the time, it’s “more condemning of gay culture than Steve Jobs that a New York gay hotspot app cannot pass a basic decency test”.

On the other hand, highly questionable apps like homosexual “dating” service Grindr, whose sole purpose is to facilitate casual sex between men, are freely available on Apple devices today. And the company donated $100,000 to the anti-Proposition 8 campaign, a movement to enshrine the rights of same-sex couples to marry in California, to the dismay of those who welcomed Jobs’s otherwise ferociously pro-family principles.

Apple has also repeatedly knocked back the pro-life Manhattan Declaration app. According to another American journalist, Christine Dhanagom, this followed pressure from homosexual activists. As I say, not an entirely consistent position for the company to take.

While many admire what a ruthlessly effective boss Steve Jobs became at Apple, and how enthusiastically he embraced free-market principles, few take the time to note how effectively Jobs played the liberals who rule Silicon Valley.

Indeed, despite donating to the Democrats on a few occasions, he was no friend of the political Left.

Jobs was partially responsible for the fatuous Californian narrative of “changing the world” through technology, which is couched in liberal language but has nothing really in common with the Left’s political agenda.

But Jobs didn’t want to save the rainforests. He did nothing that we know about for charity and scrapped Apple’s corporate philanthropy programmes when he returned to the company in 1997.

Now, a lack of charitable giving is nothing to be admired, and it may just as well be the case that Jobs chose to donate in private, rather than drawing attention to himself in a self-serving way. Bill Gates, for so long his rival at Microsoft, has been accused of using the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for public relations purposes.

What we do know is that Jobs wanted everyone in the world to own his consumer electronics devices and to buy content with them to use and enjoy on his own carefully controlled platforms – preferably the sort of polished, family-friendly studio content he himself created at Pixar. That’s what Steve Jobs meant by changing the world: all-encompassing global market domination. (Something the liberal Twitter mob likes to forget.)

In that goal, Jobs was perhaps the most successful capitalist in history: one who hoodwinked those on the Left into gushing over his products and spending their publicly funded wage packets and student loans on them while manufacturing everything as cheaply as possible in China, only paying lip service to environmental issues when shamed into it by Greenpeace, eschewing charity and laughing all the way to the bank. All the while, he extended the same brilliant marketing principles he deployed at Apple to his personal brand.

That, more than anything else, is why I loved and will miss Steve Jobs. He made idiotic hypocrites out of society’s most obnoxious members without even really trying, while standing firm, practically alone among his peers, against the massed hordes of grubby online smut merchants.

The production and proliferation of internet pornography is increasing at an unprecedented rate. The internet has changed the mechanisms of content distribution more fundamentally – and, in the case of pornography and pirated content, more worryingly – than any other technology in history.

More troubling still is the toxic relationship consumers of pornography seem to be developing with this material, thanks to the enormous volume of it available on demand. Researchers like Gail Dines are only just scratching the surface of how destructive that relationship can be, with men in particular experiencing an inexorable pull into ever-more extreme forms of smut.

Indeed, as my friend Damian Thompson chronicles in his upcoming book on addiction, The Fix, changes in consumption habits among porn enthusiasts bear a remarkable similarity to more traditional forms of addiction: the acceleration of desire, the need for an ever-greater “hit” and the growth of ritualised and self-destructive behaviour are among the characteristics of the porn addict. And the number of people addicted to pornography is growing. Fast.

That this is a problem in need of an urgent solution is not in debate. But the Government’s answer – to insist that internet service providers apply a filter to their users’ connections – isn’t just technologically unworkable, it’s also bad for the economy and morally questionable.

Why? Well, the danger of “false positives” is bad enough: humour sites like B3ta.com risk being inaccurately categorised as pornographic and hobbled overnight. But there’s also the privacy of users to consider. Yes, I only have to opt out of the filter once if I find that a site has been erroneously blocked. But once I have, will my name appear on a “likes to look at pornography” list somewhere?

Max Niederhofer, a technology entrepreneur and investor, made the point to me over lunch yesterday that, for an island nation in the grips of financial crisis, whose only hope for economic growth comes from new business ideas, to be regulating the internet is madness. He’s right. As with other restrictions in other parts of the economy, unnecessary regulation suffocates innovation.

Former Catholic Herald editor Cristina Odone asked on her Telegraph blog yesterday whether the Government can save us from internet porn. The answer is no. The Government cannot legislate morality. But it can help to create the conditions under which people are most likely to flourish.

It’s ridiculous to suggest that imposing a ban on unpleasant material will either stop determined children from accessing it or reduce its appeal – indeed, the taboo of “what lies behind the firewall” may have the opposite effect – but by encouraging personal responsibility and respect for tradition and authority, while resisting the over-sexualisation of children and relativistic, “anything goes” morality, the Government can, through lawmaking, encourage parents to give their children better starts in life.

The last Labour government presided over an entrenchment of feckless, work-shy and amoral culture through systematic attacks on family, faith and British tradition. The gap between the rich and poor widened while both groups lost their moral compasses: the rich became reckless and avaricious, while the poor sank into a fetid swamp of laziness, self-indulgence and turpitude.

While there are few signs that Cameron’s Conservatives are fully committed to reversing that trend, the coalition’s welfare and education reforms are a positive first step. (Though, given how infested the education establishment is with well-meaning, permissive liberals, we cannot hold out much realistic hope of schools ever providing better education to steer children away from inappropriate content.) The Prime Minister should, however, avoid his more authoritarian tendencies when he feels frustrated at the speed of change.

The answer is really quite simple. The best way to protect children from pornography, and dissuade adults from being sucked into wasting their lives on depraved material, isn’t ever-tighter restrictions: it’s better parenting.

