Diary: forget Black History Month. It's depressing. Pick blackberries instead

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/03/hugh-muir-diary-baroness-panthers

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• So here we go again, into October and Black History Month in Britain. A chance, say proponents, for society to focus for just a while on elements of our history often overlooked. A yearly descent, say detractors, into the backwaters of political correctness. But there is a potent argument that says we need more focus on black history, not less, because, even after all these years, some very intelligent people seem to know dangerously little about it. Take Baroness Cumberlege, the popular Tory peer, former health minister, high-flying health service consultant. On Wednesday, she responded to a tweet about Black History Month in the NHS. "October is blackberry month. Hedges full to bursting. Forget black history. Enjoy the fruits of this earth," she said, linking to the NHS Employers Black History Month page. All quite strange. Why should one ignore Black History Month in favour of blackberries, we asked her. Poor Baroness Cumberlege. "I had no idea what black history was," she tells us. "I thought it was the Third Reich and Hitler and so on. I had no idea it was the ethnic thing. I think people like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King are great people to study." It was a lovely afternoon, she says, and she didn't want people focusing on man's inhumanity. A lovely woman and we thought to tell her of the Black Panthers, but one can learn too much in one day.

• Not the best week for the Mail, as politicians condemn its now infamous attack on Ed Miliband via his long-dead father and the dispatch by the Mail on Sunday of a reporter to infiltrate a family memorial service. That matter was promptly addressed on Thursday. The editor of the Mail on Sunday apologised "unreservedly" after Miliband wrote directly to the proprietor, Lord Rothermere. With Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre refusing to budge on his denigration of the Milibands this week, it does seem as if the only way to get action is to contact the owner directly. In 1934, the then owner of the Express, Lord Beaverbrook, did just that after Sir Oswald Mosley penned an attack on him in the Daily Mail. Beaverbrook wasn't that bothered, truth be told. Still, the Rothermere of his day didn't take the matter lightly. "I intend to tell Mosley that if he attacks you I shall drop his blackshirts," the Mail owner replied. "You are my greatest friend and this is the least I can do."

• A discombobulating week indeed. How else to explain Mail Online's confident banner headline assertion on Wednesday night that the family of Michael Jackson had won a historic victory against the promoters AEG, making the latter liable for damages worth many millions. "Concert promoter GUILTY of negligence hiring Conrad Murray to treat Michael Jackson", it ran. The reverse was true – AEG won; the Jacksons lost comprehensively. Like magic the erroneous version was disappeared.

• You can't keep a good man down, and while he waits for the result of the Plebgate investigation and his mooted return to the cabinet, the one-time international development secretary Andrew Mitchell has been reflecting to Jemima Khan on how things might have been if David Davis had won the 2005 party leadership contest. Mitchell was Davis's campaign manager. "The sun would shine every day and we'd all live healthily to the age of 100," he told her in the New Statesman. "Also, the remote and faraway colony of St Helena would have a senior member of the current government as its governor." Our loss, the island's gain.

• Yes, you can't keep a good man down, so congrats, finally, to Philip Esler, once the principal of St Mary's University College in south-west London. The University of Gloucestershire has announced he will fill "one of its most distinguished posts", the Portland chair in New Testament studies. We had reason to speak of Professor Esler last year when, for a sorry period, he deployed an oppressive Norwich Pharmacal order in the courts, in an ill-advised bid to force a Catholic website journalist to reveal one of her sources. In the event she stood firm, even as she contemplated the possibility of imprisonment, and Esler withdrew from the action, which was later thrown out. He assumes his new role a wiser man.

Twitter: @hugh_muir

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