Dan Hodges, who has now departed the New Statesman, explains how it all happened:
I was still wanted at the Statesman. But the fact was my writing had caused problems with the leader’s office. Not just the Nader piece, but my blogging in general. “That relationship’s important to us,” said Throatdeep. “You’ve been in politics long enough, you know how these things work.” I certainly do.
I would have to find issues to write about other than Ed Miliband. Some new bloggers would be brought in to give a “different perspective”. What about the discussions we’d been having about me writing more for the magazine? “That won’t be happening for the next couple of months. Then we can see where we are.” It wasn’t just external pressure. There had been some internal rumblings …
Ah well, you know how these things go.
A similar thing happened to Martin Bright – whose career at the New Statesman went awry after he criticised Ken Livingstone: not a politician who has shown very much loyalty to the Labour Party himself!
By contrast, Mehdi Hasan has gone from strength to strength, despite having been recorded using offensive and sectarian language to describe non-Muslims:
“The kaffar, the disbelievers, the atheists who remain deaf and stubborn to the teachings of Islam, the rational message of the Quran; they are described in the Quran as, quote, “a people of no intelligence”, Allah describes them as; not of no morality, not as people of no belief – people of “no intelligence” – because they’re incapable of the intellectual effort it requires to shake off those blind prejudices, to shake off those easy assumptions about this world, about the existence of God. In this respect, the Quran describes the atheists as “cattle”, as cattle of those who grow the crops and do not stop and wonder about this world.”
Ah well. Let’s hope Dan Hodges has learnt his lesson.
