Michael Wolff

No, but, again its a difference between an institutional reporter and a non-institutional reporter. I dont have to ask the silly questions.

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Possibly the defining development of postmodern politics - naturally, an American one - is the separation of personality from ideology. If you are likeable, or at least not disagreeable, if you can strike a personal bond with the electorate, if you reassure rather than disrupt, it doesn't really matter what you stand for.

bond you politics personality

Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W Bush (and, in their image, Tony Blair) bitterly annoyed their antagonists because they were - at least until the Iraq war caught up with Blair and Bush - Teflon. David Cameron is in this model.

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All politicians, no matter how gifted, ultimately depend on circumstances for their success.

depend circumstances matter success

In America, the new post-postmodern politician is all about authenticity: the daffier you are, the 'realer' you must be. The more you have committed yourself to a ridiculous idea and fevered view, the more worthy you are of attention.

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Alan Rusbridger is, to many, among the most admired newspaper editors of our time.

newspaper our most time

Indeed, Rusbridger has finessed for the Guardian a certain willing suspension of disbelief and is able to credibly maintain conceits and moral standards to which his own behaviour hardly conforms.

indeed own standards moral

Rusbridger's intelligence, personal sense of higher calling and almost other-worldly self-absorption have played no small part in the stories that have most defined the Guardian and that, under another sort of steward, might have had a much more sceptical reception.

more personal small intelligence

Rusbridger's curious success, especially for a temperamentally remote figure, has been to give a reasonable face to the Guardian's quite quixotic mission.

mission face curious success

I have known Boris Johnson since 2004. I wrote the first big profile about him in the American press. I've been edited by him when he ran the Spectator. I know his family.

american big know family

Politics is ultimately not that complicated a profession; it's where the mediocre distinguish themselves.

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I can hardly tell you how boring it is to interview almost every politician among the multitudes I have ever interviewed (journalists can't say this, because if people knew how boring politicians were they wouldn't read what we write), how dead the conversation feels, how bald, flat, uninteresting the message is.

dead you conversation people

Politics, which really is about the art of expression, ought to be a logical profession for writers (it's very hard to explain to politics- and policy-addicted people that language is the basis of all ideas - if you can't say it, you can't think it), instead of a refuge for lawyers and apparatchiks.

you politics people art

At a particularly dicey moment in my own love life when I was interviewing Rupert Murdoch a number of years ago, I tried to get some advice from him about, well, about anything a man with three wives, the latest the age of his children, might offer.

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Before even getting to David Cameron's father here's a starting-point question about the Panama Papers: how is the desire to break the anonymity of Panama banking secrecy different from the FBI's interest in breaking Apple's encryption of the iPhone?

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The Apple imperative is to build a system that is 100 per cent resistant to any government warrant. The data on your iPhone, no matter how swarmy, corrupt, or dangerous you are, is supposedly safe. That's also the proposition of Panamanian banking laws.

iphone you government matter

With obvious irony, many of the left-leaning privacy advocates who might cheer Apple's stand against the government's intrusion into its system, are now, as transparency advocates, on the side of the leakers of the Panama Papers.

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Edward Snowden copied and leaked information from inside the world's most protected spy agency, and then fled to Russia, but yet, because a small part of the data he expropriated was provided to a news organisation, journalism conventions readily accord him lone whistleblower status.

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The Snowden story, which won the Guardiana Pulitzer Prize, became the realisation of Rusbridger's dream of a brand-building, left-wing-uniting, global and viral story.

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If selling had been part of his job description, Rusbridger, who never met a pound he had to earn that didn't disgust him in some visceral way, would have been disqualified long ago. Indeed, his early enthusiasm for the Internet - and a continuing principle of faith for him - was that it was free.

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