Angry to a deadline: Richard Littlejohn, Giles Coren and the “fuck it, will this do?” school of column writing
They *can* make it up.
Previously: Remember Foster's Law: A new method for dealing with Giles Coren
Richard Littlejohn has written for money since he was 16 years old. I didn’t use the word ‘journalist’ in that opening sentence because precision is important; Littlejohn is to journalism what Fred West was to home improvements, and finds facts as optional as Boris Johnson does marriage vows or his current offspring total.
Reading one Littlejohn column is like reading all Littlejohn columns. In decades of sour-faced service to The Sun and The Daily Mail, he has boiled his schtick down to a formula that allows him to get angry to deadline week in and week out. He does that by sticking to a few simple rules: Clichés are good, anger is everything, and no one besides the great and powerful Dick knows anything.
Littlejohn also returns to the same topics over and over again like a dog returning to its vomit (and with the same simple delight at bystanders’ disgust). At the moment he’s engaged in a run of columns about Afghanistan, bringing the probing insight of an inebriated idiot at a UKIP disco to questions of aid, refugees, and foreign policy. After all, who better to unpick the complexities of an international crisis than The Daily Mail’s permanent ambassador to Florida?
To show just how formulaic any given Littlejohn column actually is, I’ve gone through his latest (lack of) effort — Talk to the Taliban? Don't waste your breath... whichever way you cut it, this was a humiliating defeat for the NATO alliance. Militarily, the game is up — and extracted just the cliches:
all over bar the shouting/ whichever way you cut it / the game's up / the Taliban must be trembling in their trainers / does anyone… seriously believe that the Taliban is desperate for a seat at the… top table? / there's still a faint hope / to be fair / Boris/ made a flying visit / You couldn't make it up / the benefit of the doubt / The usual useful idiots have fallen for it, hook, line and sinker / Some journalists, who should know better / a caveman dressed up as an extra from Carry On Up The Khyber1 / thugs / far-fetched PR guff is reported as gospel / talks a good game / Wee Burney, Sleepy Joe Biden and one of the mad mullahs / hell-bent on dragging our economy back to the Stone Age / with prices to match / As knife crime rockets and XR exhibitionists cause chaos / coppers seem to spend half their time wearing high-heels, painting their nails and swanning round in rainbow-coloured cars / Mind how you go / don't come the raw prawn…
A machine learning algorithm trained on the contents of Littlejohn’s previous columns, the MailOnline comment section on any given day, and the rantings of various pub blokes who want to tell you all the things they “reckon” could replace him in a week with no one realising that “Richard Littlejohn is away” permanently.
It wouldn’t be a huge leap. Littlejohn has a habit of quoting from his past columns at length, effectively outsourcing today’s outrage to yesterday’s Littlejohn. In his latest contribution, he dips back to 2007 to run an excerpt from an interminable Doctor Dolittle parody he composed in place of any useful, cogent or fact-based analysis of Afghanistan and Gordon Brown’s policy on it.
Littlejohn last proudly reproduced this masterpiece back in 2010 for a Mail feature on his output during the Blair/Brown years and in one of his many books designed to sit proudly in the downstairs loos of angry men across Britain, Littlejohn’s House of Fun2: Thirteen Years of (Labour) Madness. Now 11 years later, it’s back and as bad as ever:
If I could talk to the Taliban/ in Arabic / Or the dialect of deepest Kazakhstan / Try a phrase or two of Farsi / A word of Gujarati / I'm sure that I could make them understand…
We could converse in Ashkun/ or Tajiki / Learn a little of the lingo of Pashto / If people ask me: 'Can you speak Turkmenistan?' /I'd say: 'Of course I can/
can't you?'If I spoke the native tongue of/ Pashtun tribesmen / I could guarantee that I would end this war/ Give a massive grant to Helmand/ Well, it always works in Scotland/ I'd even let them have/ Sharia Law…
You couldn’t make it up, probably because you have far higher standards for yourself than Littlejohn, but he definitely could. “You couldn’t make it up” has long been Littlejohn’s catchphrase — he drops it into most columns like a tedious sitcom character looking for an easy laugh — and it was the title of one of his early books, a 1995 compendium of columns for which the top Amazon review reads:
The book appeared to be in reasonable condition. All the pages showed a brownish yellow discolouration but the print was clear and readable. It was fine for the price.
