Paper Monitor
12:01 UK time, Friday, 8 December 2006
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Paper Monitor finds itself battening down the hatches against "winter weather chaos". One ordinary-looking London home, stripped of bricks along one side to reveal its house-type innards, has the newspapers in a twist.
'Blown to bits' is the unsubtle headline on the Daily Mirror as it splashes excitedly on the "140mph tornado that scythed through a London suburb ripping off roofs, blowing over cars and sending trees flying through the air".
But as the papers blow up the pictures and puff every detail of a whirlwind in north London, it is the Daily Express we must be thankful for.
"Storms lash Britain" it says, but it adds, crucially: "Just as we warned". Forget the Met Office forecast, or good taste as 150 family homes are damaged, it was the Express what warned us of the "devastation".
The paper is clearly divided, however. With a vertical black line down the centre of the page it is torn between the twin urges of saying "we told you so" and covering a bona fide development in the Diana inquest story. On the same day. Who'd have known it?
Elsewhere any worries about London bias - the niggling idea that had the tornado happened in Aberystwyth or similar, it might have got a little less coverage - are thrown to the wind. Double-page spreads abound. There are storm facts in the Guardian, tornado graphics in the Telegraph, maps a-plenty in the tabloids. Even the cartoonists have gone big on the storm.
Besides, several papers attempt to reel in the rest of the UK by making passing mention of flood waters in Shropshire, York and Wales, big waves in Blackpool and stricken tankers off the coast.
So how did the residents cope? Diving for cover seems to be the best defence tactic, at least among the freelance writers unlucky, but financially fortunate, enough, to witness it first hand. In the Guardian, they "dived under my desk and started screaming hysterically". In the Times they scrambled under the bed. Brave stuff.
With the horizon clearer, there are two aspects to ponder. Will the Guardian pronouncing Kensal Rise "fashionable" raise house prices? And, what more is to come? After all, the Express warns us, there is more on the way.
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