Matthew Norman's Media Diary

WITH ARMISTICE Day safely behind us, the 13th hour of the 13th day (and if it's not 1pm, come back later) seems the time to consider the row about poppies. To some, the fact that Jon Snow of Channel 4 News, the enemy of "poppy fascism", chooses to wear one in private but never on screen may suggest a degree of thought about the issue possibly alien to most presenters who unthinkingly slip them on, many of the younger among them doubtless unaware which war is being remembered, and people to whom the styling WW1 suggests a misprinted reference to a pioneering wrestling title bout between Hulk Hogan and the late British Bulldog. However, it requires a level of idiocy to which only The Sun can rouse itself to interpret Snowy's feelings as a deliberate insult, as it duly did on Friday with the headline "TV Jon Snub To Our Dead".

Passing over that, does anyone else begin to wonder whether the flower is still the correct symbol of remembrance? One direct result of the current "war against terror", after all, has been the exponential increase in poppy production that is doing such damage to its mythological brother the "war against drugs". So there would seem an irony, albeit a gratifyingly holistic one, that the emblem of a war we remember most for so much senseless loss of young life should also be the source of the drug responsible for so much senseless loss of young life. Regardless of that, and of the thoughts of those heroes in the Wapping trenches who parade their ersatz patriotism like City boys waving their willies, our thanks to Snowy for resisting one of the more tiresome orthodoxies of the media age.

INCIDENTALLY, SNOWY wasn't the first anchor to become embroiled in the controversy. That distinction fell to my friend Huw Edwards, who likes to refer to himself as "chief reader-out-loud" on BBC1's 10 O'Clock News, who contrived to appear without his poppy at the start of a recent bulletin, but ended it with the plastic flower in place. Whether this was because he shares Snowy's dislike of empty public gesturing but caved in to pressure, or whether he simply forgot, is unclear. But I think we should be told.

RETURNING TO the armchair warriors of The Sun, I am much taken with its columnist Jon Gaunt. Taking a bullish line on the police officer who killed Jean Charles de Menezes and shot dead an armed robber in Kent within weeks of his return to firearms duty, Gaunty dismisses those of us who disagree as "the mates of the villains and the muggers". That's all cracking stuff, but I am slightly baffled when he lashes us with the question: "What the hell has this shooting to do with them?" If Gaunty is arguing that it is not the business of newspaper columnists to comment on matters of obvious public interest... nah, it's just me being daft. Nothing self-defeating there at all. Carry on, Corporal Gaunty. At ease.

IT IS still far too soon to face up to The Times' makeover feature involving Mary Ann Sieghart, but I hope to be up to it next week. Meanwhile, Mary Ann, so brave in the summer when she stepped on a bee, has been supplanted in the columnists' injury stakes by Andrew Marr. Using crutches, his left knee resting on a metallic contraption, Andrew appeared in The Daily Telegraph to report that his recent absence from media life was due to nothing more serious than a ruptured Achilles tendon. In fact that's a hideous injury, and we wish him well with his recovery. We also wish he'd share his thoughts about the proposed strike at the Telegraph. Once, when he edited this newspaper during a period of widespread redundancies, we shared a lively chat on the phone during which he reassured me about his support for trade unionism in journalism. Now he's back on his foot, a word of solidarity for all those Telegraph colleagues recently made redundant, and for those survivors being bullied into doing more work for no more money, would be appreciated. In the circumstances, we can do no more than call on Andrew to sit and be counted.

COME TO that, some word on the matter would be even more appreciated from Charles Moore and W F Deedes, those twin exemplifiers of old-style Telegraph values. Although they are expected to man the braziers should there be a strike - W F has been measured for a donkey jacket in Savile Row, while Charlie has made himself a "Bugger The Barclays" plywood placard - their silence about the desecration of the titles continues to perplex.

CONGRATULATIONS, FINALLY, to Tim Hames, the Bunterish Times pundit so confident that the Democrats would fail to take the US Senate that he promised to eat his own column laced with Tabasco if they did. In his subsequent column, Tim made a brief reference to having kept his promise - but why on earth would anyone take the word of a man who can't predict the outcome of elections in a country in which he takes such a close interest? If the "Owl of the Remove" doesn't eat that column in the newsroom within a fortnight, and drenched not with traditional Tabasco but the much hotter new Habanero variety, a task force will be dispatched to Wapping with a family-sized pack of red-eye chillis, a litre bottle of Volvic, a liquefier, and a home enema kit. It's entirely his choice.