Since Littlejohn shifted from industrial correspondent to columnist at The Evening Standard in 19883, he has made it up over and over again. Since I have neither the time nor space to litigate the long history of Littlejohn lies and we’ve still got to get onto Giles Coren, I’ll confine myself to two famous examples:
In February 2011, Littlejohn wrote in his Daily Mail column that:
Haringey hired someone to give hopscotch lessons to Asian women.
Only Littlejohn, a sometime resident of Haringey who has attacked the council there numerous times in his column, was repeating what needlessly charitable people have called “an urban myth” but I’d just call a bare-faced racist lie propagated by Brian Mawhinney, then-Chairman of the Conservative Party, in a party conference speech in 1995. He claimed that “loony left” Labour councils were employing people in “non-jobs” including teaching Asian women how to play hopscotch.
In fact, Hopscotch Asian Women’s Centre was and remains a respected non-profit. It was started by Save The Children to help and support Bangladeshi women and children and deals with a wide range of social issues. Chalking grids on the pavements of Camden — Littlejohn also wrongly moved it from the borough which is next door to Haringey — is not one of its high priorities.
When members of the MailWatch forum flagged up that Littlejohn was repeating a lie from 16 years previously, Howard Knight4, who was the national local government officer in Labour Party HQ at the time of Mawhinney’s 1995 speech left a comment on the blog Primly Stable explaining the background. He wrote:
The Tories had established a practice, in the run-up to local elections, of publishing dossiers of ‘loony Labour council policies’. The stories were then reproduced ad nauseum in the Tory tabloid press. The vast majority of attacks were either totally untrue or a huge perversion or distortion of the truth, but Labour councils and the Labour Party nationally had been hopeless at rebutting this rubbish.
I established a rapid rebuttal system for dealing with these attacks. The objective was to have a rebuttal within 1 hour of the attack appearing… I wasn’t always popular with some council leaders who got a call from me sometime after 23.00 hours when the first editions of the tabloids appeared.
The rebuttal of Mawhinney’s Camden Asian Women Hopscotch attack was my favourite. Keeping an eye on the TV coverage of the 1995 Conservative Party Conference whilst working at my desk in Millbank, I stopped to listen to Mawhinney’s speech. As he made his Hopscotch attack – getting big cheers in the hall – I was on the phone to the Camden Leader.
Far from the scheme being about teaching hopscotch to Asian women, it was a work training scheme, part-funded by the Conservative government and had only just been visited and praised by Princess Anne.
With Mawhinney still on his feet, I phoned the information and rebuttal through to Adrian McMenemy, then a young Labour Party Press Officer, who was at the Conference. He provided a comprehensive and withering brief to all the journalists…
Mawhinney left the stage, basking in the applause of his adoring audience, only to be met by journalists demanding why he’d been attacking Conservative government-funded schemes and the Royal Family.
While Mawhinney was never allowed to forget his calculated and racist falsehood — it was referenced in his Times obituary along with his ludicrous attempts to start a newspaper full of Tory ‘good news’ and produce an anti-Labour version of Monopoly called Hypocrisy! (yours for £19.99) — it’s now 10 years since Littlejohn resurrected. The offending column is still up and resolutely uncorrected. The lie abides.
In 2012, Littlejohn wrote a column that the Mail did eventually take down but it was too late for its subject. In December of that year, Littlejohn criticised a teacher from Accrington called Lucy Meadows for returning to the school where she worked after undergoing gender reassignment surgery. Leaping on a report in a local paper, The Accrington Observer — which is still live and featured the cliched image of an ‘aggrieved’ parent holding up the school’s letter — Littlejohn composed a vitriolic screed that repeatedly misgendered Meadows and concluded with the line:
… he’s not only trapped in the wrong body, he’s in the wrong job.
