Big trouble in Littlejohn: The 21 worst columns of 2021 (part 2)
Counting down from 10 to 1 in this year's chart of the commentariat's most egregious crimes.
This is the 365th issue of Conquest of the Useless published in 2021.
To celebrate, enjoy as my psychic damage intensifies with the Top 10 of 2021’s most egregious editorial emissions. Missed entries 21 to 11? Here’s part 1.
10. Allister Heath’s mega-brained predictions of dooooom
“The woke ideology is the greatest threat to freedom since communism1,” wrote paranoid animatronic turnip and Sunday Telegraph editor Allister Heath back in August. Firstly, buddy, don’t threaten me with a good time. Secondly, I dealt with the ‘mega-trends’ bursting from his mega-mind in the August 26 edition, The Telegraph’s Taliban: The paranoid style in British newspaper commentary:
The reactionary cell that controls The Daily Telegraph are a little less ambitious in their desires; they just want to drag Britain back to the imagined dark age of the 1950s. The central thesis of the ‘modern’ Daily Telegraph is that it hates Britain — a decadent fallen empire controlled by ‘the woke’ (ignoring the growing hegemony of the right over political and cultural institutions) — and predicts doom at the hands of young people who simply do not hate enough.
09. Richard Littlejohn: “Maggots on the NHS? What next, leeches?”
Richard Littlejohn, 11 October 2021:
The crisis in the NHS must be worse than we thought. Doctors are using live maggots to treat stubborn open wounds… Never mind Covid, experts are now predicting that ten million people a year will die from superbugs by 2050.
In desperation, clinicians have fallen back on a method pioneered centuries ago by aboriginal communities in Australia and South America. The treatment, which involves using larvae to eat dead tissue, was commonly used between the two world wars, but was phased out in the 1940s…
Say it, Dick. Say the catchphrase:
I had thought about filing this under You Couldn't Make It Up, but it is deadly serious. What next — bloodletting? Leeches?
The NHS has been using leech therapy in areas like microsurgery, plastic and reconstructive surgery, cardiovascular disease and dermatology for years now because their blood-sucking action can increase blood flow and speed healing. Leeches also produce a local anaesthetic, a blood thinner, a chemical that reduces swelling and an antibiotic that aids healing.
Littlejohn can, does, and always will make it up, and The Daily Mail will continue to reward him handsomely for doing so.
08. Camilla Tominey’s “thing I wish was true” column/”Woko Ono”
Camilla Tominey is another entrant on this list who produced many columns this year that could have qualified for the chart. However, late in the year she out did herself with two truly unhinged contributions: December 10th’s Work-shy Britain only cares about ‘me, me, me’, yet another Harry and Meghan-obsessed column with a painfully pun-(un)happy opening…
In their bid to become 2021’s answer to John Lenin and Woko Ono, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have said some pretty irritating things in recent months. “Imagine there’s no Ellen/It’s easy if you try/No personnel below us/Above us, only hue and cry.”
… and December 17th’s The BBC is wilfully ignorant about Tory Britain which led with fiction that Tominey wishes was true:
It may be apocryphal but it is a story worth telling anyway. A young producer turned up at the BBC to do a shift on election night in December 2019. Huw Edwards had just revealed the results of the exit poll, predicting a landslide Conservative majority and the complete evisceration of Jeremy Corbyn. According to the tale, the rookie journalist arrived at the newsroom in Portland Place to find half of Auntie’s staff in tears. It might not be true but it certainly is believable.
That’s the stage the British press has reached: “I know this is untrue, but it feels true to me and that’s all that matters.”
07. Rod Liddle’s inevitably racist reasons to leave the country
On 27 March, Rod Liddle listed his reasons for wanting to leave the country in a typically tossed off Spectator column. It’s December 31 and he’s still here. Inevitably the piece headlined My eight ‘good reasons’ for leaving the country was a toxic soup of spite, cruelty and racism, best typified by ‘reason’ 7:
Rap, hip hop, grime and drill being espoused by schools, youth workers, parole officers and — inevitably — prison officers as a cogent expression from a wonderfully vibrant community, perhaps comparable in artistic merit to those old racists Beethoven and Mozart. When in fact it is quite often merely an expression of unrelieved coarseness and criminality.
Rod, if you’re serious2 about leaving, I’ll buy you the ticket.
06. Allison Pearson thinks she’s Jesus/recruits Prince Philip’s ghost
On her worst day — and it’s hard to identify her ‘best’ day — Allison Pearson is, pound for pound, the most horrendous columnist in Britain; she oscillates between wild conspiracism, icy cruelty, and gloopy sentimentality, all expressed in sentences assembled with the craft of a jaded greetings card writer.
Any one of Pearson’s columns from 2021 could have made this list, but it’s boiled down to April 13th’s We Should Honour Prince Philip by fighting the warped cult of woke, with its assertion that…
Philip’s infamous “gaffes” turned out to be conversational ice-breakers at stilted occasions. The “Dukemobile” will continue that proud tradition.
Even in death, the man his grandson Harry calls “a legend of banter” will have the last laugh.
