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Motoring news The announcement has not been made public yet, but you now have a new Secretary of State for Transport. It will come as something of a surprise to Insight readers to learn that the new man for the job is me. I appreciate that this will be somewhat shocking news to the incumbent,…

Does the rise of the chatbots threaten the nation’s poets? Not for the first time, Insight has arrived somewhat late to the party, in this instance, the rave that is ChatGPT. Depending on your point of view, this latest bit of artificial intelligence, (full name, Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) will either debase the art of…

Did the Lancashire Constabulary get it right? This blog was originally written before the discovery of a body on the River Wyre over the weekend. Sadly, it seems inevitable that it will turn out to be that of missing mother, Nicola Bulley. In the week prior to this, the British media had gone into one…

Even the keenest observers of health news might be surprised to learn that there is another ambulance strike today, Friday. The BBC homepage affords the news with little more than a “Strikes Update: How Friday 10 February’s walkouts will affect you”.  The ambulance strike has slipped from front page news, and the nurses and physios…

At last, a piece of good news that will, quite literally, cheer us all up. In a consummate bit of PR, the Royal Society for Protection of Birds made the headlines with news that listening to birdsong boosts mental wellbeing in 90% of adults.  The YouGov poll commissioned by the RSPB found that 88% of…

Many of the “soldiers” that make up the band of mercenaries collectively known as the Wagner Group, are convicts. Faced with the unpalatable choice of doing stir in a Russian gaol, or being used as cannon fodder in Ukraine, many have opted to take their chances with the latter. Russia has a history of deploying penal battalions…

In a great example of how to do PR well, a letter appeared in the Times last week, urging the government “to consider the value of self-care” – and reassuring us that “self-care does not mean no care”.  The letter, which comes from “a coalition of leading health and pharmacy organisations” highlights their “blueprint for…

In these troubled times, surely what the nation is crying out for is a bit of cognitive dissonance. We could all do with a bit of diversion from the fear of falling in the shower, or having a stroke while ambulance crews, nurses and shortly, junior doctors, withdraw their services in protest at (in part), the…