If there are to be any firings in Alan Sugar’s boardroom this week, one hopes it will be his media spokesperson getting the chop, for allowing the East End bruiser free rein to snipe at national newspapers over the past few years.

No doubt the reality television star and businessman thought himself very droll while publicly bashing the Daily Mail on Twitter and, if what I hear is true, devoting an entire chapter of his new book to critiquing the paper’s journalism. Such behaviour is, I suppose, to be expected from a lowbrow popular entertainer.

But Sugar, or his people, ought to have known better. The Mail is notoriously brilliant at settling scores. Its editor, Paul Dacre, oversees massive and brutal retaliation for the slightest of perceived insults, and his newspaper just loves to publish devastating exposés of self-important public figures.And so it was again this weekend, when Apprentice winner Stella English went public with her story. Since winning the show in 2010, English claims she was passed around Sugar’s companies in a variety of frustrating non-jobs until she finally quit, having wasted two years of her life. Throughout her ordeal, Sugar coaxed her out of making any public fuss “to preserve the integrity of the BBC, the show and me”.

“I had visions of being at Lord Sugar’s side, working with him, like Yasmina Siadatan, who won in 2009, and Lee McQueen, who won in 2008,” she told the Mail.

But that didn’t happen: English ended up five layers of management away from Sugar. And when English quit her second role for him, at YouView, she says he “stuck the knife in”, telling her she was superfluous to requirements and that he had discharged his obligations to her.

“I’d gone to work there under a pretence,” says English. “He had strung me along and now he was washing his hands of me.”

Investors and shareholders in Sugar’s businesses – not to mention current employees – will be furious that the neglected products of his television show languish as unproductive leeches in middle management.

Last year, perhaps in recognition that there is often nowhere worthwhile in Sugar’s empire for Apprentice winners to go, the format of the show was tweaked. Triumphant Tom Pellereau received a £250,000 investment in his business and advice, rather than a job.

If Sugar’s self-regarding tweets are anything to go by, the man regards himself as virtually unassailable. But with reality television very much in the descendent, Sugar may come to regret his allocation of priorities. And he is not in the strongest position to launch an assault against one of the country’s most powerful newspapers.

Indeed, he is becoming something of a comic character, not least because he has seen no apparent contradiction in presenting himself as a champion of business while accepting a peerage from the Labour party.

The Mail’s story suggests that Sugar’s conflicts and contradictions run deep. Stella English alleges that he prized his public profile and television career over his business interests. Extremely damaging stuff, if true.

Public figures, especially those with business interests to consider, deride the media and belittle the influence of the papers at their own peril: stories like this one often trigger a cascade of “me too” revelations that can be horribly damaging to the target’s reputation.

If an appetite for Apprentice-bashing takes hold, we will soon see all sorts of unpleasant disclosures. Those of us who trade in gossip professionally know of deliciously embarrassing horror stories as far back as the first series that are yet to emerge.

How long before Michelle Dewberry goes public about her experiences with Sugar? This story is only the first in what is likely to become another of the paper’s obsessive campaigns of negative coverage about its foes.

Thanks to demeaning, manufactured spats with Piers Morgan and his unbearable, ungrammatical flatulence on Twitter, Sugar has crossed the line from pantomime TV bully into unlikeable bore. Quite a dangerous time to be making enemies among the more ruthless tabloids, don’t you think?

Sure, everyone admires what a ball-busting, ruthless boss he was at Apple, and how enthusiastically he embraced free-market principles. But looking at Twitter today it seems that some people forget what a old-fashioned family man he was, too: he abhorred pornography, for example, making it exceedingly difficult for app developers whose products contained even hints of nudity to make it onto his devices. He disliked bad language. In 2007, he railed against teaching unions. He admired Ayn Rand. And he was fabulously snobbish about journalism, speaking of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in reverential language but privately scoffing at bloggers and user-generated content. As for “crowd-sourcing”, forget it: Jobs repeatedly scoffed at the wisdom of crowds. “You can’t just ask customers what they want then try to give that to them,” he once said. “By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”

Jobs had his quirks. He was a vegetarian, and dabbled in voodoo alternative medicine that nearly killed him. But on the the other hand, he was a blood sports man: just a few years ago, he went on a shoot in Cambridgeshire, England.

The fatuous Silicon Valley philosophy of “changing the world” through technology is couched in language complementary to that of the Left, but it has nothing whatsoever in common with the Left’s political agenda. Jobs didn’t want to save the rainforests (he famously did nothing for charity, and scrapped Apple’s corporate philanthropy programmes when he returned to the company in 1997); he simply wanted everyone in the world to own his consumer electronics devices and to buy content with them to use and enjoy on his own closed platforms – preferably the sort of polished, family-friendly studio content he himself created at Pixar.

That’s what Steve Jobs meant by changing the world: all-encompassing global market domination. It’s something the liberal Twitter mobs like to forget. (Their selective blindness extends to other liberal darlings, of course: ignoring Twitter’s tax avoidance strategies while using it as the service of choice to make noise about, yes, tax avoidance, for example.) In that goal, Jobs was perhaps the most successful capitalist in history: one who hoodwinked the goons on the Left into gushing over his products and spending their publicly-funded wage packets and student loans on them while manufacturing everything as cheaply as possible in China, only paying lip service to environmental issues when shamed into it by Greenpeace, eschewing charity and laughing all the way to the bank. All the while extending the same brilliant marketing principles he deployed at Apple to his personal brand.

And that, more than anything else, is why I love and will miss Steve Jobs. RIP, dude: you made idiotic hypocrites out of society’s most obnoxious members without even really trying.