No one to save Morgan from himself

Yet the Mirror could do worse than the former editor of The Sun. He is an intelligent Blairite, which is what the Mirror should probably become in the run-up to the general election, and quickly learned from his mistakes at The Sun, so he unlikely to take the sometimes foolhardy risks that Piers Morgan took.

It is also time Yelland moved on from News International. He has been treading water since he stepped down from The Sun, languishing in the waiting room in which Rupert Murdoch installs ex-editors that he can't quite decide what to do with next.

It is a comfortable, well-paid existence but also frustrating. A "quickie" MBA course at Harvard has not resulted in the top Murdoch management job that Yelland was tipped to get. Instead he has been writing a column for the Friday media page, buried in the business section and increasingly squeezed for space, apparently because editor Robert Thomson thinks media pages only make enemies in the rest of the media.

Whether Yelland would want the Mirror job is another matter. My man in Wapping tells me he could be about to flee the Murdoch coop for another top-notch media job commensurate with his abilities. Watch this space.

Why do we adore this king of gore?
"Violence is fun, man," Quentin Tarantino was reported as saying in Monday's Times. He then went on to say that his ambition was to make the "most violent, bloody movie" ever.

Those of us who have seen Kill Bill 1 might conclude that he has already achieved that (I have no intention of watching Kill Bill 2). More seriously, anyone who has watched the TV pictures coming in from New York, Afghanistan, Bali, Morocco, Turkey, Madrid, East Africa and Iraq over the past two years must wonder at the warped mental state of anybody who regards violence as "fun".

Tarantino, of course, might just be winding us up - though he and his star, Uma Thurman, have grown very rich out of violence. More reprehensible is the attitude of the critical classes and other arbiters of popular culture who swoon over Tarantino as an artistic genius with something important to say (he spoke from Cannes, where he's been made president of the film festival's jury), instead of just a money-making peddler of gore-fests populated by cartoon characters.

There are times when the amoral values of our cultural commentators remind me of the patricians in the last days of the Roman Empire, who also formed slavish cults in support of the worthless and degrading.

"One is tempted to wonder how much hope there is for the human race," concluded a magisterial editorial in Monday's Wall Street Journal on the continuing genocide in the Sudan and the West's failure to do anything about it. So, in its own way, does the fashionable fÍting of Tarantino by people who should know better.

Indy goes Partisan
The now wholly tabloid Independent is basking in April sales 15 per cent up on April last year (as this column predicted last week). But, given the direction in which editor Simon Kelner has taken the paper, I wonder if its name is not now in breach of the Trades Description Act.

Perhaps The Partisan would be a better title. After all, Kelner's Independent has eschewed all pretence at balanced, objective reporting - the hallmark of its original manifestation when it was launched in 1986 - and now openly pursues a Left-wing, anti-war agenda, not just on the opinion pages (where such things belong) but on the news pages too.

It's all a far cry from the original ethos of the paper, which enjoyed the most successful launch of any new paper in recent times because it quickly established a reputation for quality, authority and reliability.

Nor is it clear that the explicit antiwar agenda is attracting new readers. Over the past three months, sales have only crept up by 4,000 - all of the increase down to going to tabloid. Its sister Independent on Sunday, which shares the same partisan agenda but has stayed broadsheet, now has a headline sale of only 212,000, down 11,000 on the year.

Indeed the Sindy now sells only 145,000 at full rate. Publisher Ivan Fallon, in the wake of his successful tabloidisation of The Independent, is now likely to turn his attention to revitalising his Sunday paper. I expect some pretty radical changes, in personnel and content.

The Mirror pictures that weren't fake
Perhaps the Sweeney took the Mirror along when it caught robbers attempting to steal £100 million in gold bullion at Heathrow because it feared the paper might fake the pictures if it hadn't been invited.

Of course, there was nothing fake about yesterday's exclusive pictures in the Mirror - and their publication showed acting editor Des Kelly is rightly playing for the full-time position. But newspapers do pay a price when they make such cosy deals with the police.

The pictures were not staged but some did look almost posed: the Mirror got to take pictures of what the police wanted. You can't help feeling there were other things happening which the Mirror was not allowed to capture on camera.

The Mirror undoubtedly had an exclusive on its hands but because of the manner in which it got the pictures, the whole escapade came across as semi-stunt, semi-story and even the pictures, while undeniably authentic, nevertheless had a strangely false quality about them.

I don't say for a moment that newspapers are wrong to make such deals, but the results can be curiously disappointing.