Quintin Jardine's blog

Had a call from a BBC researcher a couple of days ago. An invitation was extended and accepted, and as a result I’m going to be a panellist on Radio Scotland’s weekly discussion programme, Brian Taylor’s Big Debate, broadcast live from 12:15pm on Friday, November 26. I’m looking forward to it, even without knowing who the other participants will be. Brian’s an old chum, who’s chaired me a couple of times at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. It’ll be a break from the norm for me, in that most of what I do is book-based, and this is a current affairs discussion, so I guess I’ll have to read more newspapers than is my habit.

Dunno about you, but as someone who grew up in an era when the Daily Express was a broadsheet, and Britain’s biggest selling newspaper, when the front page of the Courier was all ads, when the Herald was proud to admit that it was published in Glasgow, and when The Times lived up to its nickname, ‘The Thunderer,’ I’m both saddened and angered by the decline of British journalism, the drop in quality and the abandonment of the basic principle that news reporting and comment should be kept separate.