The 23 Worst Columns of 2023, part 1: Barbie, backlashes, and the usual bullshit.

From the vast pile of obnoxious opinions, here are the most appalling, irritating, and downright dim, hand-picked to hate read.

Having subjected myself to psychological destruction in 2021 and 2022, I present the third annual chart rundown of the year’s most execrable columns. It’s Top of the Slops and I’m your host, Mic Wright. Hit the music:

---

23 Caitlin Moran (⬇️ 14)
I wrote a book about men’s problems. Then came the backlash
The Times, July 19 2023

It’s weird, writing a controversial book. Particularly when you really didn’t think you were writing a controversial book. Indeed, when your presumption about the book was that you were making the most mild, good faith and fairly obvious set of observations, which everyone would greet with relaxed variants on “Fair enough!”, or even, “Hurrah!”

I reviewed Caitlin Moran’s book What About Men? for Perspective magazine in July. It was tolerable purely because I was getting paid to trudge through her generalisations, cliches, and clunking insights about men. She was guaranteed — and got — good notices from her employers at The Times and Sunday Times, but that wasn’t enough. Luckily, she had her column as an outlet to complain about an army of strawmen and bat away all reasonable criticisms of the whole exercise. The truth is the book’s title was one letter too long — What about me? would have been far more honest.

---

22 Andrew Marr (⬇️ 17)
‘Why Britain isn’t as broken as you think’
The New Statesman, April 29 2023

Now this might seem an absurdly idealistic or even priggish suggestion. But politics can no longer be just about voting. The history of the liberal and socialist movements was never simply about that – or not until very recently. It always included a belief in public service, from the self-help and temperance movements of the Liberal working classes, through to the out-reach projects in the East End of London, the Workers’ Education Association, the trade union-run pension schemes and holidays, and of course all the work of local government. To be, even vaguely, “on the left” meant accepting a personal obligation to others – not so different to faith groups. 

Today we have been so thoroughly marketised – turned into people whose fundamental identity and hopes for fulfilment are expressed through shopping – that there might seem to be no way back. But the experience of the pandemic, with all those doing extra work to help the NHS and vaccination programmes, and the more recent rise of volunteering to run food banks, suggests there is a public spiritedness still alive that a proper reforming government could help mobilise.

If you wish to bathe in a lukewarm tub of liberalism, Andrew Marr’s columns for the New Statesman are the place to go. The experience is like being lectured by a trendy vicar on a hefty dose of valium; it’s burbling mixed with sermonising from someone afflicted/gifted with the common journalistic affliction of tactical amnesia. Marr doesn’t imagine he’s played any role in carry-on of the past few decades.

---

21 Rafael Behr (🆕 entry)
’Why does the spirit of Remain survive? Because it is about so much more than Brexit’
The Guardian, December 6 2023

A study conducted for UK in a Changing Europe, a research body based at King’s College London, has found that two-thirds of people still identify with their referendum choice. That is down from 75% in the year after the vote, but still high, and Brexit identities are felt more intimately than party loyalty. Sixty-five per cent of leavers and 71% of remainers consider that identity to be “very” or “extremely” important to them. The equivalent figures for Tory and Labour partisans are 34% and 53% respectively. Of the two labels, remain has proved stickier. That is probably because the losing side feels vindicated by the failure of Brexit to deliver any of its advertised benefits, while the winners have nothing to boast about.

I voted Remain — what do I want? A medal? — but in the long and tremendously tedious years since the referendum, the hardcore Remainers for whom their choice on that day is so character-defining have become some of the most irritating people in British politics. They wrap themselves in ‘I told you so’, classist jibes and myths of the perfect European life destroyed almost single-handedly by Dominic Cummings. And they venerate columnists like Rafael Behr who elevate smuggery to an art form.

---

20 Jeremy Clarkson (⬇️ 20)
’20mph speed limits?! Why not ban cars and make us hop everywhere’
The Sun, February 3 2023

Even if the road is quiet, it is nigh-on impossible to drive at 20mph. There’s always going to be a downhill stretch at some point where you’ll accidentally reach 25. Which will land you with a hefty fine. The only way to avoid this is to stare constantly at the speedometer, and not be distracted by the sound of all the prams and the mobility scooters you’re hitting because you’re not looking where you’re going. Of course, people say that 20 is safer and kinder to the environment. But if these are the goals, then why not make the limit five? Or one? Or why not ban cars altogether and force us to hop to work instead?

Last year, Clarkson was an easy choice for the top spot in this chart; his column about Meghan was so performatively poisonous that it would have been perverse to choose anyone else as the author of the year’s most odious opinion.

It’s not surprising that he has been a little quieter in 2023 but he’s continued pouring rhetorical slurry into the waters of British public debate and remains obscenely well-renumerated for doing so. This particular column makes the list because it’s such a sad bit of trolling; a sort of Clarkson by rote.

---

19 Piers Morgan (Re-entry)
‘Barbie wants us to think men are evil oppressors – but much of the movie is also based on a demonstrable lie’
The Sun, July 24 2023

Ken is thus reduced to a weak emasculated goon, an objectified and excluded member of the wrong sex who sings a lament to his own ‘blond fragility.’ It’s true he and the other Kens are promised a more equal world going forward, but we see no actual evidence this happens. It all smacks of George Orwell’s ‘All animals are equal but some are more equal than others…’ The audience is left in little doubt that all that matters is the women are in charge.