In March 2013, Lucy Meadows was found dead at her home. Samaritans’ advice on reporting suicide makes it clear that attributing a single ‘reason’ for someone taking their own life is bad practice (“Suicide is extremely complex and most of the time there is no single event or factor that leads someone to take their own life.”) and I don’t propose to do that.
What is undeniable however is that during the inquest into Meadows’ death in May 2013 it was reported that she had contacted the Press Complaints Commission — since superseded by IPSO — to complain about press harassment (reporters and photographers had followed Meadows on her way to work), specifically citing Littlejohn. The coroner, Michael Singleton, called much of the media coverage of Meadows’ gender reassignment “ill-informed bigotry” and said that Littlejohn had…
… carried out what can only be described as a character assassination, having sought to ridicule and humiliate Lucy Meadows and bring into question her right to pursue her career as a teacher.
The Mail removed Littlejohn’s column after the news of Meadows’ death broke. But despite petitions with thousands of signatures and widespread anger, Littlejohn faced no sanction and offered no apology.
The Mail issued a crocodile tear-stained statement that claimed that Littlejohn had “emphatically defended the rights of people to have sex-change operations but echoed the parents’ concerns about whether it was right for children to have to confront complex gender problems at such a vulnerable young age.”
The statement might as well have been drafted by The Simpsons’ Helen Lovejoy and restricted to six words: Won’t somebody think of the children. It continued:
It is regrettable that this tragic death should now be the subject of an orchestrated twitterstorm, fanned by individuals... with agendas to pursue. Our thoughts are with the family and friends of Lucy Meadows.
The Daily Mail famously never has an agenda to pursue and is always the victim.
In a 2001 interview with The Daily Telegraph, Littlejohn told Nigel Farndale that:
I believe everything I write at the time I write it. I do find column-writing cathartic. If I didn't have my columns, I would be roaming the streets with a Kalashnikov, firing at random. There is a real anger there. I don't fake it.
Even with the cheap caveat (“…at the time I write it…”) I think that was bullshit then and it’s unquestionably bullshit now. To say Littlejohn phones it in would be giving him too much credit. He yawns in it, tosses it off, farts it out; he plagiarises himself often, digging through the rotting waste of his past output to give the readers what he believes they want — ‘real’ anger.
In the same Telegraph interview, he claimed:
People only read me selectively to support their own prejudice that I am a racist homophobe. I am not.
In 2004, The Guardian conducted what it called the “Littlejohn audit” counting up the number of times Littlejohn referenced LGBT people in his column that year. It concluded:
In the past year's Sun columns, Richard has referred 42 times to gays, 16 times to lesbians, 15 to homosexuals, eight to bisexuals, twice to 'homophobia' and six to being "homophobic" (note his inverted commas), five times to cottaging, four to "gay sex in public toilets", three to poofs, twice to lesbianism, and once each to buggery, dykery, and poovery. This amounts to 104 references in 90-odd columns – an impressive increase on his 2003 total of 82 mentions.
He has not experienced a damascene conversion in the intervening years. When news that Tom Daley and Lance Black were having a baby via surrogacy Littlejohn wrote a column that asked his readers to “pass the sickbag”, demanded that no-one tell him “two dads is the new normal” and ended with cheap jokes about Daley breastfeeding. The column led to a few advertisers briefly stopping their commercial relationships with the Mail but Littlejohn sailed on regardless.
And that brings me to Giles Coren, a depressingly frequent character in this newsletter, who, in concert with his enabling editors, continues to pretend that he did not gloat about the death of Dawn Foster on Twitter. He clearly hopes that we will join him in ‘moving on’ but the comments section beneath his latest piece suggests that even some Times subscribers aren’t willing to do that even as the moderators rush to delete their contributions.
You might think that Richard Littlejohn fantasising about going on a Kalashnikov killing spree would have no competition for ‘most unhinged quote in today’s newsletter’ but you’d be wrong. Coren is in contention for a medal.
Clearly having scrabbled around for topics to fill the Notebook column, Coren starts with a section inspired by yesterday’s news that the government has created a “chewing gum task force” in which three of the biggest gum manufacturers — Mars Wrigley, GlaxoSmithKline and Perfetti Van Melle5 — will pay £2 million a year towards the cost of having their products cleaned off pavements.
