Back in 1981, for example, when I was finding my feet as ITN’s diplomatic editor, I decided to turn a freebie visit to New Zealand into some pocket money, and The Times printed a piece I wrote. They offered me further work, but since I’d broken my ITN contract by failing to seek permission for the original piece, I ran the idea past my bosses. Times change, I know, but the John Humphrys saga – Today presenter makes injudicious speech; papers get hold of it; bosses reprimand him; Humphrys hits back with talk of “not being cowed” – is all light years from the way, in my case, things used to be. Never mind that the “breathtakingly brilliant” in the Mail man’s review last week referred to the performance of Keira Knightley, not the film.. Now the preferred candidate, James Slack, the Daily Mail’s Home Affairs correspondent poached from the Express last year, has turned down the job.

The paper may stoop to offering the blue-chip post to an ambitious (and cheap) thruster from the regional lobby.Towering TookeyHas any critic’s verdict on a film or play ever received such prominence as Chris Tookey’s “breathtakingly brilliant”? The words appear on the posters forPride and Prejudice, and are printed in type as big as the film’s title. You’d think an educated chap like Marr would know a bit about hubris…Who’s for the Express?The lobby is a-twitter over who shall take over from Patrick O’Flynn as political editor of the Daily Express. The post on the Richard Desmond title – which came out for the Tories at the last election and has been drifting right ever since – is viewed with suspicion by most would-be applicants, not least because O’Flynn now has an elevated position back at head office, from where he is expected to continue to publish polemics. So in the trailer for his new show, it is curious to see him giving away a newspaper, whose format he likens to the contents of the programme. The back page of its first issue flagged up in large letters a victory by Spanish golfer Sergio Garcia.

Only trouble was, City AM called him Andy Garcia – as in the Hollywood actor.Not his finest hourIn his memoir My Trade, Andrew Marr, who takes over the David Frost slot on BBC1 this morning, graciously owned up to not having been a very good newspaper editor, a view with which many of his former colleagues would concur. Kay has been known to follow up stories which have appeared in the Mandrake page, but, oddly, chose not to reproduce this particular item.Any old Garcia will doPerhaps City AM, the free financial title that hit London streets last week, should forget about covering sport. Walker is still apparently smarting that Kay asked him in April to be his deputy – an offer he considered an impertinence – and was then even more affronted that Kay went on to offer the job, last month, to Richard Eden, the No 2 on the Mandrake diary, who also, in the event, declined. Clearly Brown’s succession can’t come a moment too soon at Farringdon Road.Walker’s crisp retortIn his Mandrake diary in The Sunday Telegraph last week, Tim Walker made a passing reference to the “irreplaceable” Daily Mail diarist Nigel Dempster. While it is true that the normally mild-mannered Walker once worked as Dempster’s deputy and came to have a high regard for him, this appeared to be less of a tribute to his former boss than a dig at Richard Kay, who has replaced Dempster.