4 posts tagged “the daily telegraph”

A quote from the local elections in the UK today: ‘Gordon Brown has had his Life on Mars moment. He went to sleep in 2008 and today he’s waking up with support back to the worst his party has seen since records began in 1973.’
   How that series has changed the way Britons refer to things.
   Labour, under Gordon Brown, may even fall below the Liberal Democrats when it comes to the popular vote, says the right-leaning Daily Telegraph.
   Britons might just simply want a new bunch of people to make fun of and criticize, and David Cameron’s lot seems ready, they have decided. The next General Election will be telling.

[Cross-posted] The Office of Government Commerce, part of HM Treasury in the UK, unveiled its new logo, which cost British taxpayers £14,000.

And it didn’t take long after the unveiling for employees to see the problem:

   I am sure it is possible for all of us to be caught out from time to time, because we didn’t study all the angles (ahem) to a problem.
   But one principle I do abide by in logo development is internal review—not just to see if the client can identify problems, but to cover our own rear ends.
   The Daily Telegraph reports that staff have removed items with the logo and expects a rush on to Ebay.
   It states, ‘The logo … was intended to signify a bold commitment to the body’s aim of “improving value for money by driving up standards and capability in procurement”.’
   That sounds like a bunch of wank, even if I didn’t see the logo—though one branding professional thinks, as quoted in the Telegraph, ‘They’re going to get more column inches than they could ever have expected before. If I were them, I would be pretty pleased.’
   Please, let’s not bring inches into this.

Harry Mount’s column in The Daily Telegraph was a great laugh:

I once saw [Heather Mills] walking down Fifth Avenue in New York and was staggered by the height of her cheekbones and the depth of the groove beneath them.
   But when she opens her mouth—and keeps it open for 11 minutes, as she did outside the High Court—the spell is broken. You forget the cheekbones and drown in the ocean of self-pity pouring out of that pretty mouth.
   During the French state visit, clever Carla Bruni rarely broke the spell by talking. She realised, like the old pro supermodel she is, that all she has to do is look good and say nothing. …
   The real difference between them, though, is in what they say—or don’t say. The answer for Heather Mills in future is to do what John Galliano did with Carla Bruni's cinched Dior outfit—belt up.

   Thinking that was all that Mr Mount had to offer, I was pleasantly surprised by the final segment in his column:

A new study in the American Journal of Psychiatry claims that mobile phone addiction is a mental illness.
   I’m afraid the illness is incurable; it’s related to an addiction that's been around for ever—the addiction to self.
   People aren’t addicted to the phones themselves. They’re addicted to the attention they get from other people via their phones. Obsessive phoners send texts purely in the hope that they’ll get one back. They don’t ring people from the train to find anything out; only to get other people to listen to them saying nothing of any importance. Why is it that the person on the train is always doing the talking, and never the listening?

   I knew there was a reason I didn’t use cellphones.

This was interesting today. The Daily Telegraph reported on the campaign spending (specifically on make-up and grooming) by Nicolas Sarkozy and his rival Ségolène Royal during the French presidential election. Despite being thought of as a conservative newspaper, it painted a rosier picture of Mlle Royal than M. Sarkozy.
   First up, Sarkozy’s (over-)spending was the lead-in to the story, even though Royal’s was much higher. Mlle Royal’s spending was left to the third paragraph.
   Secondly, the standards used to round off are biased in favour of Ségolène Royal. Here are the figures I uncovered, compared with the rounding that the Telegraph did.

• Nicolas Sarkozy, spent €34,445—rounded in The Daily Telegraph as €35,000 (I would have rounded it to €34,000 or said ‘around €34,500’)
• Ségolène Royal, spent €53,581—rounded in The Daily Telegraph as €52,000 (I would have rounded it to €54,000—correspondent Henry Samuel shaves off a hefty €1,581 for the socialist leader)

Reimbursements:

• Nicolas Sarkozy was reimbursed €11,482—The Daily Telegraph reported €12,000 (I would have rounded it to €11,000 or said ‘around €11,500’)
• Ségolène Royal was reimbursed €17,220—The Daily Telegraph reported €17,000 (I would have used the same figure)

In every case, it might have been easier just to report the actual figures.
   The message, unless the figures I got from the French media are wrong: overestimate the spending by the right and make it look like the President is getting more state funds; underestimate the spending by the left and understate its burden on the state.
   The Telegraph might need to re-examine its mathematics.