Gas panic in the content mines: Britain’s 21 worst columns of 2021 (part 1)

A very normal commentariat for a very normal island.

Normal service from this newsletter will resume on January 5th but in the meantime here’s my pick of 2021’s worst columns. Cue the music…

21. Literally any of James Forsyth’s Friday columns for The Times

In a list of some of the most unhinged, unsavoury and unsound sorts in British media, James Forsyth’s dry and unsurprising columns — often little more than reworded government press releases — might seem a banal inclusion. But Forsyth’s Friday dispatches for The Times represent one of the British press’ most arrogant aspects: A total refusal to declare conflicts of interests.

It wasn’t until his wife — Allegra Stratton — left the employ of the Prime Minister that Forsyth mentioned her role there in his column. Presumably it would take Rishi Sunak vacating Number 11 for him to make a similar confession about the Chancellor, who is his best friend, was best man at his wedding, and is godfather to at least one of his children.

20. Sarah Vine calls for the return of the death penalty

With the moral sure-footedness of an alleycat on a trampoline, Sarah Vine used the case of convicted murderer and necrophiliac David Fuller to declare that she had changed her mind and is now all for the capital punishment.

The column featured Vine effectively cosplaying the emotions of the mother of one of Fuller’s victims, dragging her own daughter into the equation, and putting on her Old Testament fire and brimstone prophet act:

[This is] an individual of such indescribable evil that he can no longer be considered a member of the human race. By his actions he has rendered himself subhuman…

After rehearsing the arguments against the death penalty and doing a half-hearted Hamlet act (“Hell, a large part of me still disagrees with me.”) she concludes that society must “think the unthinkable”. Cheap emotionalism and second-hand anger is never unthinkable to the Mail.

19. Adrian Chiles on… Ranch dressing

There is a small but vocal fandom for Adrian Chiles’ particular brand of banality. In October, Gawker published a piece praising his endless naivety, calling him “a dog who turns up at your ankles hoping you’ll throw that rubber toy again.”

But the fact that Chiles, the partner of Guardian editor Katherine Viner, has not one but two national newspaper columns (he also shares his ‘insights’ with Sun readers) is a special kind of mirthless joke. Since Chiles is baffled by even the most mundane aspects of every day life picking a single column from his output this year is hard but his musings on Ranch dressing just edged it:

This Is Us, on Amazon Prime Video, has been a quiet joy during lockdown… The other night, while many of the characters were going through a stressful time gathered in a hospital waiting room, one of their number tried – unsuccessfully – to lighten things up with a question: what food is improved by neither ranch dressing nor chocolate? I can’t say I engaged with this, but it did lead me to meander off into some half-hearted research on ranch dressing. Do we have it here? Or is it just an American thing? What’s in it?

18. Charles Moore on Shakespeare/”President Meghan”

Thatcher biographer, former Telegraph editor, and Sam Eagle’s more pompous English cousin, Charles Moore offers up such a rich buffet of bluster, bullshit, and the blindingly obvious. Sadly only two columns could make the chart: August’s Find time to awaken to Shakespeare, whose work is so much more than woke (in which he confidently claims that the Bard’s plays contain no hint of the playwright’s opinions) and November’s The US won’t accept HRH President Meghan (a flight of fancy that crashed during taxiing).

Falstaff’s line — “Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!” — can be hijacked as a review of The Daily Telegraph generally. And if you click through to read the pieces I’ve linked above, Macbeth might come to mind: “… a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

17. Janice Turner on Meghan Markle column/why “Boris will always get away with it”

The weaselly use of the word “we” to imply that a personal opinion is universal is a common trick in the British media and it turns up in both of these columns by Janice Turner. In the first she declares…

Boomers see Meghan as a deepfake Diana. While the Princess of Wales was a dynastic virgin sacrifice, traduced into a lonely faithless marriage, then in divorce fed to the paparazzi, what’s the worst Meghan endured? A row about her wedding tiara?

… with each successive line setting off more dogs barking, while in the second she assured readers:

The truth is [Boris] Johnson’s supporters haven’t just “priced in” his manifest character flaws, they actually find them reassuring. With his six (or so) children, two divorces, a late-life toddler, demanding new girlfriend, weight problem and propensity for gaffes, his life is a blur of chaos and drama. In popular parlance he is a “messy bitch” but so are many of us.

Thought Boris Johnson was a mendacious, self-serving, corrupt chancer at the wheel of a clown car government? No! He’s just a messy bitch.

