The 22 Worst Columns of 2022 (part 2): Same Cuntery for Old Men
The 22 Worst Columns of 2022 (part 2): Same Cuntery for Old Men
Counting down from 11 to 1 in this year's chart of contemptible columns.
Having dispensed with the lower table loathsome takes of the year, we move into the top half of the competition. Catch up on The 22 Worst Columns of 2022 (part 1) before you hit the music and ‘enjoy’ the conclusion…
11. CAMILLA TOMINEY (⬇️3)
”The royals will only thrive if they are anti-woke”/”HR language is destroying Britain’s work ethic”
Camilla Tominey is another columnist who’s dropped down the chart this year because though her output is consistently awful, it’s also incredibly repetitive. Her byline guarantees something sour about Meghan and Harry, or another slab of route one culture war carping.
The columns that have earned her spot this year come from those two categories; the first squeezing the few remaining drops of outrage from the story of Lady Susan Hussey and welding it to Meghan and Harry who were thousands of miles away at the time, the second giving us the spectacle of a newspaper columnist sneering at other people’s work ethic:
We should work for the sake of our companies, or indeed our public services, and not expect them to work for us. In environments where we are paid to be service providers, we now demand to also be in receipt of service.
Who is the “we” Tominey is talking about? And what service does she provide?
10. SONIA SODHA (🆕entry)
”The Trojan Horse Affair: how Serial podcast got it so wrong”
A column that accuses The Trojan Horse Affair podcast of “[cherry-picking] facts in service of a gripping story” itself cherry-picks facts in service of a lukewarm take. See when Sodha writes…
[The podcast] grossly understates the risks children were exposed to, with real consequences. One teacher implicated in the sex education lesson was later convicted for sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl he referred to as his “wife”.
… despite this narration from co-host Hamza Syed:
... they all remember that the school did hold an assembly for the boys in that grade to tell them that sex without consent is rape.
That incident is perhaps more disturbing than Sue and Steve could even have known, though, because in March of 2021, after our interview with Sue and Steve and years after Park View ceased to exist, that same teacher who’d been teaching the sex ed class at Park View was convicted with sexual activity with a child from another school he’d gone on to work at.
That’s just one of many examples in the short column, which relies mostly on sources that are called into question by Syed and his co-host Brian Reed. The British press circled its wagons over the podcast and Sonia Sodha was at the front of the train.
9. CAITLIN MORAN (🆕entry)
“What The Queue, the tears and the pomp taught us all”
I established in part one of this rundown that Elon Musk has been a gift to columnists this year but not even the discourse around him has matched the brief burst of takes that followed The Queue. Of the many responses to a line caused and maintained by a deliberate and managed PR campaign, Caitlin Moran’s over-caffeinated contribution makes the grade because it stretches for that classic columnist’s goal: defining what ‘it’ tells ‘us’ about the state of the nation:
The Queue, then, was one of the final scenes in the Queen’s life — where we saw her power in this final reaction shot from her subjects. It was how she manifested in our heads, suddenly made flesh — five miles long, drawn from every demography and corner of the country, and visible from planes circling to land at Heathrow. Finally you could see how we felt about being people who are born with a Queen as part of their money, stamps, Christmas, public holidays and lives.
The Queue was not spontaneous. The Queue, capital letters and all, was stage-managed and the media’s coverage of The Queue helped to lengthen and justify The Queue. Caitlin Moran’s column, like so many others, was manufactured emotion to go with the manufactured spectacle:
In that moment there was no subject or monarch; no status divide at all. There was just a woman, saying goodbye to another woman, who they felt — like all women, and mothers, and grandmothers — really had tried her best.
A lie is a lie, even if you write it inside a Hallmark card.
Previously: QueueAnon (September 15, 2022)
8. TIM STANLEY (🆕entry)
”Why I’ve had enough of centrist talking heads”/”I wouldn’t want to be young this Christmas”
The output of builderphobic bowtie enthusiast and perpetual Thought For The Day irritant Tim Stanley in 2022 provided a lot of potential columns for inclusion. I finally narrowed it down to this frequent Question Time guest’s complaint that “the media’s Overton window is so narrow”, which focuses of the equally irritating Rory Stewart and comes over like Gonorrea complaining about Shingles getting too much attention, and his festive column which begins:
This year I turned 40, and I’ve finally reached that age when I have no idea what people are talking about. At a Christmas party, my young nephew asked if I’d like to play Halo 3 on his Xbox. I said, “That’s very kind of you, but I’m afraid I don’t know what any of those words mean.” I’ve not played Minecraft or danced on TikTok. And I’ve never seen an episode of Game of Rings.
