The Wintle Blog

Here’s the deal: I own a horse, you have a big stable. So you look after my black beauty and hire him out to make money, and I get a trot or a canter when I want one. A fair arrangement? I think so. Now let’s suppose, unexpectedly, you write to me and say, “we have made available, carefully selected to suit your lifestyle, a menagerie consisting of six goats, three rabbits, a brace of pheasants and a duck. All of these are potentially of great value to you, and therefore we now propose to charge you substantially for the stabling of your horse, which we will continue to hire out for our profit.” At which point I reflect that I have no use for goats, rabbits are three-a-penny in the marketplace, pheasant is a delicacy I disdain, and I already sourced my own duck. What should I do next? Moving on, here’s a letter I received this month from Lloyds Bank, about an account I opened a few years before the start of the ultimate quarter of the last century (coy, moi?): Dear Mr Wintle Your gold ...

The Annual General Meeting of the Worshipful Guild of Media Trainers was held in the upstairs chamber, the Lens & Pen Inn, London EC1. Members present included “resting” actors, former political advisers, sidelined PR practitioners, “life” coaches, redundant BBC presenters (female; over the age of 35), sundry other superannuated reporters and camera-people and the usual phalanx of casualties from Mrs Thatcher’s bargain-basement ITV auction of two decades ago (most still smarting from, and whining about, the injustice of it all). Addressing the meeting, the President, the Very Worshipful Bro. A. Djing-Hack, said it would be no exaggeration to say that the profession, or craft – for so he preferred to describe it [applause] – was facing the greatest crisis in its long and venerable history. He was referring, he explained, to the recent appearance of the former Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, at the Chilcott Inquiry into the war in Iraq. The President continued: “In the welter of comm...