Daily catch-up: ‘government requires compromise, by everyone, pretty much all of the time’

Plus Michael Gove’s style tips, JR Ewing, Homer Simpson and another view of old London

1. Great photo of Hyde Park Corner, 1935. Via Rob Baker.

2. Nora Mulready has written a brilliant article about how she grew up admiring Jeremy Corbyn but cannot vote for him as Labour leader. Inspiring stuff about socialism and compromise:

“I see many lovely (and some not so lovely) people writing posts about how they will join the Labour Party if he was the Leader, that they would support his true socialist Labour Party and not the Blairite, careerist, neo liberal, capitalist shell of a Labour Party it has become. And so on. I think Jeremy is a good person, I think many of those who feel like this are good people, but when I see these posts I just want to rest my head on the table and give up on politics altogether. But I won’t...

“If Labour wants to be a party of government, and rebalance the ethic of the county from the right back to the left, we have to understand that being given the immense privilege of governing a democratic country requires compromise, by everyone, politicians and the public alike, pretty much all of the time.”

3. My colleague Mark Leftly has a scoop in The Independent on Sunday: Michael Gove’s advice on writing style to his civil servants in his new department (Justice). Most of the advice is reasonable, in that I agree with his stylistic preferences (I’m afraid my friend Oliver Kamm dogmatically describes them as “peevish nonsense”). But Gove did lay himself open to this:

“The Lord Chancellor has also told officials that they must not start a sentence with ‘However’. However, Independent on Sunday research has established that Mr Gove has often done just that in articles for The Times, where he was once a journalist.”

4. I wrote about David Cameron and Europe in The Independent on Sunday. The Greek crisis and the changing mood on free movement of people suggest to me that things are going Cameron’s way. Comrade Andrew Rawnsley took a different view in The Observer.

5. My Top 10 in The New Review, the Independent on Sunday magazine, was Characters Not Originally the Star. I could also have included JR Ewing and Homer Simpson. And I should have credited Patrick McCafferty, who had suggested this idea before Thomas the Tank Engine prompted me to revive it.

6. And finally, thanks to Philip Cowley for drawing my attention to this from the Daily Mash:

“Lego ‘promoting unrealistic body image’.”