Salut!

A minor media empire shrinks with the end of Salut! Sunderland

The brilliant Telegraph cartoonist Matt produced three drawings for me during my career. This was one of them, marking my posting by the newspaper to Paris. My friend John Clark ('Jake') added colour

In 52 years as a journalist, I have witnessed the closure of several newspapers as an outsider. I was deeply involved in one launch - The National in Abu Dhabi - but have been fortunate to escape the sadness and pain of a closure directly affecting me.

Today I have an idea of how that last experience feels. Less than three weeks from the 13th anniversary of its creation, I am closing my football site Salut! Sunderland.

Macron and the 'grave mistake' of French colonialism, a shaming mission 'to civilise inferior races'

Found at Flickr's Creative Commons; Manal Belaid

This is my most recent piece for The National, which kindly permits me to reproduce my work here. And posting it gives me an opportunity to wish all Salut! readers, even those who support Brexit, a very happy Christmas and New Year ..

France’s long struggle to acknowledge the iniquities of its imperial past has taken another significant step forward with President Emmanuel Macron’s declaration on a visit to the Ivory Coast that colonialism was a “grave mistake”.

Mr Macron’s choice of words on Saturday recalled previous comments, notably including a famous admission in another former French territory, Algeria, while campaigning for office, that colonisation was a “crime against humanity”.

But the tone was unequivocal. As he stood alongside the president Alassane Ouattara, in the Ivorian capital, Abidjan, there was no attempt to qualify the recognition of colonial sins by insisting, as he had done in Algiers in 2017, that it was important not to “sweep away all of the past” or descend into a culture of self-guilt.

Jens Hage and Guy Verhofstadt: the cartoon and tweets that capture the Boris and Brexit blues

Most of us have had our say on the result of the general election, what caused it and what it means for the UK.

I offered leavers my olive branch, albeit a bit prickly, last week. It can be seen here.

No one posted a comment, though a few did when I mentioned the piece at Facebook and Twitter, but 51 people so far have ticked "like", for which many thanks.

Get Brexit Done. A post-election programme every forgiving Remainer and thinking Leaver can embrace

From a splendid Private Eye cover

 

Most of my non-Tory, Remainer friends are resigned to a Boris Johnson victory.

Hideous a prospect as that may be, they say enough of the public has swallowed his incessant burbling about an "oven-ready" deal "ready to go", or are so repelled by the thought of Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister, that a liar, opportunist and bully will, if not cruise back into Downing Street, secure what he needs to govern.

For Brexiters, except the neanderthals who longed to see Nigel Farage - or, for all we know, Tommy Robinson - in or close to power, the future is glowing.

There'll be a windfall for the NHS - OK not the equivalent of £350m a week as Boris and other Leave leaders falsely pledged in 2016 but hey, doesn't everyone tell porkies to win votes? - and work may even start on all those brand new hospitals we've been promised.

And as for those 50,000 new nurses ... well, we will all be able to marvel at the modern definitions of "new" and "50,000".

Mike Amos: in praise of a towering figure of journalism

You may continue to read Mike Amos's work at his blog, Grass Routes, which he describes as a 'thumbs-up journey with North East football folk'

When I heard the news that my friend and journalistic mentor Mike Amos had been told by The Northern Echo his services were no longer required - after 55 years or writing for that newspaper and its defunct stablemate, the Evening Despatch - I rattled off social media posts in which I was unpleasant about the Echo management and called Mike "as fine a journalist as the North East [of England] has produced". I was right about the Echo, wrong about him.

Eight years ago, I described Mike as "one of the finest journalists in the world". That seems altogether more accurate (see the obvious qualification below, where I reproduce the Salut! article in which the phrase appeared).

All I said about Mike in 2011, when he reached 65 and technically retired, only to continue to enhance the Echo's pages with two columns a week, remains true.