Word: backbencher
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...demand access to his lover's 2-year-old boy, who Blunkett says is his son. An authorized biography full of nasty remarks about his Cabinet colleagues was released as his troubles mounted, making enemies when he needed friends. One day after he attended the Christmas party of backbench Labour M.P.s and awkwardly sang the Fred Astaire?Ginger Rogers standard Pick Yourself Up, he was forced to dust himself off and start all over again. Charles Clarke, the bruising former Education Secretary and close buddy of Prime Minister Tony Blair, will replace Blunkett. He has a big job: Blair...
...check the clock to know the evening's first deadline is close. Interruptions are briskly dealt with. Expletives are occasionally uttered with quiet vehemence. "Let's get this show on the road," he says loudly. Around him the paper's most senior production editors - a team known as the backbench - are assessing the last few pieces filed for tomorrow's paper by journalists from Cairns, Canberra or a few desks away, "tasting" them for tone and logic before flicking them over to the news sub-editors. Words must be cut, queried, inserted or rearranged. Headlines must sing and sentences gleam...
...journalism, is part of the job. "It's a solid story," she says. "But when they're putting a paper together at such high pressure, people make decisions based on gut instinct." Of course, sometimes the decision is simple. At around 8 p.m., as copy is bombarding the backbench - including the free trade story, which will be the splash - Whittaker's told a young girl has been set on fire in a Sydney park. The only reporter on deck in the Sydney bureau is hurriedly contacted and sent to the hospital where the girl's been taken. Media...
...need to appeal to Carnarvon, too." When they open the paper tomorrow, the residents of neither place will sense the skilled flurry that produced it. Words are moving at high speed among the subs now. Stutchbury and Mitchell have left; barring any major changes, it's now the backbench's call. "Whack it through, mate," shouts Dore. Just before second deadline he notices a name spelled inconsistently in a story. "Sorry to wake you," he says to the reporter he's rung at 11 p.m. As final deadline advances, the newsroom is all silent concentration. Cleaners come and go. While...
Joseph McCarthy was just an obscure backbench Senator from Wisconsin looking for a political edge when he arrived in Wheeling, W.Va., to address a Lincoln Day dinner. He wasn't even sure what he was going to say, so he took along a speech on federal housing programs and another on alleged communists in government. A local Republican advised that the commie speech would have more oomph. And so that night, McCarthy, waving a paper in the air, proclaimed, "I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were made known to the Secretary of State as being...