Tim Stanley was 19 when the Xbox was first launched and 25 when Halo 3 was released. Cosplaying as a fourth-rate Quentin Crisp for an audience of dessicated Home Counties racists may be a living but it’s a far from dignified one.
7. ZOE WILLIAMS (🆕entry)
”I saw the magnificent Pussy Riot last night. If only the world had listened to what they were saying a decade ago…”
Yes, no one noticed what Putin was after Grozny (1999) or the murder of Anna Politkovskaya (2006), or the many, many times clumsy critics of his regime stood too close to an open window. It wasn’t just the headline that earned this column its spot but the glibness of the copy below it:
[It was] a glass of cold water to the face, after years of somnambulance: no one is laughing at Vladimir Putin now, of course, but for years, he was almost a figure of fun, with his bare-chested, horse-riding photoshoots and florid turn of phrase. On the world stage, he was the uncle who might say dodgy things, but got invited anyway: what was the worst that could happen? This indulgent, pretty feckless view of Putin was overlaid by the sense that Russia merely did things differently; perhaps the state was a bit thin-skinned and hotheaded, maybe it didn’t prioritise human rights as much as one would like, but this was a cultural thing, probably related to the weather.
6. GILES COREN (⬇️1)
”Crash diets are off for super-sized dummies”/”Thank you, Harry Kane, you’ve saved Christmas”
Almost any column by Giles Coren — a man who faced no consequence for laughing at the death of Dawn Foster beyond the need to repaint his front wall — could have earned him a spot in this countdown. The ones I’ve picked feature two of his favourite obsessions (mocking fat people and ‘funny’ foreign accents).
From the man who fat-shamed his own four-year old son for an Esquire column and once began a Times restaurant review by representing a Chinese person’s speech as “TAKA TAKA TAKA BOKKA TAKKA TAKKA” repeated over and over, we got…
So it’s great to hear that a New Model Army of obese crash test dummies, weighing in at over 19 stone each, will be testing cars from now on, which means that you and I will soon be rattling about in seats, belts and cockpits designed to be safe for a small rhinoceros.
Which is absolutely marvellous and I fully support it. I only hope that the dummies are not made to feel bad about themselves. I hope it is explained to them that it is not their fault they are fat; it’s all down to education, government and the food companies. We must not resort to victim-blaming.
… and:
We’ve got these Brazilian builders in, see. Wonderful guys. Work like Poles but look like supermodels. And they’ve been in a great mood for the last few weeks on account of the World Cup…
… “You’re back!” I squealed.
“Yes,” said the foreman, as his men filed cheerily past me into the house. “It was bad 24 hours, I am admit. But then England is knock out and everyone is cheer up immediately! Now, let’s to get job finish and have happy holiday!”
A message to the car thieves of Britain: Giles Coren’s Jaguar i-Pace must not go unstolen in 2023.
5. ANDREW MARR (🆕entry)
“Keir Starmer’s mildly authoritarian streak chimes perfectly with these troubled times”
Andrew Marr was named columnist of the year at the BSME awards in November. Unfortunately this column wasn’t awful enough to take the win here but it was certainly of a shitty enough standard to secure him a Top 5 finish.
Equating state intervention with authoritarianism, Marr, the man who stood on Downing Street and declared Tony Blair “a larger man” when Baghdad fell, confidently declares “war is back”. He sound positively horny when he writes:
[Keir Starmer] is more the buzz-cut public prosecutor than he is the rebellious leftie schoolboy. His relish for throttling the left – and his instinctive traditionalism when it comes to the rights of parents with transgender children, or the treatment of Just Stop Oil protestors – is beginning to add up to a picture that may not delight many readers of this column but which may, just may, chime with the times.
Traditionalism here means the boot stamping on a human face forever is, in fact, a natty Hugo Boss trainer that really “chimes with the times”.
Previously: Kissed Off | On the mediocre spectacle of Keir Starmer's Times interview
4. ALLISON PEARSON (⬆️2)
”In the end he was his own worst enemy, but Boris’s heroic legacy is secure”
With three decades of opinion spewing to her name, Allison Pearson knows exactly how to shift her view to fit with The Telegraph’s current company line; so it was that she shifted with gear-crunching inevitability from writing pieces about how “Boris” had let her down to delivering a saccharine political eulogy that nearly out did her rewriting of the eucharist at the height of the pandemic (“We need you, Boris – your health is the health of the nation”).
