Ashberto - back to our conversation last week, do you really think now is the time for the

media to drop its emphasis on personality politics?

Even in the newspaper world’s heyday, editors would agonise over their lead stories. Get it wrong, and their readership could fall by hundreds of thousands. Get it wrong several times and your advertisers start to get jumpy.

And yet you are proposing that right now, at a time when papers are desperately trying to work out how to survive in a digital age, they should change their approach with absolutely no guarantee it will work and a huge weight of evidence that it won’t (papers spend huge amounts on researching what their audience wants) because Jeremy Corbyn says they should?

Surely Corbyn has, if anything, much more of a personality than a great deal of your airfix model oxford ppe/spad/safe-seat production line politicians. And also a far more compelling story of long and distinguished service.

I mean, he's a million miles ahead of literally every other labour leadership candidate for starters.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/apr/11/pressandpublish ing.mirror

This is what happened when The Mirror tried to become a serious paper in the early noughties

strange of them to blame the "controversial anti-war stance" though. Most right-thinking people were against the Iraq war, or at least viewed it pretty cynically at the time.

Mind you, people do seem to have actually accepted it was a bloody stupid idea which has achieved nothing but the rise of ISIS and a stronger Iran.

I mean, I'm no expert but they were pretty much the exact opposite of what they wanted.

a not wholly interesting man doing a very nice job of selling something nobody wants.

I think there's real hunge for someone offering an alternatibve to the third way/middle of the road thing tbh, at least there certainly is among people I know.

The only left(ish) people I know who are broadly against the whole business are children of the whole nulabor orthadoxy who generally tend to marry blair's morals with brown's stubborness anyway.