To Fill The Space

If the Daily Mail really wanted to annoy The Guardian, then it would give a weekly column to Jeremy Corbyn.

And why stop there? Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray are journalists.

Only this weekend, John Pilger told Neil Clark that the "liberal Right" Guardian was full of "precocious windbags". 

He did so on a programme that is ordinarily presented by George Galloway, a sometime Mail on Sunday columnist who remains an occasional contributor.

So that's six: Corbyn, Milne, Murray, Pilger, Clark and Galloway. One for every day.

Meanwhile, The Guardian will just have to make do with Owen Cohen, the little boy who wants to be Nick Cohen when he grows up, as if it were possible to do both.

In any given year of Tony Blair's Premiership, he was the most prolific freelance on Fleet Street, writing "exclusively" for every national newspaper.

There is another General Election coming up, so Corbyn and Milne need to be offering the former's byline on a weekly basis to each of The Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Daily Star, the main national stables of local and regional newspapers, The Sun and the Daily Mail again ("and twice on Saturdays," as it were), and the Mail on Sunday.

That would cover all seven days of weeks in which there is no time to be precious.

Why should those papers carry such columns? Pay them.

Get the unions, or whoever, to pay them what they would have been paying someone else to fill the space. At least.

Shy bairns get no chocolates.