The 23 worst columns of 2023, part 2: Cracking up with the soft-boiled eggheads.

Our march through this year's most tedious, tendentious, and traumatic opinion pieces continues.

It’s year three of this annual jamboree of columnist junk — after lists in 2021 and 2022 — and we’ve already covered the chart from 23 down to 15. Now it’s time for part two with familiar suspects and new offenders.

Hit the music!

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14 Sarah Vine (⬆️4)
Basket case Britain is starting to feel like a Third World country
The Daily Mail, August 29 2023

Britain feels like an absolute shambles, a basket case. Almost nothing works any more, and it hasn't done so for a while now. All around us, the social and physical infrastructure that once held this country together is crumbling. You name it: our roads are rubbish, our rivers are polluted, our streets are overrun by lunatics wielding machetes — it's impossible to get anywhere or do anything without it turning into a three-act drama.

Was it child poverty, homelessness, or some other great suffering that triggered this howl of rage from Sarah Vine? Of course not. She felt she — and her daughter — did not receive proper customer service from British Airways. From there she spirals from reality — polluted rivers — to apocalyptic visions designed to put the shits up her geriatric readership — “streets… overrun by lunatics wielding machetes”. Of course, she doesn’t pin the blame for these horrors (real and imagined) on the government in which her ex-husband serves but instead points wildly at her usual targets — the left, the woke, and… Sadiq Khan. From ULEZ to armies of knifemen stalking the streets in one (very) simple leap in a columnist’s fevered imagination.

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13 Giles Coren (⬇️ 7)
My road trip with my son in a £250,000 Bentley
The Times, September 1 2023

I call Lord Lester. What? I hang up and try again.

“Hey, Siri, call Esther.”

“Calling Lord Lester.”

Bizarre. In 15 years of having the phone numbers of both my wife, Esther, and the late barrister Anthony Lester, Baron Lester of Herne Hill, in my contacts, Siri never once accidentally called him when I wanted to call her. In fact, I’m not absolutely certain that I ever called him at all. But now, suddenly, in the middle of a long drive to Pembrokeshire, the car thinks I want to try to ring him. Surely, it’s not because it’s a Bentley? Is this a car so posh it just naturally assumes I want to contact a peer of the realm?

This was the year that Giles Coren messaged me directly to say he knows that my opinion of him is lower than the championship bar at an international limbo contest. And yet, it’s not been one of his worst years in the content mines. While his generally trollish tone abides in his two weekly columns and restaurant review, Coren’s not been at his offensive worst in 2023, which explains his drop down the rankings. That said, this piece — featuring the son who he described as “a fat little bastard” while he was still a toddler — still earns him a top 20 placing with its eggy smell of smuggery.

Dawn Foster forever and may Coren’s car never go unstolen for long.

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12 Polly Toynbee (🆕 entry)
To all the doubters who still think Labour too tame: read its policies – and finally believe
The Guardian, April 29 2023

To those doubters who still think Labour’s plans tame, take time to read the national policy forum document. The mood music will remind you how a victory for this Labour party would herald a sea change. “Breaking the class ceiling” was never said by Tony Blair. Jobcentres will stop the venomous culture of sanctions against “scroungers”, with positive support into work instead. Cutting child poverty is what every Labour government does. Gone will be meanness to children, and that Gradgrind fixation with exams designed to eliminate, not encourage. It’s good to see the words “bolster the BBC’s independence”, and a hundred other things a world away from Torydom.

I won’t waste too many words on this dry cracker of a column other than to say that it convinced me that Polly Toynbee would make an easy mark for someone with a Three Card Monte stall and patter no better than Rachel Reeves.

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11 Camilla Tominey (–)
Our children are bleeding us dry
The Daily Telegraph, October 24 2023

If your children are anything like mine, then a large chunk of your family’s income is probably being spent on sports clubs, music lessons (that they never practise for) and DOWPs (Deliveroos Ordered Without Permission). And let’s not even get started on footwear. 

Our first non-mover of the year is Camilla Tominey who has managed to deliver an unchanged amount of awfulness from her perch at the Telegraph. This column, in which she extends her personal issues with her children into a general trend, was a break from her twin obsessions of Harry & Meghan and the Tory Party but still has health-threateningly high levels of awfulness crammed into a short number of words.

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10 Jon Sopel (🆕 entry)
The Kissinger I knew was a dazzling intellect right until the end
The Independent, December 2 2023

… when [Kissinger] was born in 1923 the ink was still drying on the Treaty of Versailles (well more or less); he was born into Weimar Germany – the Bavarian accent was one he would never lose. He fled the Nazis and ended up in America. An academic who rose to high office – the very embodiment of the American dream. And as America’s top diplomat to Nixon and Gerald Ford, and advisor to ten other presidents (a little over a quarter of the total in the history of the country) when he spoke, you listened.

