Remember Foster's Law: A new method for dealing with Giles Coren
Remember Foster's Law: A new method for dealing with Giles Coren
Or why columnists writing about writing columns is so very tedious.
And if you’d rather not read about Giles Coren: Read these beautiful obituaries of Dawn Foster from Tribune and The Guardian.
I should begin by accepting that there are people who like Giles Coren and enjoy his writing. You can find these poor misguided individuals in the often heavily moderated territory of his comment sections. But then, as the great philosopher Super Hans had it:
People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can’t trust people.
The last time I wrote about Coren in this newsletter, it was following his cheap shots at Dawn Foster who, having recently died, was not there to shut him down in her own inimitable way. I predicted then that Coren’s approach to the justified anger his comments created would be tactical silence…
Giles Coren has a tried and tested method for avoiding the fallout that comes after he says something appalling in his column or on Twitter. He just disappears. He’s the Keyser Söze of shitheads…
… and so it came to pass. He slipped back into the pages of The Times recently with no mention of his cowardly calumny in his column or the news pages of the “paper of record”.
Yesterday, I watched Dawn’s funeral through the unsatisfactory means of a stuttering Facebook livestream. This morning, I opened The Times and there’s Coren doing his Gatsby ‘careless people’ act, writing once again about what a terrible struggle it is to be paid handsomely for twice-weekly bouts of solipsism.
Beneath a headline that runs six words too long, I can’t write — there’s not enough to distract me, Coren wraps a stale complaint in the cheap sausage meat of a boast, a Scotch egg of self-pity. He writes:
With the sudden Restart of Everything, it has again become possible to film TV shows in hotels around the world. And so, after holding fire for more than 18 months, that is what I am doing, somewhat intensively.
At present, I sit typing between scenes in my bedroom in a grand old lady of a hotel in Madeira… You might think that a vast, air-conditioned room with hand-painted wallpaper and views over the shimmering bay would be an excellent place to write. It isn’t.
We then get a brief description of how the usual Coren column creation process happens…
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.
… before that section of the piece comes to an abrupt end:
But with hot and cold running flunkies on hand to do all of that — and much more — for me, I’m struggling to get started.
That “struggle to get started” probably explains why the rest of the notebook column is padded out with the information that there is a funny picture of George Bernard Shaw in the hotel, that David Lloyd George along with his wife and two children once stayed there, that a survey suggested climate change could lead to a rise in the cost of beer, that Giles is performatively baffled by Love Island like every other wordcount-filling columnist in Britain, and that he cannot stop thinking about Lloyd George and swimming pools.
When I wrote about Robert Peston’s painful novel over the weekend1, one of his fans assured me on Twitter that I am merely jealous of his status, publishing contract, and inability to ask a question that comes in under 40 words. In that case, they were wrong. But anyone accusing me of being jealous of Giles Coren would be right. Or more accurately, I’m jealous of the space he wastes every week and angry that his editors tolerate (and celebrate) his utter contempt for it.
It’s also maddening to remember that Dawn, who used the platform that she fought hard to achieve to write about stories that needed to be amplified and to call powerfully for justice, is gone and Coren sails on.
That his latest column may as well be a hotel napkin with the words “will this do?” scrawled across it in marinara sauce is not a surprise. His previous piece was yet another update on his stolen car saga2 and in an article published just before his tweets about Dawn, he wrote3:
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.
There are many columnists and other journalists with cosy beats who labour under the misapprehension that their jobs are terribly hard work but most realise it’s unwise to say that out loud or commit those thoughts to print.
But, as I’ve said before but bears repeating, Giles Coren has been drinking in the last chance saloon for so long that he knows all the bartenders by name, has a favourite spot, and knows he can say almost anything without being thrown out for a day, let alone barred for good.
If you want/can stand to read a (relatively) full accounting of all the vile things that Coren has done in print and beyond, the previous edition on him contains that. But a brief summary would include writing a racist screed against the Polish in The Times, creating a sock puppet to abuse people who criticised him, fantasising about murdering, killing and then fucking a neighbour’s child for playing the drums, baselessly accusing another journalist of being a paedophile4 and threatening to stab them, writing an article about going on holiday with his three-year-old daughter in which he called it “the sexiest holiday [he’d] ever had”, writing another about his four-year-old son berating him as “a fat little bastard” and a “chubby fucker”, and, of course, gloating over Dawn’s death.
When Coren returned from his holiday on August 17, with a column bearing the suspiciously trolling headline Did you really expect to turn over a new page?, the comments section was pre-moderated, almost as if despite the columnist’s ‘best’ efforts to pretend nothing had happened his editors realised that lots of us had not forgotten what he did. A nugget in Private Eye confirmed that:
… the backlash against his remarks about Foster was so severe that an urgent missive went out at 8.30 that evening from The Times’s night editor to all staff on the paper’s website: “Sorry for the mass email. I’ve been asked to ensure comments are on pre-mod for all Giles Coren pieces from now on please, including reviews, until told otherwise.
The cowardice of Coren’s remarks was matched by the cowardice of his employers who pulled up the draw bridge to protect him.
Comments are now open again beneath Coren’s columns and you can count the number of his colleagues who spoke out against his behaviour on no hands.
I’m writing about this again because I don’t want people to forget what he did. As a young woman’s friends and family were in the first and most raw stages of grieving her untimely death — she was 34 — Giles Coren went onto Twitter and wrote that she could “fuck off on to hell now where you belong” before deleting that tweet that contained that phrase and replacing it with another which ended “HA HA HA HA HA HA”. The second tweet was then deleted.
We can only hope that when the time comes for obituaries of Giles Coren to be written, a writer somewhere will reach for the words Dawn wrote in 2018 that so needled him three years later:
Giles Coren a prime example of how the “if I’ve heard of yer da, I don’t need to hear from you” rule holds for almost every man bar Jesus.
Whenever you see Coren smirking in the luxurious surroundings of a five-star hotel or from one of his many undeserved bylines, remember Foster’s Law then switch off the TV, shut the paper, or close the tab.
RIP Dawn. We miss you.
I’m still not sure if the prose was more or less unsettling than the pink suit he poured himself into for the Times photoshoot.
Car thieves of Britain, unite and ensure that no Coren car ever goes unstolen.
By the way, I’m well aware this column is framed as tongue-in-cheek but Coren’s defence is always “haha, I didn’t really mean it” and that can’t wash forever.
The Times allowed him to get a column out of that one, in which he defended his words by saying: “… I, myself, quite recently called someone a paedophile on Twitter without for a moment believing the man to be one. He had just left me with no option but so to accuse him.” He is very lucky that Michael White did not decide to sue him.