Comment cooking with Coren: Paris Hilton has no idea? That’s nothing! Meet British newspaper columnists...
The New York Times is shocked that Paris has a cooking show but… can’t cook.
Paris Hilton has a cooking series but she doesn’t really know how to cook. This is a shocking occurrence to The New York Times, which dedicated a whole story to the show without using the magic word “privilege”.1 It says:
Ms. Hilton doesn’t pretend to know how to cook. On “Cooking With Paris,” her new six-episode cooking series on Netflix, she’s not afraid to make messy mistakes…
“I love cooking,” Ms. Hilton says in the introduction to her show, which was released in full on Wednesday.
“But I’m not a trained chef, and I’m not trying to be.”
Someone opining about a topic which they know very little and being handsomely rewarded for doing so shouldn’t be a surprise to The New York Times. It publishes several pages every day dedicated to individuals with no expertise in topics offering half-arsed takes and solutions entirely divorced from reality. It’s called the Opinion section and the NYT seems very proud of it.
Still, if it wants to discover world-beating bad takes, it needs to turn its attention to the world of British columnists. When it comes to being uninformed, arrogant, self-obsessed and self-aggrandising at a championship level, the denizens of the UK’s comment pages are the best.
No other country has as many hereditary opinion havers as Britain. This is an island where Giles Coren can repeatedly soil himself in public and still win awards. Where he can write that he…
… [hates] banging out column after column, whanging on about nothing on the radio for hours and talking codswallop from exotic locations on television.
… in one of those columns and still have his bosses at The Times, Times Radio, and the BBC clapping like trained seals being tossed sprats. They’re hoping we forget his vile messages just days after a talented young journalist’s death too.
This cursèd island is a place where Sarah Vine can in today’s Daily Mail manage to wring a whole column out of projections about a single picture of the Duchess of Sussex in her home office. Under the headline, Anyone fancy a sugary slice of Brand Sussex? This is the Queen in her Montecito castle, and I have to admit, it's very impressive... and so very Meghan, she writes:
So who lives in a house like this? Come with me now as we go Through The Keyhole and survey the clues left for our grateful gaze by the birthday girl. Over here, a pile of identical white books, their spines carefully arranged in elegant symmetry. Over there, a vase of velvety white roses. On the table, a snowy block of energising quartz.
And is that an Hermes throw I see draped on the chair? Or could the H be a clue for the HRH captured ‘by mistake’ (oh, how we laughed) juggling ineptly in the ‘yard’ outside her window, not quite the court jester, but then again not exactly not, either.
This stalkerish stuff; odd and obsessive in the same style as The Daily Telegraph which runs an unhinged feature today headlined Twelve hidden messages in the Sussexes’ stylish study (and inevitably bylined to Camilla Tominey).
Vine’s equally inevitable sugar-coated hit piece continues:
Turning 40 is a significant birthday in any woman’s life but, this being Meghan, it had to, of course, be a SIGNIFICANT significant birthday. She can’t just celebrate like everyone else, throw a party and knock back a few proseccos.
It has to be an opportunity to reach out to the world and, crucially, to enhance the all-important, ever-expanding Brand Sussex.
Forty women, 40 minutes of compassion and caring, 40 chances to help the needy and the disadvantaged.
Not in itself a bad idea – indeed, rather commendable. But the problem is, this is Meghan.
The unspoken line there is: “If this were the Duchess of Cambridge rather than the Duchess of Sussex, I’d be going on about how creative and kind Kate is…” But “this is Meghan” so Vine interprets everything in the baddest of bad faith:
And, however much I try, however much I want to believe she’s genuine, and that she is only doing this for the sisters, I’m afraid the snake of cynicism uncoils itself out of shot and whispers: ‘This is a masterclass in image management.’
Because, of course, Vine and her fellow member’s of Rothermere’s Ratbags (imagine an evil Charlie’s Angels with equally expensive blow drying but far more deceptive byline photos) spend so much of their time “doing it for the sisters2”. She concludes the piece by saying:
But for me it’s going to take more than a sycophantic celebrity sidekick and some guff about female empowerment to convince me that this is anything other than what my gut tells me it is: a carefully orchestrated PR exercise.
Right, and everything William and Kate do is terribly organic.
Continuing our tour of today in British columnist hell, we reach The Times, where today’s contributor in the Notebook slot is Janice Turner. After some Hallmark sentiments about kittens, she writes:
The US journalist Katie Herzog writes a fascinating blog called Moose Nuggets about the ethics of giving her goldendoodle the chop. Suspicious owners of female dogs scrutinise Moose’s testicles in parks and ask when she’s going to get him “fixed”? But if all bitches are spayed, she ponders, isn’t universal castration unnecessarily cruel?
Extremely normal to recommend a Substack dedicated entirely to the discussion of one dog’s bollocks. Especially when the writer of that… uh… specialised email is the co-host of the podcast Blocked and Reported and an extremely committed culture warrior like Turner.
It’s a dog whistle about a dog’s dick.
