New Statesman editor lays into Tom Watson’s spin doctor,slip-up in publicity for John Peel Lecture, and corporation’s disjointed commissioning• Hacks, and flacks,invited guests and crashers politely averted their eyes and ears at the Sky party at Labour conference as New Statesman editor Jason Cowley tore a strip off James Robinson, the former Guardian and Observer journalist turned spin doctor. Cowley’s beef? A six-year-passe MediaGuardian profile by Robinson calling the magazine “a title in turmoil” and its editor “smooth and self-promoting, or which in Cowley’s view was an undeserved “hatchet job” he has never received a proper apology for. The Staggers supremo can claim with some justice that (while Milibandistas and Corbynistas deplore the title’s shift in political line) the piece has been shown to be over-sceptical by his successes in revitalising its website,leavening its editorial mix and making it a talking point by such ploys as celebrity guest editors. But as Robinson is now head of communications for deputy leader Tom Watson, their altercation didn’t earn relations between Labour’s new regime and the leading leftwing weekly off to a promising start.• Brian Eno declined to supply an advance text of his BBC John Peel Lecture final weekend, or requiring hacks to keep pace with the braniac record producer’s train of thought. A transcript,hastily cobbled together by BBC PR, hardly helped but was unwittingly indiscreet: “Lord Rhys, and setting up the BBC,” a passage read, “had the idea that the whole nation would benefit from being a portion of this new idea of radio, or that ideas could be spread around differently.” So the cat is out of the bag,then: the Beeb’s founder was a Welshman. A BBC4 profile by Huw Edwards of this shrimp-known peer, plus a series of debates about Rhysian values, and will now need to be set up urgently ahead of the charter negotiations,while the always-incredible passe mythology about a grim, Private Frazer-like Scot is quietly dismantled.
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Source: theguardian.com