In my defence, the Daily Mirror didn’t seem to be aware either until some point yesterday afternoon, when it removed its own coverage of the story from its website. Given that no other British media outlet is reporting anything about Alfie today, I figured I’d best take my post down as well. Nonetheless, you can still read all about the latest developments thanks to the power of little-known search engine Google, which, I’m reliably informed, is available on literally dozens of computers in the UK.

It’s a bit of a shame really, as I was keen to launch into a spectacular rant against the Sun for its lack of basic fact-checking. I also wanted to have a go at nauseating columnists like Amanda Platell for stuff like this, which was published in the Daily Mail on February 13:

Looking at the pictures of 13-year-old Alfie Patten, cradling the head of his new-born daughter, it’s hard to know who to feel more pity for  -  the baby, or the father who is still a child himself.

I know there are those who will pour scorn on Alfie’s head. Doubtless, he’s not the sharpest pencil in the box. But the blame for this whole sorry episode lies elsewhere  -  and I don’t mean with his 15-year-old ‘girlfriend’, Chantelle.

For their predicament is testament to the moral collapse that is the true legacy of a liberal establishment that has imposed its own values  -  or rather, lack of them  -  on the British people for the past four decades. 

Yes, she did just call a 13-year-old child stupid. Oh well.

It’s perhaps worth observing that the court ruling has actually helped the Sun, which is now saved the bother of having to explain to its readers why it is incapable of establishing the truth before splashing with a story.

Russell Brand resigned yesterday following thousands of complaints about his Radio 2 show…

But the Daily Sport is backing the long-haired weirdo…Forget all that Political Correctness Shite and BRING BRAND BACK!!!

The byline is Ann Coates, which I assume is supposed to be funny.

Meanwhile, the Mail has targeted its latest laser of outrage on Mock the Week, publishing a transcript that includes some “highly offensive” jokes about the Queen. The comments underneath are more interesting than the story. My favourite is from “RAJ” of Pontefract, who says:

I may be old. But I pay my licence fee. I will be at the Cenotaph again this year. Will these treacherous insulting comedians be there? People who insult the Queen should be sent to the tower.

Someone else, Gemma from Essex, seems to be offended by a photograph of comedians Frankie Boyle and Dara O’Briain.

Just look at them in that photo, in their expensive jackets and haircuts…

Strangely, O’Briain appears to have had his bonce shaved with a “number one all over” of the sort that can cost as much as absolutely nothing if you own some £20 electric hair clippers. Ooh, the brazen excess!

The resignation of Brand and Radio 2 controller Lesley Douglas, and the suspension of Ross on zero pay until January, shows the debate has moved beyond the issue about who said what to whom and how offensive it might have been. It’s morphed into a Daily Mail-led hate explosion in which the Alan Titchmarsh-loving moral majority lament the bloke-ish, foul-mouthed comedy of a few highly-paid BBC “faces” who represent the antithesis of everything they hold dear. (And yet the Mail’s decision to publish numerous photos of Andrew Sachs’ granddaughter Georgina Baillie in various states of undress entirely thwarts the paper’s position as a moral guardian.)

Whatever the problems with the unfunny, puerile, bullying phone “prank” might have been – and how it came to be aired – the Beeb’s capitulation to this mass of 30,000 brainwashed idiots – none of whom, let’s remember, actually heard the original broadcast – is depressing in the extreme.

The dead hand of Max Clifford in the affairs of Baillie (aka Voluptua from the Satanic Sluts – link almost certainly NSFW) adds another sordid angle. I notice she was complaining in a Sun interview yesterday about how Brand

embarrassed me by making a private relationship very public in the cruellest way imaginable.

And yet today, the same fuckwit’s comic publishes a kiss-and-tell in which Baillie reveals Brand is

a disappointment in the bedroom considering he has had so much practice.

Thanks for clearing that up, Voluptua. I hope your appearance on next year’s Celebrity Big Brother goes well.

Photo: BBC

As the graph here shows, the number of web searches for RP has shot up in the last month. But the reviews haven’t been entirely favourable.

Guido Fawkes, quoting the FT, thinks he should just shut up on the basis that his queerly-intoned outpourings are helping to bring about the destruction of the world’s financial system. Others seem to agree.

The root of the complaint is that Peston put out a story on his blog an hour before the FTSE opened yesterday about various banks approaching the Treasury for a cash injection which, it’s fair to assume, helped lead to a 40% fall the share price of the Royal Bank of Scotland and big falls among other banks by close of trading last night.

