Conrad and Tony, hire some editors

It doesn't quite rank with the inconsistent stories coming out about British intelligence activities aimed at the IRA, but there's an incredible sloppiness to the way the Irish Independent and the Daily Telegraph handle their big analysis pieces on Freddie affair. Both papers are owned by rich guy press barons: Tony O'Reilly owns the Independent, and perhaps aspires to be more like Conrad Black, who owns the Telegraph, amongst many other publications. Both today carry a seemingly identical article by Ed Moloney, an expert on the IRA. Nothing wrong with that, there's not big overlap in readership and one assumes that each newspaper knew the article would be flogged to the other. But the Telegraph article informs us that most people are spelling Freddie's codename wrong; it should be:

"Steak Knife" (as he was first nicknamed - the erroneous spelling "Stakeknife" is a later mistake that has crept into the national press)

Fair enough. But disconcertingly, the Telegraph spells Moloney's own name incorrectly in the summary of the article. Meanwhile, the Independent does manage to spell Ed's name right, but the codename is now written as Stakeknife all the way through. The possibilities here? We'll leave that as an exercise. It does seem odd that someone who has studied the IRA for so long would not have been on top of such a basic spelling issue from the start. It's perhaps an overactive imagination, but the way we read it, he's dropping some hints there's an even bigger informer still to be unmasked. Someone with a beard.