Quotes of the Week: From confesssions of a spin doctor to Stephen Fry ashamed of British press

Damian McBride, Gordon Brown's spin doctor, in the Daily Mail: "Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat; ministers, MPs or advisers; if they'd ever shared their secrets with colleagues in Westminster, the chances were that I ended up being told about them, too. Drug use; spousal abuse; secret alcoholism; extramarital affairs. I estimate I did nothing with 95% of the stories I was told. But, yes, some of them ended up on the front pages of Sunday newspapers.”

Martin Bright, who says the Brownites cost him his job as political ed of the New Statesman, in The Times [£]: "My story is a mere footnote of the Brown premiership but it is symptomatic of precisely the poison Damian McBride has identified in his confessional memoir. Imagine a country in Eastern Europe or Africa where the prime minister’s friend, an MP and millionaire owner of a prominent weekly magazine, removed the editor and political editor after they refused to print the government line. You would be rightly outraged. Well, it happened here."

Alastair Campbell in the Guardian: "When I first published The Blair Years I got offered over a million quid from News International. I am not saying I wasn't interested because we did have an unspoken agreement. But I had three sleepless nights and in the end I woke up and I said to Fiona [Millar, his partner]: 'I can't do this.' Once you take that sort of money for a book you have no right whatsoever to stop them taking whatever they want, what headline they want. My gut reaction when I heard that he [McBride] had sold it to the Daily Mail was I thought it was sickening but unsurprising."

Peter Preston in the Observer on Damian McBride's book: "It's a tawdry collation of muck and threat. Who wants to put politicians and their propaganda squads in charge of press regulation, you may well ask as the autumn leaves of Leveson begin to fall anew? But any news organisation, concerned about journalism's ethical standards, has one or two grisly questions to grapple with too. Such as: when you're a reporter fed a tale about carousings past or present by a press secretary serving a minister in Labour's house of cards, what exactly is the story? That someone may have drunk too much? Or that this stuff is being leaked from on high? The facts of the McBride connection are a heavy duty commentary on the morality of power. Wasn't that true then, when the sewage flowed? Wasn't that the much bigger story?"

GingerElvis ‏@GingerElvis on Twitter: "Can't believe the public sometimes. They keep phoning up expecting to talk to reporters. We're a newspaper FFS. We don't have any reporters."

Lloyds List editor Richard Meade on the decision for the newspaper to go digital only: “Lloyd’s List first started in 1734 as a notice pinned to the wall of a coffee shop in London offering customers trusted shipping news and information. That aim has not changed, but the technology has and our customers are now accessing the industry’s most sophisticated intelligence source in any coffee shop, anywhere in the world 24 hours a day.”

Peter Oborne in the Spectator: "As any newspaperman will recognise,  Daniel Finkelstein has never in truth been a journalist at all. At the Times he was an ebullient and cheerful manifestation of what all of us can now recognise as a disastrous collaboration between Britain’s most powerful media empire and a morally bankrupt political class. He is, however, a powerful manifestation of the post-modern collapse of boundaries between politics and journalism."

Ian Burrell in the Independent:  "The truth is that neither the Mirror nor The Sun can look to a new dawn. Irrespective of the merits of either of their different digital strategies, and whether their refreshes and relaunches please the eyes of their readers, Britain’s two biggest tabloids face a turbulent future. The storm clouds heading from the direction of New Scotland Yard will see to that."

Mike Lowe ‏@cotslifeeditor on Twitter: "Those blank pages in the Mirror made me think of all the times I've had to fight to get extra space. Self-indulgent tossers."

Martin Regan publisher of newly launched Macclesfield Today on ProlificNorth: “We are creating a paper for ‘clever’ people. There will be no cats up f*****g trees coverage in our titles."

'Kendo Nagasaki' posts on HoldTheFrontPage about the Bristol Post highlighting positive news: "Ignore the focus groups, people love bad news. Nobody is going to sit down in a focus group and say 'actually, I would like to read about more rapes and murders'. But the truth is people revel in the depravity of mankind. Look in your local bookshop – shelves and shelves of books devoted to the doings of killers and criminals. Not many books about people helping the elderly across the road. That is human nature. Ignore it at your peril."

“We are creating a paper for ‘clever’ people.
“There will be no cats up f*****g trees coverage in our titles.
- See more at: http://www.prolificnorth.co.uk/2013/09/macclesfield-today-to-launch-monday-16-september/#sthash.sPmOAeDt.dpuf

Regan would be that: “We are creating a paper for ‘clever’ people.
“There will be no cats up f*****g trees coverage in our titles.
- See more at: http://www.prolificnorth.co.uk/2013/09/macclesfield-today-to-launch-monday-16-september/#sthash.b8dTO0ax.dpuf

Regan would be that: “We are creating a paper for ‘clever’ people.
“There will be no cats up f*****g trees coverage in our titles.
- See more at: http://www.prolificnorth.co.uk/2013/09/macclesfield-today-to-launch-monday-16-september/#sthash.b8dTO0ax.dpuf

Regan would be that: “We are creating a paper for ‘clever’ people.
“There will be no cats up f*****g trees coverage in our titles.
- See more at: http://www.prolificnorth.co.uk/2013/09/macclesfield-today-to-launch-monday-16-september/#sthash.b8dTO0ax.dpuf

Stephen Fry:  "I spent this morning doing an hour’s filmed interview for a foreign news crew who are doing a ten part series about England and what it means to be English. 'Is there anything that makes you ashamed to be English?' I was asked. 'Yes,' I said. 'Our printed press.' 'Oh,' he said, resignedly. 'That’s the answer everyone gives.' I wonder why."

[£] = paywall