Peston’s blog post said:

…last night [Monday] a trio of the UK’s biggest banks – Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays, and Lloyds TSB – signalled to Alistair Darling that they’d like to see the colour of taxpayers’ money rather quicker than he might have expected… Current rough estimates are that the capital injection could be as much as £50bn in total for all British banks.

But according to Guido Fawkes yesterday:

There is real anger in the City because of his reporting… Peston has single-handedly inflamed the situation.

Well boo-hoo. You’ll notice that by some miraculous coincidence, all the banks named by Peston have been part-nationalised to the tune of £50bn this very day. Thus Peston’s story is, um, essentially right. In fact, the only reason the markets reacted as they did is because he’s always right – but I guess the truth hurts when your million-pound bonus has gone down the plughole.

Admittedly, his tendency to use the phrase “I have learned…” is deeply tedious but in the wider scheme of things, shouldn’t we be celebrating this man’s talent as a journalist, rather than calling for him to be fired or, quite possibly, killed?

This comes from a piece buried on page 23 of the NUJ magazine, Journalist. A delegate at the union’s recent ADM in Belfast, Simon Chapman, raised the issue. He encourages the NUJ to oppose the idea, noting: “If you don’t sign up, you don’t get work.”

What a wheeze. It reminds me of one of those dodgy estate agents who charges students a fee just to look at the list of rat-infested shit holes he has available to rent. Except that this particular estate agent would then start whining about immigration policy and babbling on unfunnily about the Home Secretary’s cleavage.

Meanwhile, Trinity Mirror newspapers in North Wales have agreed to award photographers a whopping 29% increase per photo used. Which would be great news… except that the rate has gone from £7 to £9 per picture.

Next week in the Mail: a delightful cutaway diagram showing how asylum seekers prepare swans for the oven. Mmm. Swans. [Dribble.]

Sally Smedley, Globelink News (left); Sarah Sands with colleagues from the Daily Mail (right)

There was an especially awkward moment when fellow guest Alex James from Blur (who books these people?) called Sands “darlin’” after she mistakenly accused him of living in Gloucestershire. (I mean, imagine the horror!) “I live in Oxfordshire, darlin’” he sneered back. Seriously, it was like the summer of ‘95 all over again.

Next week they’re going to get Noel Gallagher on to call Polly Toynbee “sugar tits”. Probably.

(I can’t find the infamous “shadow of fear” story on the Mail’s website. If you Google “30-mile shadow of fear Daily Mail” and follow the link, it turns up a Mail story with no mention of this phrase, strangely enough.)

He notes that farming accounts for just 1% of the UK economy – so why all the fuss? He also draws attention to some breathtaking hypocrisy from Simon Heffer in the Mail, who abandons his Thatcherite posturing in order to demand state support for beleaguered farmers, having last month offered no sympathy whatsoever for uninsured working-class/northern types who lost everything in the recent floods.

Wilby makes some good points but I can’t help noticing that during this particular “silly season”, there seems to be a large volume of stories and comment pieces about the “silly season” as a concept. It’s a rather tedious media circle-jerk for which the broadsheets are largely responsible.

Take, for example, the Sun’s story about great white sharks off Cornwall. Utter bollocks, of course, but what else do you expect from the Sun? Nonetheless, the Guardian, the Times and others have filled pages reporting on this and other daft stuff under the guise of a report about the “silly season” as a concept.

They also like to run debunking stories – such as this one from the Guardian about the “Demon of Dartmoor”, which turned out to be someone’s pet dog. The Times, meanwhile, has spent vast amounts of time debunking the Sun’s merry-making – not, you understand, to fill space during the dry spell but to put right a grave falsehood being perpetrated by its News International stablemate.

Thus, for next summer, I suggest all broadsheets should be banned from running stories about the silliness of the silly season, and instead should be required to come up with their own silly news themselves. It’s only fair.

Is bringing the iPod out of your pocket in order to turn the volume up and down really a major problem for car salesmen, insurance clerks and others who wear M&S suits on a daily basis? Why would you want wires inside your suit? The suit also contains lycra. Lycra, I ask you.

The picture in the Mail is priceless and goes to show that male models in suits should probably be outlawed, especially when being forced to pose in a way that “demonstrates” the workings of the world’s most hi-tech but least fashionable garment. If you look closely, you can see it’s basically a suit with some rather shoddy slashes on the inner lining in which wires and iPod are shoved. Genius.

I also love the way the Mail goes on to report in some wonderment that, come the year 2020, we will all be wearing Buck Rogers-inspired tin-foil (I paraphrase), containing “TV screen technology using materials so thin and flexible that they can be worn like clothes”, which “could display moving images, changing colours or designs to match the mood of the wearer”.

Yes! And all our household chores will be done by robots wearing aprons.

Via Gizmodo.