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An audience with James Murdoch. Don't get comfy
• Changes at News International, where James Murdoch, discombobulated perhaps by the phone-hacking revelations, devises new ways to disconcert his underlings. Summoned, they walk into his huge office, past the life-sized Darth Vader outfit he has owned for many years. But once before the great man they find they are no longer able to sit. One chair remains, and it belongs to him. "Keeps the meetings good and short," a recent visitor told us. A win-win, for him and the Wapping wage slaves. Hastens their escape.
• War is hell, and the reporting cannot make it less so. Thankfully the military has a kitbag full of euphemisms. There's friendly fire, collateral damage; and yesterday, according to the MoD, RAF Tornado and Typhoon aircraft "successfully engaged two regime artillery pieces south of Litany and seven armed pick-up trucks near Mirada". Successfully engaged the hell out of them, we understand. By the end of the successful engagement, there was nothing left.
• Is there anything to be done, we asked, about King Constantine of Greece, who has no kingdom to speak of and cannot have a Greek passport because he insists it should carry his now redundant title? Yes there is, we are told. Look to history. For our authorities faced much the same situation with the last King of Yugoslavia, Peter II, who was forced into exile in Britain when the country was invaded by Hitler. After the war, Peter, who was British-educated, applied for naturalisation and for a British passport but insisted on giving his name as King Peter of Yugoslavia. The Foreign Office was nervous about this, since it feared it might affect relations with the Tito government. As a compromise a passport was issued in the name of "Peter Karadordevic, self-styled King Peter of Yugoslavia". We commend this arrangement to the Greeks.
• And yesterday we referred to Tory outrage at the Lib Dems over AV, specifically accusations against Nick Clegg's deputy leader Simon Hughes. Conservative newbie Therese Coffey, MP for Suffolk Coastal, ascended some way up to the moral high ground, accusing Hughes of lowering the tone with nasty jibes and myths and slurs. But Coffey, we find, wasn't always from Suffolk Coastal; she cut her political teeth in the bearpit of Hampshire politics, and she wasn't always so squeamish about the use of questionable info to gain advantage. "Lib Dems, high on drugs, soft on porn" was the headline of a brutally worded election leaflet circulated by Hampshire Conservatives in 2003. It suggested Lib Dems were happy for 11-year-olds to be given contraception without the knowledge of their parents (they say they weren't), that they favoured making hardcore porn available to 16- year-olds (they say they didn't) and that the party favoured the importation of more heroin to treat addicts on the NHS (wrong again, they say). The line at the bottom of the leaflet is interesting. "Promoted by T Coffey". Nice picture of her too. The saving grace was that, on that occasion, Coffey and co lost.
• On the subject of AV, is there anything we should know about Lord Leach of Fairford, chair of the No to AV campaign? Just thought we'd ask. For yesterday colleagues called the No camp asking for a stock photograph of the Tory peer. No, came the reply, he really shouldn't be in such a gallery as he is very much "in the background". They also declined to name any campaign events he may have attended. Next stop a superinjunction, one expects.
• Finally to South Africa House in London, once a symbol of repression and a target for agitation. Now there's stability and calm, and yesterday there was jubilation as politicians, diplomats and the diaspora celebrated 17 years since the fall of apartheid and the first democratic elections. Peter Hain stood out at the lunchtime reception, swapping tales of demos past; and working the room, all smiles, was his Labour colleague Lord Boateng, who from 2005 to 2009 was Britain's ambassador to South Africa. "Today Brent South, tomorrow Soweto," Boateng proclaimed on winning the London seat in 1987, and took a lot of stick for it. He was right, of course – even if tomorrow meant seven years.