16. Some spectacular Spectator sewage from Lionel Shriver

From this newsletter’s archives, September 1, 2021:

Whenever Shriver writes a phrase like “surely only a monster could…” you can be sure she’s moments away from dressing up as Godzilla and stomping on some unfortunate child’s train set. Similarly, you’ll get lots of the same kind of broad fact-free assertions you’d hear from Fox News or Britain’s Fox with training wheels GB News (hence “America’s southern border [is] no more than a notional scribble…”)

The monster begins to roar in the next paragraph when Shriver introduces two reports from Migration Watch — an anti-immigration think-tank beloved of right-wing publications who can lean on its deceptive name to suggest neutrality and rigour where there is none — and claims she will present their key findings “as succinctly and neutrally as possible”. It’s like Wile E Coyote proposing to give a presentation on the pros and cons of roadrunners.

15. Melanie Phillips’ incredible immunology amnesia

I dealt with this column by Phillips in the October 26, 2021 edition of this newsletter, Alan Partridge's Scum reboot:

Melanie Phillips was a key actor in the media propagation of the ‘MMR jab leads to autism’ conspiracy theory in the early 2000s. When Andrew Wakefield made his now throughly discredited claims of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, Phillips wrote about his claims frequently and defended him even as proof that his research methods and motives were suspect emerged…

The level of gall needed for Phillips to lecture about the horrors of anti-vaxx scaremongering could be converted into a statue of General de Gaulle so tall that it would tower over Christ the Redeemer in Rio.

In pretending that her past output never happened, Phillips is also pretending that she played no part in creating a public discourse in which conspiracy theorists pickets schools.

14. Toby Young begs for a gong

It’s long been clear that Toby Young thinks “dignity” is nothing more than a bad mispelling of a word meaning “small inflatable boat” but this column took his self-respect to undiscovered subterranean levels:

I thought my elevation to the Lords might happen when Boris became Prime Minister. Up until that point, I’d given him more tobacco enemas than any other journalist in Fleet Street. (Blown smoke up his arse.) I even wrote a 5,000-word hagiography for an Australian magazine entitled ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man’. Indeed, I laid on the oil so thick in that piece I’m now worried that when I’m standing in front of St Peter at the Pearly Gates he’s going to bring it up: ‘You did plenty of good works, you’ve been a decent husband and father and you always gave money to beggars. But on the other hand, you did write that 5,000-word piece about Boris in which you compared him to Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Sorry mate, it’s down you go.’

From the February 5, 2020 edition of this newsletter, Baron Bullshit & the Mail to Beeb pipeline:

Toby Young is a jedi of the self-own. However low you think he can go, he knows there’s further to dig. Normally there’d be no point in devoting more than a tweet to picking over the bones of Young’s latest sacrifice to Aidos, but this time he’s accidentally said one of cardinal truths of the British media out loud — a big part of its output is about sucking up to the powerful in the hope of reward, be that through a cushy think-tank gig or, as in Lil Tobe’s case, a seat in the Lords…

13. Christopher ‘Chopper’ Hope: Royal Yacht shagger

And on the subject of people for whom dignity is a lost art, here’s The Daily Telegraph’s Chief Political Correspondent defending making his bathtub daydreams into a national newspaper campaign:

People who spend too much time on Twitter generally share a fierce dislike for Brexit and Boris Johnson. And for the past five years, it has been possible to add another ‘B’ to that list: Britannia.

Since I was given the task of running The Telegraph’s campaign for replacement for the Royal Yacht Britannia in September 2016, every supportive article has been greeted with a sneer and a mocking post on the social media platform.

For some reason, the very idea of a replacement for a yacht that was decommissioned in 1997 by Tony Blair’s Labour government was deeply offensive to vast numbers of the bien pensant media and political class.

While the jokes write themselves, I took the time to fill the May 31st edition of this newsletter, Yacht is wrong with them?, with some of them and to look at the half-witted history of demands for a replacement Royal Yacht.

12. Dan Hodges’ “Red Mole”/”I don’t know why Sir David Amess was killed but…”

Covered in the April 19th, 2021 (Hodging the question: Dan Hodges, an imaginary 'red' mole, and the difference between reporting and stenography) and 17 October, 2021 (Toxic avengers: The paper of “Enemies of the People” and “kill vampire Jezza” cannot offer lectures on civility...) editions.

11. Judith Woods losing her mind over the John Lewis advert

Woods’ column was featured in the October 16th edition, Four perspectives on a delusion:

The “Generation Rent” section is almost the perfect Telegraph paragraph, made to engender both smugness and rage in the readership: “My house is lovely! And now John Lewis wants to send a cross-dressing, poorly-disciplined child of the renter class here to smash everything up.”

Want the Top 10? Here’s part 2.