… on the topic of low-grade trolling, we come to Piers Morgan, a man on a multi-million-pound contract who’ll fly into a rage about vegan sausage rolls, women he claims to have been for a drink with once, or comedy movies that he considers insufficiently respectful to men to provide fodder for his perpetual outrage machine. His rage over Barbie and concern for Ken makes me wonder if he also has moulded plastic where you might expect genitals to be.

---

18 Charlotte Ivers (🆕 entry)
‘Keir Starmer’s local is really good’
The Times, December 10 2023

Then, fishcakes. Monstrous. A texture only God could forgive. The texture of an omelette left sweating in the sun. The taste of something unholy stuck in the drain when you’ve finished washing up the fish knives. Some around the table think there might be prawn in these miserable little discs. It’s hard to say. 

I’m allergic to prawns and I ate one and emerged unscathed. And thanks to this inconvenient allergy I can’t tell you what the prawns in filo pastry tasted like, or the prawn toasts. Luckily, if you want to know you can pop to the nearest Iceland. Wash it down with another bottle of wine and a few more just-over-a-fiver Neck Oils.

In theory, a restaurant review column that regularly escapes London and prefers the more affordable end of dining to decadence is a good idea but since Charlotte Ivers was parachuted in to replace the brilliant Marina O'Loughlin as Sunday Times food critic banality has been the order of the day. It reached its nadir — so far — with a review of a pub that just happens to be Keir Starmer’s local. The food gets a kicking (followed by a swift Starmeresque u-turn) and the drinks — just normal pub drinks — are treated like unique nectar. The poor landlords must have been mortified.

---

17 Nick Timothy (🆕 entry)
‘Truth’ is being weaponised in our sinister new age of disinformation’
The Daily Telegraph, June 4 2023

Sometimes the truth can hang on the disputed definition of a word, or the framing of a question. Last week, for example, the BBC interviewed a former CBI president who claimed that “every single person living in Britain today is the descendant of an immigrant”. Either his assertion was correct, and he was referring to migrations dating back to the Stone Age, before Britain was a country or immigration a concept, or it was wrong. But the interviewer did not correct him, and of course social-media partisans took different sides.

You might think that Timothy, former co-chief of staff for Theresa May, presently a think-tank ghoul and prospective Tory parliamentary candidate for West Suffolk, would be too busy to still crank out his highly cranky Daily Telegraph contributions. But still, week in, week out, he finds a way to rewrite his single column — the country is broken but it has nothing to do with me or my friends. This particular entry — in which he decides, while writing for the Telegraph’s alternative facts factory, that it is the left who deal most in disinformation — is simply representative of his schtick.

---

16 Dylan Jones (🆕 entry)
‘Remote working is killing London. Get back to the office’ / ‘I can afford to pay for NHS care so why shouldn’t I pay?’
The Evening Standard, September 25 2023

Me, I’ve had enough. The Evening Standard offices are in Finsbury Square, near Liverpool Street, and Monday to Thursday the area is buzzing. From 7am to 8pm, the place is full of people rushing to work, rushing home, and rushing to pubs and bars to fortify themselves in between. Come Friday, it’s like a bomb has dropped, with deserted streets around Moorgate, empty shops in Broadgate, the surrounding restaurants all starved of trade. And it has got to stop. Remote working is killing London. It’s killing trade, killing commerce, and killing the city’s ability to properly get back to work.

Come on, hurry up.

After 22 years as editor of British GQ, Dylan Jones took one year off and regenerated as Editor-in-Chief of Evgeny Lebedev’s Evening Standard. As a columnist for the paper, he uses that same patented GQ mix of pomposity and sycophancy to lecture the reader and slobber over celebs and his ever-present proprietor. What possibly could inspire a man with a large salary paid by a newspaper reliant on commuters to condemn remote working and advocate for more NHS privatisation?

---

15 Jan Moir (⬆️4)
‘Why is Farage the only person in Britain you can throw ANY insult at?’
The Daily Mail, November 23 2023

What is it about Nigel Farage that makes people feel they can say anything they like about him, or treat him with the disdain usually reserved for toxic waste or tyrants?

Do you want to tell her or shall I?

Moir’s career as a newspaper columnist should have ended in 2009 when she wrote a series of grotesque insinuations about the death of Stephen Gateley, but in the moral mirror world of the Mail, she continues to rise like an over-inflated barrage balloon. It should come as no surprise really that her sympathies — always so thin towards the poor, the desperate, and the weak — are enflamed by the thought of anyone being beastly to… Nigel Farage.

---

Programming note: Part 2 will be out on Christmas Eve. Part 3 with the countdown to the worst column of 2023 will be with you on New Year’s Eve.

---

Thanks for reading.

I still can’t access my original Twitter/X account because Elon Musk has broken 2FA but if you’re still there, I’d appreciate it if you hit the button below…

You can also follow me on Threads, BlueSky and/or TikTok.

If you haven’t yet, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. You’ll get bonus editions and other exciting developments in 2024.

It helps and allows me to spend more money on research and reporting. Buy a t-shirt if you’d like to make a one-off contribution and get a t-shirt