The perils of office

Coulson left No 10 because he'd become the story. Craig Oliver must this morning be wondering if £140k is enough for this sort of hassle. 

Michael White in The Guardian: "Old telly friends remember Craig Oliver, the upmarket attack dog ("Not so much a rottweiler as a sleek sausage dog") hired from the BBC to replace Andy Coulson at No 10, as a not-so-closet Tory who cultivated Coulson and wore tight beige trousers whose transparency would impress even Julian Assange. Arriving from ITN, where he was a mate of Nick Robinson, Oliver was blamed for dragging Huw Edwards's flagship Ten O'Clock News downmarket with flashy graphics. When summoned to Downing Street he was busy slashing budgets at the BBC World Service, all skills which may come in handy".

John Rentoul in The Independent: "I can offer no snippets about the private life of Craig Oliver, the Prime Minister’s new head of communications. But I can make two observations.
1. He was responsible for the BBC’s election night programme. I can remember Andrew Neil on a boat . I can remember giving up on the BBC’s coverage because Sky, ITV News and Twitter were better and quicker.
2. His is a strategic appointment. David Cameron’s weakness is not News International or the mass-market press. His weakness is the LBLM&C (London-Based Liberal Media and Culturati), of which the BBC is the inner cadre."

STV offered Craig's first ever appearance on screen. 

The Sun offered irrelevant family background, repeated by Guido Fawkes.  I' m not giving you links - it's just wrong, but the world is harder than it was in the days of Sir Bernard Ingham.

In the Twittersphere, Jeremy Paxman is alleged to have commented on Oliver's new role thus:  "It's like discovering Theresa May has been moonlighting as a pole dancer". 

Richard Sambrook explains why some of this may be happening very clearly here.