The Times, they are a-changin' columnists

When it comes to running a successful newspaper, there is nothing like consistency. And the behaviour of Rupert Murdoch’s increasingly right wing Times, edited by Fleet Street veteran Tony Gallagher, is nothing like consistent.

In 2020, after a thumping landslide win for the Conservative Party, the paper sacked its superb political columnist Phil Collins, telling him that, as a former Labour staffer, he no longer had any insight or contacts in the new government. “All I know is that I am supposed to be plugged into this government,” he wrote in an all-staff valedictory email after News UK forgot to switch off his account. “To be honest, I’d rather be plugged into the mains.”

Fast-forward five years and after a thumping landslide win for the Labour Party, the Times has now appointed (at no little expense) as a columnist Fraser Nelson, the former Spectator editor prized for his insight and contacts in the, er, Conservative Party.

Meanwhile, there is always consistency over at the Daily Mail…

February 2024: Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe, the killers of 16-year-old transgender girl Brianna Ghey, are sentenced to life in prison. Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine is tasked with covering the case. “It made me think: what if that were my child?” she writes. “What if I’d been responsible for bringing this killer into the world? What if that evil had been germinating in my house, without me even knowing?”

November 2024: Queen Camilla is said to be “devastated” after her beloved rescue dog, Beth, has to be put down after the diagnosis of an untreatable tumour. Fortunately, the Mail has someone who can set out how she must be feeling, as Vine also once had a dog die. “At the risk of appearing racist (see the Welsh Labour government, whose latest initiative involves recommending ‘dog-free’ spaces in a bid to make the countryside more inclusive), dogs are everything,” she tells readers.

December 2024: As Prince Andrew lands himself in another fine mess, this time over his connections with an alleged Chinese spy, his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson gives an interview explaining why, despite it all, she’s always stuck by him. Sarah Vine can offer some insight: her own ex-husband, Michael Gove, had recently been snapped by a paparazzo playing tonsil tennis with a woman 25 years his junior. Fergie is “another woman who clearly feels similarly indulgent – if that’s the correct word – towards her former husband as I do towards mine,” she explains.

January 2025: Vine is worried that life online means we’re “living in the age of narcissism”. “It’s all me, me, me,” she writes. “And we have man’s so-called greatest invention to thank: the internet.”