There’s an obvious line here which is that the payments cover less than a third of the total annual cost of removing gum and that this is yet another example of the government allowing business to bribe its way out of paying its proper share and avoid a tax which would have been much higher and far more effective. Instead, Coren opts for an unhinged classist, fat-shaming rant:
I have a better solution: first, ban the sale of chewing gum, then bring in a law that anyone eating actual food in public — snarfing their revolting burgers and Pret tuna salads on public transport and the like — has to spit out every mouthful after chewing. In other words, make swallowing illegal.
This will serve myriad ends: it will point up how grotesque chewing anything at all in public is; it will double-underline the horribleness of gobbing that thing into the road; it will save millions on pavement scrubbing because the half-chewed organic detritus bespattering our cities will eventually biodegrade of its own accord; and, best of all, by not allowing all that junk food into the fat tummies of these feckless losers, it will go a long way to solving the obesity crisis.
It’s an odd move for a food critic to argue that eating in public should be banned at a time when the hospitality industry is on its arse and needs every bit of help it can get. But then Coren doesn’t actually believe what he writes. He generates ‘real’ anger for cash and to a deadline several times a week in the fine tradition of Littlejohn. No doubt Coren, who famously raged at sub-editors for changing a single word of his scintillating prose, thinks he’s a cut above Littlejohn but they are functionally identical.
The rest of the Notebook is taken up by some lazy xenophobia about Italians which is very much in the Littlejohn tradition, a bit about suits that somehow manages to include sneering at anyone who doesn’t dress like Giles Coren and a weird line about auto-erotic asphyxiation, and a riff about OnlyFans which is a week late and just plain weak.
In a column about writing columns last week, Coren wrote…
Like most writers, I spend most of my designated writing time not writing. On column days, I generally flip open my laptop and then immediately go and do a spot of laundry, then tidy the whole house, make endless cups of tea . . . anything to defer the fraught moment of setting word to page.
… while in another published just prior to his ugly contribution to the grief following Dawn’s death, he whined:
I hate banging out column after column, whanging on about nothing on the radio for hours and talking codswallop from exotic locations on television, every bit as much as you hate operating on diseased livers, doing other people’s tax returns, teaching other people’s ignorant children, putting up scaffolding every day, or whatever you do, and every bit as much, it turns out, as the world’s second-richest man hates running Tesla.
Which is odd, because I’d have thought the money would help. The fact that I am paid quite well for this job is what keeps it this side of bearable. Makes me feel less of a mug for trawling through the newspapers every single morning of my life for stories I can bark my opinion about to total strangers, like some smelly headcase outside Morrisons.
Those two paragraphs say a great deal about the Coren mentality and why he is one of Littlejohn’s heirs rather than a successor to his own urbane father, Alan Coren, who was actually capable of writing jokes that were funny rather than cruel.
Look at dismissive handwave of “…or whatever you do”, the lazy smugness of “trawling through the papers every single morning of my life” (go dig a ditch then, you pampered prick) and the contemptuous confidence of “I hate banging out column after column…”. Imagine writing publicly that you hate your job after publicly embarrassing your employer numerous times and knowing that they’ll only applaud you. Coren is a charmless man living a charmed life.
Littlejohn has been a columnist for 33 years. Coren, 15 years his junior, has already racked up 28 years in the job, having started as a Times restaurant critic in 1993, aged 24. That means we potentially have decades of Coren left to come. Sometimes the apocalypse seems awfully appealing.
Never forget:
It’s the second time in two weeks that Littlejohn has made the Carry On analogy but once he finds a phrase he likes he’ll use it way past breaking point.
A funhouse devised by Littlejohn would have all the clownish joy of a John Wayne Gacy art retrospective.
He joined The Sun in 1989, at the height of the Kelvin MacKenzie-era, jumped ship to The Daily Mail in 1994, went back to The Sun in 1998 on a £1 million deal and then returned to The Daily Mail in 2005 in a move he described as “returning to his spiritual home”.
Knight sadly died last year.
… all of which sound like obscure PG Wodehouse characters.