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Psst! Want to see something special? I MET HIM in a side corridor, by arrangement. We each looked over our shoulders to see if the coast was clear. Only a few yards away the Greater London Labour Party was holding its conference: but my mind was on much greater things.
He reached into his briefcase and produced it. I gasped out loud, then looked round again to make sure no-one had noticed. It was glossy, in several colours. There might even have been thousands of them - but I knew this could not be the case: someone would have blabbed.
"See: they have produced one," he said, taking it back from me and carefully replacing it in his briefcase. I was now one of the small circle in the know.
He walked back into the conference. I felt a weight of responsibility to keep his secret.
I had just met the man with the leaflet for the TUC's July 7 demonstration on the NHS. Water bosses tap into pay main PRIVATISED water company chairmen have not waited long before dipping in to the pool of profits they expect to make. In the first flush of success, the chair of Thames Water has just awarded himself a thumping 200 percent pay increase, from £40,000 a year to £120,0K0.
Now water workers are piling on the pressure: they are annoyed that their bosses appear not to have heard of the "trickle down" theory, and have offered
COMMENTARY them just 7.7 percent -tied to an extra hour on each working week!
They appear unconvinced that the responsibility of high office means that top managers should splash out on such big salaries for themselves. Nor are most people. While the chair "takes the strain', we strain the water! Newsman's secret obsession "READING THE SUN is like masturbation," says Sun columnist Richard Littlejohn, writing in the UK Press Gazette. Almost everyone does it, but hardly
WHOTHE HECK IS THAT. GORBACHEV? YELISIN anyone will talk about it.
His argument is that most people who confess to having read the Sun claim not to have bought it themselves but to have "found it on a train" - as many men do with pornographic magazines. This can't be right, says Littlejohn, because it sells four million copies a day: somebody must actually buy it!
The analogy with masturbation is fairly apt: the fact he finds hard to come to terms with is that nobody is proud to admit to their links with the squalid gutter tabloid. It is the kind of self-indulgence many middle class people prefer to indulge in furtively and privately.
If reading the paper is seen this way, can it be any surprise people look askance at the ghastly types who make their living writing the racist, sexist, homophobic drivel that fills its pages?
Littlejohn's article defensively tries to justify his habit of writing a rabidly reactionary column as 'normal behaviour, and seems at a loss to understand why people's jaws drop open when, in the middle of otherwise (relatively) civilised company. he confesses how he spends his day.
Long before the Wapping dispute proved it beyond doubt, many people were sure that the