Later in the same ‘light-hearted’ column, Turner calls Love Island a “whorehouse of a show” before contributing a story about some expensive cheese ending up filled with maggots. Truly all life is there.
Meanwhile over at The Daily Telegraph, perpetually enraged novelty painted egg (and editor of The Sunday Telegraph) Allister Heath is talking a different sort of bollocks. Rehashing a topic he last obsessed over in April (‘Joe Biden’s woke Left-wing agenda is a catastrophe for the free world’), he writes again about the nightmare USA that stalks his dreams under the headline Biden's woke, Left-wing America is no longer a model for the world.
Heath opens the column by sounding like Jeremy in Peep Show when he decides that if he could go back in time he’d head to the ‘50s to watch The Rolling Stones and enjoy Coke from a bottle (“Enjoy Cokeless Rome, dickhead!”):
It was the land of capitalism, freedom, the melting pot and the American dream: its deep imperfections notwithstanding, I always held it to be a self-evident truth that there was much the USA could teach Britain. On visits during my teenage and student years, I was enthralled by the dynamism, the can-do attitude, the work ethic, the quality of life of the middle classes, the commitment to religious freedom and civil society, the brilliance of the universities, the romance of its great cities, and the lifestyle epitomised by the homes and cars of its suburbs.
It all sounds very black and white, doesn’t it?
Heath really gets into his apocalyptic visions, imagining Joe Biden as the ringmaster of The Purge, desperate to destroy the beautiful dream developed by… [checks notes] Ronald Reagan:
A quarter of a century later, I still love America but the tragic reality is that today’s United States is no longer Ronald Reagan’s shining city on a hill. It is, instead, a Republic in decline, plunged into a moral, economic, philosophical and existential crisis that may yet destroy it. Joe Biden’s useless presidency will merely intensify the forces driving the nihilism that is eating away at America’s soul.
That’s Ronald Reagan who got into the White House through racist rhetoric (and 'acquiring’ Jimmy Carter’s debate prep) and spent much of his time there denying AIDs was a problem. The Ronald Reagan of Iran-Contra and Oliver North.
Heath concludes his column of scare stories and bulletins from the alternate reality in his head (one where tech companies were once “disruptive, libertarian ventures that empowered ordinary people…”) by saying:
Can America still be saved? I hope so, for the sake of its wonderful people and for what we used to call “the free world”. However, for the first time, I’m no longer sure.
The first time?! He wrote on 14 April that a “wave of madness [is] emanating from America” and claimed Biden has “give free rein to the woke revolutionaries”. Perhaps Heath does have something in common with Reagan…
The Sun’s most unhinged contribution to the discourse today is focused closer to home and comes from the reliably repugnant Rod Liddle.
Under the hilarious hypocritical headline Shirking civil servants need to get back to the office NOW he writes:
If you work in the public sector you are far more likely to have a secure job, rather than a short-term contract.
You’ll have a generous amount of time off for holidays — which you can spend demonstrating against the wicked Tories alongside most of your colleagues, if you wish. You’re more likely to have an agreeable pension.
… So, you civil servants — you might now be beginning to understand why the rest of us are getting just a little bit, you know, arsey. Just losing our patience a little with regard to your behaviour.
Yes, James and Olivia, I’m talking about you. We kid ourselves that the same rules apply to everyone in this country.
But clearly, that is a delusion. Some people get away with taking not a blind bit of notice of injunctions to return to work. To use Whitehall terminology, this is called “taking the p**s”.3
We pay for these public sector jobs because they are important to keep the state running. That contract doesn’t hold if you are not doing the work that is required.
It’s a classic columnist’s trick. Liddle is writing about straw civil servants, creating for his red-faced readers some imaginary people (“James and Olivia”) to rage at, imaginary people who are “taking the piss” with “our money”.
I’ve long suspected that British columnists are physically different from ‘normal’ people, in possession of outsized gall bladders that allow them to produce far more gall than the average human. Want proof? Look at the levels of gall required for Rod Liddle, a columnist who works from home and has done for the thick end of two decades, castigating public sector workers and demanding they get back to the office — a place he can barely imagine.
Elsewhere in his column, he drops some lazy xenophobia about the French, predictably rages about trans weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, without mentioning that she crashed out of the event and came nowhere near getting a medal, and snarks about Team GB’s medal wins in BMX, saying “Next Olympics – Minecraft should make its debut. We’ll clean up in the medals there, too.”
Imagine The New York Times being shocked that Paris Hilton has a cooking show but cannot cook in the same world where Rod Liddle has a column but cannot think, Sarah Vine fills an entire page with projections about someone else’s furniture, and The Times considers writing about literal bollocks to be very droll. If there were a league table of ridiculous individuals, Hilton wouldn’t make the top 10, but Britain’s columnists would be jostling for podium positions.
Or, in fairness, mentioning Hilton’s brave testimony about the abuse she suffered as a teenager.
And there’s another dog whistle that Vine will deny blowing.
It remains hilarious to me that the cruel and tediously lascivious Sun clutches its pearls over words like “piss”.