In the Observer today I look at the media's hatred of Tony Blair, which is building up in the advance of the release of his autobiography. The most distasteful manifestation of the mania is the conspiracy theory that Blair covered up the "murder" of David Kelly and maybe...

To my mind it is obvious that Labour is in a great deal of trouble, and that the only candidate who can get them out of it is David Miliband. More than half of the electorate voted for the Conservatives and Liberals in the 2010 election. To win some of them back Labour is going to have to start winning arguments in those swathes of southern and central England where supporting Labour is now a minority interest on a par with water divining or train spotting. David Miliband strikes me as an intelligent politician who can appeal to moderates. Moreover, he is the only candidate who you could imagine as prime minister. Choosing him seems so obvious a step to take as to be no choice at all.

Reporters do not always treat subs well. On occasion, when pushed beyond endurance by the cutting of our best lines, or a puritan purge of all our gags, we tell the old joke about the plane carrying a sub and a reporter crashing in the Sahara. For three days they walk through the burning heat until finally they collapse, skin burning, throats parched, at the base of a huge sand dune. 'Let us just climb to the top of the dune,' croaks the reporter.

Jews get the blame in every great crisis, and it was inevitable that conspiracy theorists would blame them for the foreign policy crisis of the early 21^st century.

What distinguishes our time, however, is that elements within western liberalism now adopt the position once associated with European reaction. I noticed that there was much grumbling in Standpoint's letters column after the editor pointed out that the supposedly leftist and supposedly serious London Review of Books had been promoting anti-Semitism rather than say the Spectator or Mail as one would have expected in the 1930s. However loudly readers complained, they could not deny that the LRB had been the first to offer its "enlightened" readers the conspiracy theory of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that the "Israel Lobby" had taken America into the second Iraq War. "For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel," the authors intoned. "Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical."

The leaked Afghan war documents show that the trouble with the Net is that every liberating feature its boosters claim as a virtue is also a vice. In the pre-computer age, a mole could not have got 90,000 documents out of a military base and to a journalist without being arrested. Nor for that matter could a disaffected worker in Parliament copy all the receipts of all the expense claims of 650 MPs and deliver them to the Telegraph. He would need to spend the best part of a morning loading them into a removal van, rather than slipping a couple of computer discs into his pocket, and the odds are the security guards would have realised a crime was going down long before he had heaved in the last box.

My paper the Observer has now got stuck in with a debate between Boyd Hilton, who argues that British TV has no problems, and Euan Ferguson, who says the Brits are years behind. Boyd supports his argument by saying that the BBC made The Office

 I've met many an American TV producer/writer/actor who talks in the same misty-eyed manner about Gervais and Merchant as we do about the creators of The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and Mad Men. And even though The Office is a comedy rather than a brooding, intense drama, if the question is "have we produced anything of similar quality?", rather than "have we produced anything similar of similar quality?" I think you'll find most American TV types would point to The Office (the final two episodes of which were pretty much comedy-drama anyway).