The Wardman Wire

Clueless Correspondents

The Independent this morning, reporting the Mother of all Bailouts:

The teams: Who’s who

The Government:

Paul Myners: The former Marks & Spencer chairman and ex-director of GLG, one of the world’s biggest hedge funds, was a surprise appointment as the Treasury minister responsible for the City. Mr Myners, 60, was appointed to his new job on Friday.

Nick Macpherson: The permanent secretary to the Treasury, aged 49, was appointed in 2005 and is rated very highly by Gordon Brown. He gave £12,700 to Mr Brown’s Labour leadership campaign when Mr Brown was Chancellor.

That caught my eye - a top Civil Servant giving a donation to a leadership campaign in a political party? Doesn’t the Civil Service Code say something here? It does:

You must act in a way which deserves and retains the confidence of Ministers, while at the same time ensuring that you will be able to establish the same relationship with those whom you may be required to serve in some future Government.

This is getting tedious, and slightly annoying.

Early in July I had a little go at Joy Lo Dico for suggesting that differences of 1 or 2% between website “unique user” statistics of national newspapers were of significance, when in reality any differences of less than 5% or maybe even 10% in Unique Users are smaller than the likely amount of noise on the figure.

Last weekend we had a repeat of exactly the same embarrassing mistake in exactly the same place - the Media Column of the Independent on Sunday.

In this case we had a case of major statistics abuse in an article about the superb satirical website the Daily Mash by Professor Tim Luckhurst.

(Illustration Credit: Wellington Grey)

I have a “Clueless Correspondents” category waiting to start - for highlighting howlers in the mainstream press, but Rumbold over at Pickled Politics has forced me to introduce a “Blogger Blooper” category first.

One sport that the Chinese Olympic Torch Escorts seem to excel at is All-in-Wrestling with members of the public.