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Could the former prince of The Guardian be returning to the paper to claim his throne? The Londoner hears that Newsnight editor Ian Katz, deputy editor of the Guardian until 2013, has decided to throw his hat in the ring.
Katz is said to have made his decision after seeing the manifestos that the paper’s four internal candidates — Janine Gibson, Katharine Viner, Emily Bell and Wolfgang Blau — released last month as part of an ongoing staff ballot to find a replacement for departing editor Alan Rusbridger, and thinking he had something fresh to offer.
Until he unexpectedly left to join the BBC two years ago, Katz had spent his entire professional life at The Guardian, editing the G2 supplement, inspiring fierce loyalty as the paper’s deputy and being immortalised by Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens in the Julian Assange thriller The Fifth Estate.
He left because, according to one Kings Place insider, he “didn’t want to spend his life standing around waiting for the top job to become vacant.” Alan Rusbridger has been enthroned for 20 years.
Katz is also thought to have reckoned that — in the digital age — getting serious multimedia experience at the BBC wouldn’t hurt his editorial prospects. “A lot of people are saying there should really be two jobs here,” says another mole. “One for the blue-skies, big-picture thinking and another for the actual day-to-day editing of The Guardian. No one’s really been doing that job since Katz left.”
So what says the prince-across-the-water? The Londoner asked Katz if he wanted to make any comment. “No!” came the reply.
Libby lets loose
Startling insurrection in the BBC ranks this morning, with Radio 4’s Libby Purves daring to express her opinion of the BBC’s creative director. After a broadcast of an interview-style skit between Alan Yentob and comedy icon Mel Brooks, the Midweek presenter tweeted: “Feeble attempt on Today to answer (with self-serving Brooks item) the perennial mystery — what is Alan Yentob FOR these days?” Answer? “Notalot.”
A Prescott who won’t go straight to Hull
Campaign group Generation Rent has proposed a handover of the Houses of Parliament for low-priced accommodation for Londoners, and for politicians to move to Hull where they would get “sense of humility”. What think the Prescotts, lords of the Hull Manor?
“Obviously, Hull is a fantastic place to live and work but I think Parliament should relocate to Gainsborough,” said David Prescott — son of Lord Prescott — who is standing as Labour’s candidate for the Lincolnshire constituency. “The property is even cheaper than Hull at £259 a month for a one-bedroom flat. The nightlife is good too — only last week we had octogenarian Labour MP Dennis Skinner doing a comedy night at the Blues Club.
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The club does a mean pie and peas supper that MPs and Lords would love, though we’d have to Mandelson its guacamole.”
This Dame is certainly no prude
To New York, where Dame Helen Mirren was honoured by the Roundabout Theater Company with a celebration at The Waldorf Astoria on Sunday — our picture shows her receiving the Excellence in Theatre award from actress Jennifer Garner.
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Alessandro Nivola, Mirren’s co-star in A Month in the Country, was among those offering tributes and said his crush on the actress led to him once turning an onstage kiss of the hand into an unromantic nibble of the finger. Horrified, he then sent her an apology note only for her to storm into his dressing room. “Do you really take me for that much of a prude?” she exclaimed. Helen Mirren a prude? We’ve seen her twerk.
‘Unknown’ Cara makes a splash
Blood was dripping down Cara Delevingne’s face on screen at the BFI last night, as she consumed a man’s heart in one of many nightmare moments in Michael Winterbottom’s The Face of an Angel. Based on the media frenzy around the Meredith Kercher murder, the film stars Daniel Brühl as a Winterbottom-esque film-maker trying to write a movie about the media frenzy around the killing.
The director explained that this navel-gazing hall of mirrors was exploring the fact that “journalists write about other people’s experiences from a kind of moral high ground”, so “in order to not do the same thing ourselves the film-maker was deliberately as badly behaved, if not worse, than everybody else”.
Winterbottom reminded the audience that, remarkably, he “didn’t know who Cara was” when he auditioned her for the film. He admitted that her character — a carefree waitress who bewitches the film-maker — “doesn’t really have much story function. She’s more there to be someone who’s young, full of life, full of energy... someone who reminds the people watching of everything that’s good about life.”
Which presumably explains why, for no obvious plot purpose, he had Delevingne’s character strip down to her underwear and splash about in the sea. The Londoner hopes the supermodel’s many other upcoming films will prove a little more stretching.
A mind boggling suggestion from Creasy
A question from Stella Creasy MP. “Why don’t we have World Book Day in Parliament?” The event, where pupils go to school dressed as book characters, might see Messrs Cameron and Osborne turn up as prefects from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Ed Miliband as Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice, and if the Mumsnet chat is anything to go by, Ed Balls as Christian Grey? The mind boggles.
Kanye gets a bit crabby
Kanye West gave students something to ponder at Oxford’s Museum of Natural History yesterday, explaining that “we have the ability to approach our race like ants, or we have the ability to approach our race like crabs”.
Was the rapper-turned-professor referencing the debate held in the same hall 150 years earlier between Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and biologist Thomas Huxley, who argued at length over the theory of evolution expounded by Charles Darwin, his crab collection being a prized exhibit at the museum?
Or maybe he was talking about research at Oxford into the butterfly Maculinea rebeli, which mimics the sounds produced by ants to infiltrate their society as one of nature’s most effective social parasites. Kanye, which was it?
Cameo of the day: The producers of Neighbours have invited Oscar- winner and ardent Karl and Susan Kennedy fan Eddie Redmayne to appear in the show.