The death of war criminal, Nobel Prize winner, and Tom Lehrer’s Wario, Henry Kissinger, prompted many chin-stroking columns on his ‘legacy and influence’ from men desperate to show how their rationality and political sophistication means they’re above such plebian concerns as being disgusted by massacres. Jon Sopel, one of the self-referential trio behind LBC’s current affairs chucklefest The News Agents, delivered a particularly vomit-inducing example. That he also used it to boast about “a discreet, private conference that I have been involved with for the past dozen or so years” — which includes when he was at the BBC — only adds to the grimness.

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9 James Marriott (⬆️4)
These days anyone can pose as a serious thinker / You don’t need to share your views on Gaza  
The Times, September 20 2023 | November 1 2023

Doubt, uncertainty and judicious silence are the victims of a culture that celebrates instant conviction, opinion and certitude. For many people there is no geopolitical tragedy so grim that it cannot be ameliorated by their personal point of view. This is not to diminish the importance of protest or moral outrage in the face of horror, only to doubt the prevailing modern impulse to interpret one’s emotional response as evidence of geopolitical expertise. Sometimes, to listen or to read more or to reserve judgment is better than to speak.

The Times’ young Turk of terrible takes has done it again. Jumping up the rankings, James Marriott managed to write a column headlined with the year’s biggest self-own (“These days anyone can pose as a serious thinker…”) and continue the theme later in the year with an ouroboros opinion piece about why you don’t always have to share your opinions. That might have worked if The Times had allowed him to be journalism’s John Cage and file an empty white rectangle.

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8 Toby Young (⬆️4)
Why Barbie deserves the backlash
The Spectator, July 26 2023

While Barbie learns about the horrors of male violence, as well as the irreconcilable expectations imposed on women and the inevitable toll that takes on their mental health, Ken transforms himself into Andrew Tate, returns to Barbie Land, and leads an incel revolt, reducing Doctor Barbie, President Barbie and the Supreme Court Barbies into docile handmaidens. In the film’s third act, Barbie returns to her home world, liberates the Stepford Wives and puts the uppity men back in their place. In other words, it’s a gender studies seminar disguised as a summer blockbuster. The most annoying thing about it is the way in which Mattel – which signals its endorsement of the film with a big rainbow-coloured logo before the opening credits – is constantly being sent up. Thus, its CEO is played by Will Ferrell, who reprises his role as an evil capitalist from The Lego Movie. His reaction on discovering Barbie has escaped into the Real World is to try to imprison her in a box, and there’s a tedious subplot in which his minions chase her across LA.

Toby Young is 60 years old.

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7 Matthew Syed (⬆️ 7)
To silence cancel culture, our craven elite needs only to change its tune | The Sunday Times, March 12 2023

Orwell wrote about the phenomenon of doublethink: people who talk about peace when they mean war; who claim to be interested in truth while telling lies. I have to confess that this concept came to mind last week as I listened to liberals talking about “compassion” while solemnly avowing our obligation to honour the 1951 refugee convention. Do they not know, or do they conveniently forget, that the modern operation of this treaty has led to misery, criminality and suffering?

Historians will rightly point out that the treaty was a wonderful piece of international co-operation in the aftermath of the Second World War, but that doesn’t change the fact that it has become a powerful asset for criminal gangs and the tyrants of China and Russia. All this is undeniable to anyone who follows this debate closely, but it is obscured by pearl-clutching liberals who profess to care about enlightened values while inadvertently helping to destroy them.

Matthew Syed, The Sunday Times’ soft-boiled egghead, rarely goes a week without delivering a column that suggests that he alone can see what’s wrong with the world. He’s a classic example of a columnist archetype I think of as the ‘rational’ sadist. By wrapping his cruel desires and demands in the bland language of the technocrat, he can pretend that his hang-ups, hatreds, and bigotries are, in fact, simply the common-sense conclusions that any ‘rational’ person should reach. If he’d stuck to ping pong, opinion writing would have been all the better for it.

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6 Isabel Oakeshott (🆕 entry)
The Covid bereaved have overplayed their hand
The Daily Telegraph, December 12 2023

… victim status does not come with a free pass for bad behaviour – nor does it give the Covid bereaved the right to make the inquiry all about them. They say they want “justice”, but what they really seem to seek is retribution, and a permanent position on the moral high ground from where they are free to make whatever accusations they like.

Bad writers create villains that know they’re villains; one of the clearest signs of a script that needed another pass is when the baddie indulges in a long monologue about their eeeeevil plans. Isabel Oakeshott comes off like one of those characters. She seems to delight in being awful to the extent of penning this kind of column where she trains her sights on… people mourning their friends and relatives who died in the Covid pandemic. She wrote those words, filed them, saw them published, and submitted an invoice. That’s all in a day’s work for a Fleet Street villain. Mwah ha ha ha.

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Programming note: Part 3, the concluding part of the countdown of the worst columns of 2023, will be with you on New Year’s Eve.

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