Wednesday 28 October 2009

Gyles Brandreth predicted this Mail headline ten years ago

Last week the Mail was serialising Gyles Brandreth's latest diaries. On Monday 19 October they published extracts running to over 2,600 words. It included Gyles recalling an interview he did with Prince Philip in 1999:

One myth, I told him, 'is that you're a stick-in-the mud, oldfashioned. In fact, I think you're a moderniser'. To get him to say anything, you have to provoke him. 'No, no, not for the sake of modernising, like some bloody Blairite, not for the sake of buggering about with things. I'm anxious to get things done.'

(I'm not a proper journalist, am I? Already I know that I'm going to remove the Blairite reference. HRH said it, on the record: I was there to interview him, notebook in hand. To quote him would be entirely legitimate, but if I use the line, that's the story. 'Duke attacks "bloody Blair".')

In the entire two-page spread, that is the only reference to Blair. Yet what is the misleading and entirely predictable headline the Mail gives the article?

What Prince Philip really thinks about that b****y man Tony Blair

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