Patrick Bateman for The Financial Times

Analysing one of the most brazenly contemptuous columns ever written.

Previously: Tim Stanley files Fourteen Words
The 'Thought For The Day' regular's latest homily in praise of Suella Braverman boils down to some very nasty conclusions.

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I’ve argued for some time that Janan Ganesh has only avoided being crowned Britain’s Worst Columnist because he lurks in the pages of the Financial Times print edition or behind the publication’s high paywall. Connoisseurs of columnist dickheads know he is world-beating in his wearying wanker wittering.

While Ganesh’s back catalogue is stuffed with examples of columns that illustrate that he could have been the model for the man Mark E. Smith sang about in How I Wrote Elastic Man (“E.g. self-satisfied, smug…”), his latest offering is special. I think it captures not just the mindset of a single columnist but the underlying nature and sentiments of most of the British columnist class.

The lives politics doesn’t touch

Affluent, childless and middle-aged, I am unaffected by most political decisions

Janan Ganesh, The Financial Times, September 29 2023

Let’s — to shamelessly steal from Dylan Thomas — begin at the beginning. Ganesh bursts out of the traps with an introduction that assumes the reader has the same kind of casual, finger-clicking-at-waiters, waving cash-at-bartenders, line-skipping contempt for ‘normal’ people as he does:

Last year, owing to strikes, it took an age to reach a bar where I take my occasional refreshment. Hours passed before I understood the sense of personal affront that I felt. Here, I realised, was a case of politics affecting me in a discrete and tangible way. The impudence of it. You see, it tends to leave me alone. 

That paragraph is 60 words exactly, but it only takes the first sentence to understand absolutely everything you need to know about Ganesh. Those 19 words are a pen portrait of the contemptuous columnist, the unreliable arsehole narrator. If they had been written by a novelist, we’d instantly realise they were offering us a kind of Patrick Bateman figure, the arrogance like a stink on someone that they have got so used to they no longer even realise it’s there.

A writer less wrapped in such a high-togged duvet of smugness would have written:

Last year, I was in a bar that I go to sometimes and realised that I hated having to queue. 

That’s 20 words — down from 32 — and ducks the pretentious construction (“… a bar where I take my occasional refreshment”). But Ganesh sees himself as a thinker and not just a thinker but one who wields language in a way that ‘civilians’ like you and I are lucky to witness. This is… a man of destiny, albeit one who spends hours picking at the scab of his own irritation because he had to wait a little while.

Ganesh continues:

Right now, across Europe, governments are deciding when and how to ban gas boilers in homes. As I rent, through choice, this is academic to me. The landlord decides the boiler. The cost will be passed on to me in a way I won’t notice. What about electric cars? I don’t drive. Inflation? I can economise without suffering. The malaise of Europe? I am mobile. I can duck out for a while. Singapore’s dining scene has come on a lot. 

This approach — throwing your wages and general disconnection from ‘reality’ — at the reader is not limited to Ganesh. Giles Coren, for example, has written a number of columns where he boasts about his wages while complaining/laughing about having to write about the world. Ganesh, though, takes it to a new level — this is someone employed to comment on the world around him crowing that he exists in a bubble that protects him from it.

I’m told by reliable sources that when Ganesh moved to America — where he lived in Washington and LA for four years — his editors at the FT only found out about the drastic change in his circumstances when he started filing copy about the US. They had employed him for his commentary on the UK; still, he kept his job. Perhaps he simply moved because of the relative fortunes of the “dining scene(s)” in London and Los Angeles.

Still, the list of smug exceptionalism in the column continues:

Brexit? The direct victims are small exporters, touring artists, research scientists, not pampered columnists. London is more cosmopolitan, not less, than it was in 2016. Infrastructure? A precious thing if you live in a remote or ill-favoured region. But the major cities of the rich world are well set up? Education? The far future? Killer androids? The great resource wars of the 2070s? I don’t have children to fear for. 

Should the situation on this fetid, overheating planet get worse faster than Ganesh assumes, I intend to have a copy of his column printed out and slip it into my wallet. As the out-of-control AI dispatches its killbots or the fires ripple across London, I will be striding forth in search of Ganesh to shove that print-out into his smirking mouth.

And here the fantasy section of today’s newsletter comes to an end. Sadly, the self-indulgent part of Ganesh’s column starts from the first letter and ends with the final full stop. He goes on:

Friends, I seem to have exited History. Outside of the obvious and eternal themes of taxation and law and order, the issues of the day impinge little on me. I find it stimulating to observe politics, as a zoologist does a wombat colony, and I certainly have preferences. But something about the atomisation of the modern world has spared me personal exposure to political decisions. 