…raising the grim prospect of a zombie Duke of Edinburgh, and December 21st’s My cheering Christmas message? It’s time for humanity to prevail over scientists which features this Jesus-invoking, conspiracy-stoking, unhinged rant of an opening which any responsible editor would reject out of hand…
This Christmas, if the Archangel Whitty hasn’t cancelled the festive season, cautioning against the reckless and unnecessary consumption of sausage rolls, there will be a Covid swear-box at Pearson Towers. Anyone who mentions the wretched virus must put 50p in a jar. All proceeds to the Salvation Army, whose magnificent mission is based on faith in Jesus Christ “who wants everyone to experience life in all its fullness”. Shhh! Don’t tell the old misery guts on Sage. Those scientists would crucify that Jesus chappie for “dither and delay” in imposing curbs on social gatherings as the omicron variant rages like a forest fire across the land causing devastation, destruction, plague and death. Or, alternatively, causing Brian in Blandford Forum to have a bit of a sore throat.
My big wish for Allison Pearson in 2022 is a P45.
05. Giles Coren hates his job/pretends he’ll be cancelled
In 2021, Giles Coren laughed at the death of my friend Dawn Foster and experienced no professional consequences. May no car he ever buys go unstolen and may his pathetic columns about hating his job (Poor Elon hates his job as much as I hate mine, 16 July 2021) and pretending to be concerned about being cancelled (Done The Times, now I need to do the crimes, October 15 2021) become self-fulfilling prophecies.
The only joke in this section is Giles and while he is laughable, he’s desperately, consistently and irredeemably unfunny.
04. Matthew Parris: “…pandering to Travellers”/”Prince Andrew dog saviour”
Giles Coren would be one place higher in this list were it not for the ‘sterling’ efforts of his Times comment section colleague Matthew Parris who delivered columns this year that argued Gypsy, Romany and Traveller people should be stripped of ethnic minority status (It’s time we stopped pandering to Travellers, 15 May 2021) and claimed that Prince Andrew was worthy of our sympathy because someone told him that the royal had saved a dog3 (Good news about Prince Andrew has to be shared,September 22 2021). The latter story has been corroborated by no one.
03. Rachel Johnson’s sympathy for the Devil, darling
On November 17, the day after jury selection began in the Maxwell trial, The Spectator — yes, them again — published a diary column by Rachel Johnson — LBC presenter, former editor of The Lady, and sister of the Prime Minister (though she doesn’t like to mention it) — which spent the first half of the word count on her dog’s new puppies and the second on a breezy recollection of Ghislaine Maxwell: The University Years.
Beneath the headline It’s hard not to pity Ghislaine Maxwell and lede “We met briefly at Oxford” — five words that curse the entire British media — Johnson wrote in her family’s patented chummy burbling style that “it [was] hard not to feel a batsqueak of pity for Ghislaine Maxwell”. There was no space for sorrow or sympathy for the victims in the 156 words Johnson expended on the woman she knew well enough to write about but not well enough to be associated with (she wrote 260 about the dog, who has cost her “eight grand for various reasons”).
02. Jan Moir ‘wonders’ about the age of consent
Published today and rocketing into the number 2 spot, it’s a column from Jan Moir, a woman whose career should have ended in 12 years ago after her ghoulish, homophobic speculation about the death of Stephen Gately.
She wrote today, nestled in the middle of her column, that:
The youngest victim in the Epstein/Maxwell scandal was 14, and most were in their mid to late teens. Which makes me wonder, at what age does someone move from child-victim status into a person who is responsible for their own actions?
When she was 15, Greta Thunberg began the school strikes and public speeches, which made her an internationally recognised climate activist.
Detractors said the teen had been brainwashed by adults in pursuit of their own causes, while her supporters claimed she was an intelligent campaigner perfectly capable of making her own informed decisions.
Shamima Begum (pictured) was the same age (15) when she travelled 3,000 miles from London to Syria to become an Isis bride. Her supporters say she was radicalised by adults, while her detractors claim she was an independent crusader, emotionally qualified to make her own choices.
You cannot be both enlightened and misguided at the same time, whatever your age.
That is not ‘wondering’. Those are the grotesque conclusions of a handsomely paid but morally bankrupt mind.
01. Brendan O’Neill presents… Bin Laden was woke.
In the same way that it was hard for anyone else to win the NBA’s Most Valuable Player title while Michael Jordan was on the court, topping the bad takes chart will always be challenging for anyone else while Brendan O’Neill is in the game. While many of his columns this year could have secured him the crown, it was one of the ages that actually clinched it: His contention that the real problem with Osama Bin Laden was that he was “too woke”.
Here’s what I wrote when it was first published (Disturbed Dust: In a crowded field, Brendan O’Neill’s 9/11 20th anniversary take is the most unhinged…):
In recent years, despite having accidentally met O’Neill on one occasion, I have become convinced that he is, in fact, a long-running art installation created by the KLF to demonstrate the limits of stupidity. His 9/11 article for Spiked, the kingdom of contrarian dunderheads he rules with a forehead of iron, is the latest piece of evidence for that theory. Spiked’s tweet promoting the piece screams of Bill Drummond’s mischievous hand…
“Hitler was a vegetarian” is such an old cliché that The Residents used the phrase as a song title on their 1976 album The Third Reich ’n Roll. But Brendan O’Neill knows writers who abore cliché and they’re all cowards. If there’s any feasible or even infeasible way to weld the word ‘woke’ to a topic, O’Neill will do it. He’s the Evel Knievel of logic-defying rhetorical leaps.
Thank you for reading and special thanks to everyone who has upgraded to a paid subscription. It really helps keep this going.
The ‘woke’ regularly march their pronouns around the block to over-inflate estimates of their arsenal.
Rod Liddle is one of Britain’s least serious men.
Prince Andrew: Dog Saviour not coming to the Disney channel any time soon.