Not disagreeing with any of your points, just on the last bit.

The joy of the magazine being neither a charity nor funded by the tax-payer is that it can be exactly as balanced as the editors want it to be without needing to always present both sides of an argument as the BBC do.

Well I suppose all of the other MPs in the house were just eager to hold News International to account.

Enough sniping, he's a hero just by ensuring that the BSkyB deal did not go through. IMO obvs.

the exact words he made in the Word interview but he made a comment that there is something "wrong" about David Cameron enjoying The Smiths (?). It just made me think that for all his good work in the House he was a bit of a snob, parading the same old cliches about certain types of music only being for people from a certain class or background.

He's not a hero or a public champion. He's a politician with a checkered past, playing the system like any other MP and currently enjoying some time in the sun as a result.

I do not, by and large, have a problem with MPs' expenses.

Sure the whole duck house thing was crackers but I mean the actual principle. If I work away from home, I expect my employer to put me up in a hotel. And pay for my meals. I do not believe that this arrangement is unusual. I am further led to believe that hotels in London are rather expensive. So buying a flat - as most MPs seem to do - and being paid the mortgage instead actually works out cheaper for the employer (ie us).

The only alternatives it seems to me are to a) build a giant Halls of Residence for MPs and insist they stay there or b) restrict MPs to those who already have a pad in the city.

I can't remember the details of Tom Watson's misdemeanour, however I wouldn't underestimate the courage needed to take on the Murdoch evil empire. That does rather make him both a hero and a public champion. YMMV of course.

get hauled up in front of justice Leveson for a thorough check up.

'Balance' is specious bollox anyway. If there was ever any balance then you would see a hell of a lot more than the usual establishment 1-degree-of-separation nonsense we receive 99.9999% of the time. The fact that the commentariat goes into a melt-down and dominates the airwaves/discussion/debate whenever anything outside the bubble gets aired, squealing for right of reply and 'balance', when other viewpoints automatically receive none of that right, when it's never even considered necessary, all suggests that it's all a very tightly controlled and driven environment. Try following the fall out from a mass-media Chomsky or Pilger interview (which is tricky given their rarity), then imagine all those responses but with the positions inverted, where a Chomsky or Pilger demands right of reply every time some hopelessly compromised politician parrots the usual party line.

< / rant>

With you all the way Bren.

Can you imagine any Tory who'd done half the things this former Brown henchman did getting this sort of puff-piece? The £100k claimed to pay for refurbing his flat, his recent ambush of long overdue libel reform, his prominent role in replacing a 'triple election winning political genius with a vote repelling malevolent weirdo' (Guido Fawkes) and his involvement with a coterie around Gordon Brown that thought nothing of smearing, lying and stitching up - any of these might sound a warning bell, but no, he stuck it to James Murdoch and that entitles him to a bit of a gush - incredible!

Interestingly his conversion from 'Minister for Dirty Tricks' to saintly scourge of the News of the Screws came after Tom started employing a firm of PR consultants - the cost of which he kindly passed on to us.

but no-one, uses the full form of "that's the pot calling the kettle black" any more?

I appreciate this doesn't add a great deal to the debate.