Paper Monitor
11:57 UK time, Thursday, 10 June 2010
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Is Paper Monitor the only one to experience a frisson of excitement ever time John Prescott features in the papers? Or, to be really honest, any time he opens his mouth in public. He just never fails to disappoint.
When the Daily Mail is thrown into the mix we're really being spoilt. You simply have to stop what you're doing, pull down the blinds, unplug the phone and fully relish such a treat uninterrupted.
Today the paper tells the tale of a Prezza outburst on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio 4's Today programme. It was over a Conservative initiative that will make it much harder to turn . Who bore the brunt of this verbal assault? Wet-behind-the-ears Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, the millionaire environmentalist who has some of the biggest back gardens in the country - with several other supersize back gardens in foreign countries.
The Conservatives say the initiative is about clamping down on land-grabbing developers. Not so, says Prezza. It's about class war, as he told Goldsmith in their radio discussion. Well, perhaps discussion is not quite the word:
"It's the old Tory policy, spouted by millionaires like yourself, always for the few and not the many."
But the real delight is in the Mail's treatment of the story. Spread across two pages is a comparison of the pair's homes and calculations of how many average family houses could fit in each back garden - although it doesn't specify what an average family home actually is. Nonetheless, it was a few hours well spent yesterday by some junior hack on the paper.
In the Prezza portfolio is his eight-bed house in Hull, with a back garden that is half an acre. The Mail reckons you could squeeze six houses into it. But most of the page is taken up with the Goldsmith "empire", which includes three bolt holes in the UK, one in Mexico and one in Spain. An estimated total of 607,714 new homes could be squeezed into those back gardens. Paper Monitor calls them back gardens - vast estates might be more appropriate. That's probably the size of a rather sizable town.
And so another useless form of measurement/comparison is born. Forget the swimming pools and elephants - how many average family homes will a space fit?
The 
