Last Wednesday, the day that Victoria Wood’s death was announced, was not the Daily Telegraph’s finest hour. Like other papers it had oodles of royal birthday coverage ready to run; but unlike them it didn’t tear up the planned paper to give Wood priority, and assign her more or equal weight alongside the Queen on the front page. Whether because of the rigidity of its production process or the passionateness of its monarchism, Thursday’s Torygraph ludicrously ended up with no piece about Wood (someone manifestly very popular with its readers) until an Allison Pearson appreciation on page 25, and no news report of her death anywhere.
The Daily Mail, in contrast, reacted with typical flexibility, putting the two women together on the front and running four pages on Wood ahead of the prepared eight pages of sunny royal pics and gushing tributes. But something was clearly forgotten about amidst the hectic rejig until almost too late: a loyal birthday leader. What eventually appeared was a one-par piece (ending “many happy returns of the day, Ma’am”) awkwardly jammed in at the foot of a five-par leader on the NHS, with its brevity, its unflattering position and the strange black block it began with – rather than the usual headline, and with no space left between it and the words (“ON” and “pledge”) opening the first two lines – all suggesting it might have been an afterthought. For a paper with the royal arms on its masthead, this looks to have been a narrow escape.
Blogger Guido Fawkes has a secret benefactor. “Thank you Simon Walters for putting my kids through prep school,” he said in a Media Masters podcast. Fawkes, aka Paul Staines, revealed the munificence of the Mail on Sunday political editor when it comes to paying tip fees for exclusive stories. Geordie Greig, the paper’s editor, might ask how many of the scoops under the award-winning Walters’ name have been handed to him on a platter for hard cash.
The Shame of Giles Coren, as evidenced by his article A Farewell to Palms in the May issue of Esquire, is a subject Monkey only addresses with reluctance given the mortifying nature of the novelist, restaurant critic and TV presenter’s disgrace. It’s not the central confession in the piece that Coren only gave up continually “wanking like a chimp with a hangover” six months ago that constitutes the Shame, of course - although stopping “well into my late forties”, and after five years of marriage, does seem unusual. No, the moment in the printed piece that will have kept the ex-wanker wordsmith awake at night is when he used “compliment” instead of “complement” (an error now corrected online) - masturbation was “a thing I did while I was waiting for sex to begin in my life, and then did alongside sex because it seemed to compliment it”. It is clearly possible, given Coren’s well-documented past sweary spats about word-choices with subeditors, that Esquire’s subs were well aware of his mistake but decided to leave it in and hang him out to dry.
Does anyone on the Telegraph’s Business pages, or in the paper’s top editorial team, actually read the daily Alex cartoon that (with Matt and the parliamentary sketch) is one of the true-blue title’s few concessions to fun? Monkey only asks because in Wednesday’s Alex strip last week the EU referendum was said in a chat between bankers to be happening on “July 23rd”, which tends to suggest none of them does. No admission of error followed, of course: like love in the film Love Story, working on the Telegraph means never having to say sorry.