I try not to pass on every rumour I hear, but on at least two sep­ar­ate occa­sions recently strong hints have been dropped to me that sug­gest a man­age­ment shake up is com­ing soon at Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish. This is code for someone repla­cing CEO Nigel Par­sons.

Par­sons has sur­vived much longer than I would have pre­dicted — given the delays launch­ing the chan­nel — but now that it has been run­ning for a while it needs to move on, and Par­sons might well feel the same.

If there’s a prob­lem with AJE for me, it’s that it doesn’t have an edit­or­ial voice, and it doesn’t get talked about (except when David Frost for­got to ask Benazir Bhutto if OBL really was dead). Ulti­mately, that edit­or­ial voice needs to eman­ate from the Middle East, rather than from the min­eral depths of a glass of Chablis.

Someone Middle East­ern, with a ser­i­ous edit­or­ial back­ground and who under­stands Wash­ing­ton might be a good choice. Who might that be?