With Johnson on his way out of Number 10, she simpered:
Them’s the breaks,” he said with a ghost of a smile. Only Boris. Only Boris would make that wry, colloquial quip in the middle of a historic speech.
… Boris Johnson was adored in a way that politicians rarely are, and in a way the metropolitan media class never began to understand. Even those of us who eventually came to the conclusion that he had to go, for the sake of our party and country, may now feel a shaft of sadness. Of a blond sun going out.
In the coming days, it would be good if people could bear in mind that our soon-to-be ex-Prime Minister is a human being with feelings to be hurt, not a Mr Punch puppet to be bashed for sport. Most of us, I’m sure, will wish Boris Johnson well for the future while forever being grateful to him for Brexit. Only Boris. His legacy is secure.
As I wrote at the time, a “shaft of sadness” sounds like how E.L. James would describe Christian Grey’s penis during a particularly melancholy shag, and the image of “a blond sun going out” suggests an even more cursed Tellytubbies reboot.
3. ALLISTER HEATH (⬆️7)
”Britain is in ruins thanks to the failed dogmas of our permanent Leftist elite”
Allister Heath belongs to a sub-category of British headbanger columnists who think that true Toryism has never been tried and that, contrary to the evidence, the Conservative Party has not been in power for 12 years. The preeminent proponent of the paranoid style in British comment journalism, Heath can always find reds beneath his bed and “leftists” pulling all the levers. While his accidental comic masterpiece Kwasi Kwarteng's Budget is a moment in history that will radically transform Britain almost took the spot here, it’s this deranged rant from earlier in the year that sealed his podium position:
Tony Blair was devastated by the referendum, but he is having the last laugh. We’ve ended up with a technical Brexit in which Britain is subservient to a permanent Left-wing, politico-managerial class. Many Tory MPs might as well be Labour MPs, and vice versa. Nothing has changed: Whitehall Blairites seized the power relinquished by Brussels’ social-democrats.
Are these Whitehall Blairites in the room with you, Allister? Has the permanent Left-wing, politico-managerial class moved your glasses again?
2. BRENDAN O’NEILL (⬇️1)
”I love you Ireland, but it’s time to grow up”/”The tyranny of Pride”
Last year I wrote that “in the same way that it was hard for anyone else to win the NBA’s MVP title while Michael Jordan was on the court, topping the bad takes chart [would] always be challenging for anyone else while Brendan O’Neill is in the game” and yet, despite a despicable effort, he’s slipped back one place this year. He’s still on course for that lifetime achievement award though. Here are five brain melting sentences from the columns that secured him this year’s silver medal:
Ireland once had Pádraic Pearse, Joseph Plunkett, James Connolly. Now it has Jedward.
… the famine bores are swarming social media
The Irish famine is not your prom dress.
We’re living under a tyranny of Pride. Its eyesore rainbow flag dominates every major highway during Pride month.
Defiling Pride is to the 21st century what desecrating an image of Christ was to the 14th.
… and now, a new number one from a veteran act:
1. JEREMY CLARKSON (🆕entry)
One day, Harold the glove puppet will tell the truth about A Woman Talking Bollocks
I actually feel rather sorry for [Harry2] because today he’s just a glove puppet with no more control over what he says or does than Basil Brush.
Meghan, though, is a different story. I hate her. Not like I hate Nicola Sturgeon or Rose West. I hate her on a cellular level.
At night, I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, “Shame!” and throw lumps of excrement at her.
Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way.
Of course Jeremy Clarkson’s December 16 column1 for The Sun was going to take the battered crown of bullshit this year. It was a screed that compared both Meghan and Nicola Sturgeon to the serial killer Rose West and featured Clarkson repurposing a Game of Thrones scene to fantasise about the Duchess of Sussex pelted with shit as she was marched naked through the streets. It also sparked defences from most of the other unbearable wankers of British media.
Clarkson’s subsequent nonpology will mean the incident ends up as nothing more than another item in the long ‘Controversies’ section of his Wikipedia page. And the removal of the column is equally meaningless; it already did its job. Jeremy Clarkson will remain the patron saint of the pub bore and the bumptious bigot, defended and idolised by millions of other pricks who would love to be as richly rewarded when they “say it how it is” in offices, at family meals, and down the pub.
This ‘win’ for Clarkson is a ‘win’ for all of them too. Every tedious arsehole who thinks lazy xenophobia, cheap racism, selective misogyny (“since I became a father…”) and shock tactics are just jokes is embodied in the ongoing career of Jeremy Clarkson.
Previously: Jeremy Clarkson’s *very* white Christmas and Tatical retreat and the coward Clarkson.
Happy New Year.
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