It is incredible hubris for a man whose job is “columnist” to assume, as generative AI with its hunger-free appetite for gobbling up every word ever written, that he is fine and untouchable. That kind of smugness might have been understandable in the 70s, but he sits atop a shrinking industry, doing an 18th-century job in a 21st-century world, and chuckles to himself. In his head, it sounds like a sophisticate’s laugh; to anyone paying attention, it’s the idiot giggle of Ralph Wiggum saying, “I’m in danger.”

And still, the arrogance goes on:

Putting a name to this kind of life is a challenge. It isn’t “apathetic”. Politics is the central part of my career. Only in my thirties did I lose the Blairite/Clintonian habit of regarding people outside it and its adjacent industries as “civilians”. I hardly need to follow the news because I get it from the ambient effect of being in and around that world. (Political podcasts are for civilians.) The mode of living that I am describing isn’t apolitical, then. The best I can do is “extra-political”. It is a life outside the reach of most governmental acts. It is an imperviousness to most events.

Reread that sentence — “I hardly need to follow the news because I get it from the ambient effect of being in and around the world.” — in the voice of Patrick Bateman; the whole column is like the killer monologuing about 80s power pop to his victims:

Do you like Phil Collins? I've been a big Genesis fan ever since the release of their 1980 album, Duke. Before that, I really didn't understand any of their work. Too artsy, too intellectual. It was on Duke where Phil Collins' presence became more apparent. I think Invisible Touch was the group's undisputed masterpiece. It's an epic meditation on intangibility. At the same time, it deepens and enriches the meaning of the preceding three albums. Christy, take off your robe. Listen to the brilliant ensemble playing of Banks, Collins and Rutherford. You can practically hear every nuance of every instrument. Sabrina, remove your dress. In terms of lyrical craftsmanship, the sheer songwriting, this album hits a new peak of professionalism. Sabrina, why don't you, uh, dance a little… 

Ganesh — even surrounded by the methane guff of his own arse, where he “takes occasional refreshment” — knows he has to pretend he doesn’t think about other people as “civilians” but every other part of the column makes it obvious that he does. His conviction that he has “imperviousness to most events” recalls the giddy and destructive confidence of someone on PCP who decides they can fly and dives head first from a skyscraper. Only, the drug Ganesh is freebasing is his own ego.

Coming to his conclusion, Ganesh realises he needs to make the column ‘relevant’ to the reader so he turns it into the arsehole’s equivalent of Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen), an advice song for the dangerously egotistical:

… it is attainable. You will need the following items. An upper middle income. (You needn’t be rich, and it is an active disadvantage to have assets. Asset-owners are slaves to the interest rate cycle, and therefore to politics.) A metropolitan address in a rich and peaceful country. No children. It also helps if you are middle-aged. The young, who stand to lose the primes of their lives to various crises, are politically exposed. The old are sensitive to politics in other ways: as prolific users of healthcare, or as people on fixed incomes. The extra-political sweet spot is 35 to 55. 

Ganesh is 42. He has 13 more sweet, sweet years of being “extra-political”, so long as he doesn't get ill, become a victim of a serious crime, lose his job, or face any of the many other misfortunes he assumes he is insulated against. But, of course, like any ‘good’ columnist, he needs to take the particularity of his personal circumstances and make a claim for them being a trend, something more universal:

Meet all these criteria, and you are liable to feel an eerie insulation from ‘affairs’. And more and more of us do meet them. 

Look at the decline of the birth rate in rich countries. A growing minority of people won’t know the direct touch of politics very often, between tax returns. 

Having burbled on theoretically, like Mork in his bubble chatting to Orson about the silly old humans, Ganesh tries to offer an example. He writes of attending an “unusual performance of Gustav Mahler’s first symphony” but being unmoved because “the political framing of the show” was “‘crisis’, ecological and otherwise”. The world is on fire doesn’t matter to Ganesh because he assumes he will always have access to a range of expensive fire extinguishers

His conclusion reaches a crescendo of smuggery, the editorial equivalent of walking in on someone who has mastered self-fellatio:

The fault is mine, though. To most people [at the performance], with hopes of raising children or getting a mortgage, politics must have rawness and immediacy. Whereas I, after a tumultuous decade of national and world politics, live much as I did in 2013. The extra-political life will strike some as inhuman. To me, it is a miracle of modernity. What it won’t be for much longer is exceptional. 

In 2013, Ganesh had just published a hagiographic biography (George Osborne: The Austerity Chancellor). Austerity didn’t hurt him then and he’s shielded from suffering now. But to echo and twist his final line, I’m not sure he will be for much longer.

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