The 23 worst columns of 2023, part 3: Festive Shits from the Fetid Five

We've reached the top of the slops. Time to consider 2023's very worst columns and crown the person who delivered the pinnacle of piss-poor takes.

After lists in 2021 and 2022, this is the third year of my annual chart of the worst columns. We’ve already covered the chart from 23 down to 15 and 14 to 6. Now it’s time for the ‘top’ five (‘top’ used there in its loosest sense).

If you’re a paid subscriber, you can read the full final five now. If you’ve not yet upgraded, you can hit the button below or wait until New Year’s Eve when this edition will be unlocked for everyone.

Cue the music:

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5 Allister Heath (⬇️ 2)

Thirteen years of Tory failure have shifted Britain radically to the left / Britain is now an elite dictatorship where majority opinions are crushed | The Daily Telegraph, July 5 / August 2 2023

Britain’s deranged war on cars, our looming ban on gas boilers, the debanking scandal, the failure to prosecute crime, the attempted cancellation of women, the sabotage of the Brexit agenda, the scale of migration: welcome to anti-democratic Britain, where the beleaguered majority is increasingly subject to the whims of an entitled, activist elite that often seems to despise the people over which it exercises so much power… 

… In a truly majoritarian society, one where the demos actually exercised kratos, no form of crime would be tolerated, and certainly not burglaries or muggings. Nobody would dare to indoctrinate school children with extreme trans ideology, and the green agenda would be centred around urgent technological innovation rather than seeking to prevent working people from flying to holidays in the sun.

Allister Heath is so unhinged that I once wrote that his house is totally devoid of doors. In 2023, he maintained his position as the Telegraph’s most headbanging of headbangers, pumping out variations on his only theme — a conspiracy of lunatic leftwingers runs everything and it is they who are to blame rather than the range of right-wing demagogues who are in power and for whom Heath has such a throbbing pseudo-intellectual hard-on. Having memory-holed his enthusiastic endorsement of Liz Truss, Heath swiftly returned to his position as the foremost proponent of the paranoid style in British political journalism. Witness how silenced he is with a weekly column and a job as the editor of a weekly national newspaper. I can barely hear him above the strains of the microscopic violin that plays only for him.

The Telegraph’s Taliban: The paranoid style in British newspaper commentary...

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4 Tim Stanley (⬆️4)

Death penalty for Lucy Letby? Let’s debate it properly  / It’s time the West admitted that free speech is dead
The Daily Telegraph, August 21 / September 4 2023

What makes Lucy Letby different from other killers is that her motive remains unclear and she doesn’t look the part. When I heard about the verdict and saw her photograph for the first time, I couldn’t believe she was guilty. She seemed so ordinary; so caring. It was only when I read into the strange pattern of deaths on her ward, how it had to be Nurse Lucy, and how this sweet girl did it, that I thought: “Hang her, shoot her or fry her. Just get her off my planet.”

There were so many egregious examples of the columnist’s darkest arts in Stanley’s output this year that it was hard to boil the choice down to just two. In the end, his “I’m just asking questions” response to Lucy Letby’s conviction and an off-the-peg howl about ‘free speech’ from the following month provide a decent sense of the dirty rhetorical tricks he’s been up to this year.

The first column exists in the same territory as his slippery contributions to Radio 4’s Thought for the Day where he uses his catholicism as a means of getting Telegraph leader columns broadcast unchallenged on the BBC. He opens with a familiar refrain from the Letby case — surprise that a white, blonde, middle-class woman could commit a horrific crime — and then shifts swiftly into his ‘Billy Graham raised in Kent’ parody of hang ‘em all evangelism before concluding with some amateur armchair psychology. You can expect to see calls to ‘debate’ the idea of restoring the death penalty get louder as the election gets nearer; Stanley is just ahead of the game.

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3 Janan Ganesh (⬆️4)
The lives politics doesn’t touch
The Financial Times, September 29 2023

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. 

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. 

Protected by the Financial Times’ relatively hard paywall, Janan Ganesh often avoids the opprobrium he truly deserves. He could easily have appeared in this chart in years past and his high placing this time is both a corrective to that and richly deserved in light of his columns in 2023. The example I’ve chosen is larded with the arrogance and exceptionalism that characterise a typical Ganesh creation: A man paid to write about politics and society airily admitting that none of it matters to him because he’s wrapped in a high-tog duvet of delusion and privilege. I think I summed it up pretty well back in October:

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.

Patrick Bateman for The Financial Times

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2 Brendan O’Neill (–)

The real reason they hate GB News
Spiked, September 27 2023

It won’t stop the pile-on, though. And that’s because the pile-on isn’t really about Laurence Fox. Or Ava Evans. Or sexism. It’s about the virtual left’s burning hate for GB News. Their prim horror that there exists a news channel that thinks differently to them. Their staggeringly entitled belief that they should never have to see ‘unwoke’ commentary on TV. The Fox scandal is a Trojan horse for the longstanding urge of middle-class authoritarians to take GB News down.

Just as Slade, Wizzard, Mariah Carey, Jona Lewie and the rest will never be out of the Christmas charts, Brendan O’Neill will be a fixture of this rundown for as long as I put it together. Last year and this, however, he hasn’t quite managed to reach the levels of 2021’s chart-topper ‘Bin Laden was woke’. Instead, he’s continued to pump out Top 5-level bad takes with a dreary consistency. The column I’ve chosen — a howl in defence of his fellow travellers at GB News — just typifies the O’Neill method (taking the most obvious contrarian view on a topical story and smashing it out at dizzying speed for a fee). O’Neill earns his spot again because his columns could easily be replaced by a large language model trained on his previous output. He’s (nearly) the worst because he spews words into the public debate like a sewage overflow poisoning a river. See you again next year, Brendo.

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1 Allison Pearson (⬆️3)

Will Britain soon get its own Geert Wilders? / Politicians have created a multicultural monster beyond control. Who gets the blame? We do
The Daily Telegraph, November 21 / 28 2023

I don’t know about you, but I stand with the Irish mammies guarding their communities like lionesses. “The likes of the toerags coming into this country – they’re not vetted and are causing havoc. When we do things peacefully we get ignored,” one mother said after the Dublin riots that an Irish government, which has recklessly endangered its own citizens, tried to blame on far-Right thugs. Here’s the thing: all of us are “far-Right” when our loved ones are at risk of being stabbed by someone who shouldn’t be in our country.

In the Telegraph’s slide from the tweedy journal of the Tory shires to fascist fanzine with an ever more demonic hunger for suffering, Allison Pearson has played a key role. Her columns, like her (unintentionally) ironically-named podcast Planet Normal, feature a vast and ever-changing cast of ‘sources’ and ‘informants’, who I strongly suspect are inventions of Pearson’s feverish mind so often do they sound exactly like her and express sentiments that come in right on word count.

This pair of columns, taken from the same fortnight, sum up Pearson’s ongoing push for a further far-right government: In the first, she fangirls for mega-coiffed wannabe Dutch dictator, Geert Wilders, while in the second she comes off like Enoch Powell with a perm, finding as ever that the problems of the world can be put down to ‘the immigrants’ and not, for example, the politicians she has promoted for decades. I’m often asked how Pearson’s current incarnation can be squared with the bearable incarnation that used to appear on BBC 2’s Late Review. The answer is that she’s got worse year on year, in return for money and attention, and that slide sped up obviously when she was declared bankrupt. First financially, and now spiritually.

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