Quite an evening at the Orwell Prize.
The best man won. Timothy Garton Ash carried off the award for journalism. Delia Jarrett-Macauley won the book category for her novel, Moses, Citizen and Me. (I had no idea fiction was eligible, to be honest.)
Me? I was there with a previous winner, Michael Collins, author of The Likes of Us, that stirring account of working-class London life. (Orwell's biographer, Bernard Crick, who runs the event, assumed I was Michael's agent. Imagine how humiliated I felt.) Guest speaker MP Ed Miliband - brother of David - talked about Anthony Crosland. The genial Mr Crick was rude about the Guardian; Victoria Glendinning was rude about the Times, while her co-presenter Andrew O'Hagan was rude about the publishing industry in general.
While I'm busy name-dropping, I'll also mention a conversation with the FT's John Lloyd. I asked him if he had any qualms about being on the board of the journos-meets-PRs group, Editorial Intelligence (see this post). Turns out he's left the advisory board, not because he was unhappy, but because he thought there might be a conflict of interest with his role at the new Oxford institute for the study of journalism.
But, I asked, does he honestly think that the profession is on the same level as PR? Alas, yes, he does. Things really are that bad. I still don't agree.
What would Eric Blair have thought?
UPDATE: Tim Worstall, not normally an admirer of Timothy GA, finds lots to enjoy in his latest column.
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