As you’d expect, Jeremy Clarkson has not always been such a fan of Amazon. Just two years ago, looking bleakly at prospects for Britain’s high streets, he wrote in the Sunday Times that the popularity of online shopping would make them “home to nothing more than charity shops, pizza takeaway joints and Daily Mail photographers, prowling around looking for a drunk girl in a short skirt”. Eventually, Clarkson prophesied, “Amazon and eBay will turn Stow-on-the-Wold into downtown Detroit and cause Hartlepool to drown in a sea of vomit”. But there’s been no word yet from him on the impact of streaming video services on broadcasting’s high street - something underlined by a Times backgrounder under its report on the £160m deal, headlined “Big money digital media are biggest threat to the BBC”.
The Amazon Top Gear deal also makes Clarkson someone with a foot in two warring camps, and Rupert Murdoch probably won’t be happy with him. Once Amazon had insolently displayed its willingness to invest heavily in making and distributing video content, Murdoch called on the media industry in October to take on Jeff Bezos’s company and Netflix by finding a digital champion (a “competitor”) to battle them. Now one of the biggest names in his newspapers - for all the mockery of him as unemployed post-BBC, Clarkson writes columns for the Sun and Sunday Times, and is the chief writer and figurehead of the latter paper’s Driving section - will be enlisting part-time for the hated online enemy.
Required reading at News UK since the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, Monkey hears, is an article the MP wrote for the Morning Star in 2011, which makes a Blair-style trip to Rupert Murdoch’s island retreat highly unlikely should Corbyn become Labour leader. Denouncing Murdoch’s transformation of the Sun after buying it into “a low-grade abusive tabloid whose populism and abuse of individuals was unprecedented in its ferocity and bile,” Corbyn cited “the denigration of women” and “the abuse of Irish people” before thundering that “we have a right for our information and messages not to be controlled by the amoral attitudes of megalomaniacs”. Even if Corbyn fails to succeed Ed Miliband, the deputy leader is likely to be Tom Watson, co-author of Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (in which he weirdly chronicles his own feats in fighting the evil empire in the third person), so either way the Sun’s election treatment of Miliband may come to seem lenient by comparison, as relations between Labour and the papers Corbyn sees as owned by a “megalomaniac” revert to how they were in the pre-Ali Campbell era.
There are still plenty of posts in political journalism left to fill before the conference season arrives next month - Independent on Sunday political editor, FT deputy political editor, Laura Kuenssberg’s mostly political job on Newsnight - with more due to be left vacant by the people who fill them. The biggest prize left is ITV political editor, with the BBC’s deputy pol ed James Landale (recently beaten by Kuenssberg to the top job relinquished by Nick Robinson) widely tipped as the front-runner after having a good election. But how would two-ways between Old Etonian Landale and Old Sherborneian anchorman Tom Bradby come across on the people’s channel - reminiscent of ITN in the 50s, perhaps? And what should we make of the fact that he received backing in a column (for the BBC post, but presumably the endorsement holds good for the ITV job too) by veteran Sky anchor Adam Boulton? Is Boulton someone generous enough to hope the opposition choose an excellent team captain? Or someone more likely to slyly recommend that they pick a duff or unsuitable skipper?
According to the W1A-worthy job ad, the BBC Trust’s new head of communications will be capable of devising “a programme of proactive engagement encompassing the full communications mix”, someone who demonstrates “imagination, creativity and divergent thinking and encourages it [sic] in others”, and who oddly “manages personal effectiveness by controlling emotions in the face of pressure, setbacks or when dealing with provocative situations” (George Osborne being nasty about the Beeb? Things thrown by testy trustees? A call from the Mail?). But most of all, the new PR supremo will need a mind of considerable flexibility, since the job is just for 15 months - a detail eloquent about the survival prospects of the organisation (whose own chair, Rona Fairhead, has voiced doubts about its viability), as the current BBC Charter expires on 31 December 2016. The tricky challenge, then, is proclaiming the Trust’s glories while working out a contract whose end-date implicitly accepts that it’s doomed because it was never fit for purpose. Maybe the last head of comms of the PCC, with valuable similar experience as a deathbed spinner, might be available?
Regrettably, the sledging between the teams in the Ashes series has spread to journalists and pundits, with the Daily Mail’s sports diarist Charles Sale reiterating on Friday his view that Shane Warne makes a “boring, repetitive” analyst (his “Sky employers rate his Aussie team-mate Ricky Ponting far better”), and listing the insults the leg-spinner has aimed at him: “these have varied from ‘muppet’, ‘k*** jockey’ to ‘f***wit’ as in ‘F*** off you f***wit nobody likes you’”. The Mail’s primness means not all of these jibes are immediately intelligible, however, and Monkey readers who believe they know what a “k*** jockey” is (probably not a “Kiss [disc] jockey”, as even Warne would find it hard to imagine Sale as a hiphop DJ) may wish to offer their suggestions.
Monkey’s quote of the week: “I really couldn’t give a monkey’s bottom about fame” - Katie Hopkins, beginning an item in her Sun column that was openly an advert for her weekend gig on London talk station LBC (“this Sunday from 10am... 0345 60 60 973 - put it in your phone”), and sat above another item plugging the fact that “my new show for TLC - If Katie Hopkins Ruled The World - kicks off next Thursday at 10pm”. Could her editors be too scared to tell her off?
Once an agreeable way for fatcats to gain some favourable PR (and for the Financial Times to boost its own image as their favourite read), the weekly feature Lunch with the FT has suddenly become a reliable source of embarrassment for an already jumpy paper. There was the £580 bottle of wine ordered by Richard Desmond, which his interviewer was unable to claim on expenses. The lunch with leftwing economist Thomas Piketty (winner of the Pink ‘Un’s book award, but also the target of a hapless attempted takedown on its front page), when the FT’s aristocratic Paris bureau chief was disconcerted to find herself in a sandwich bar’s back room “eating lunch from plastic containers” and forced to sample “microwaved pasta bolognese”, with no wine and a bill for two of only €19.50. Now feathers have been ruffled again by last weekend’s lunch (in a strip club) with The Fat Jewish, aka Josh Ostrovsky, an Instagram idol specialising in dirty jokes: “trashy vulgarity”, “a downmarket interview ... the FT [has] become a Murdoch tabloid”, “a desperate attempt to appeal to younger readers”, readers winced and tut-tutted. It may be time for editor Lionel Barber to get a grip, if he’s not too busy doing an intensive Japanese course.