The 24 worst columns of 2024, part one: Lime Bikes, landlords, Boris books, and sacrilegious hot cross buns...

After another year of digging through the British press' most disagreeable opinions, it's time for our annual countdown of hand-picked hate reads...

In 2021, 2022, and 2023, I catalogued the worst columns of the year. In 2024, I’ve done it all over again. With an extra entry in the pile, there’ll be four parts this year, spread across the next two weeks. So without further ado, please ‘enjoy’ this annual trip through everything awful.

Hit the music…

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24 Michael Gove (🆕 entry)
’Politics as Ripping Yarns: the breathless brio of Boris Johnson’s memoir’
The Spectator, October 12 2024

It is, perhaps, hard to imagine a collaboration between Virgil and Captain W.E. Johns, a fusion of the Aeneid and Biggles Pulls It Off, but that is how Boris Johnson’s memoir reads. Our intrepid hero travels round the world, wooing Gulf potentates, sticking it to Vladimir Putin, snatching submarine contracts from under Emmanuel Macron’s snooty Gallic nose and then makes it home in time for some uniting and levelling up before settling down to a well-deserved glass of Tignanello. He also, like Aeneas, endures a thousand ordeals and makes himself father of the world’s greatest city… There is a breezy, breathless, boosterish brio to this tale which could have come from no politician, or writer, other than Boris. It is politics as Ripping Yarns. For his fans, and I am still very firmly one of them, this is a box of Turkish Delight as addictive as the White Witch’s in Narnia… 

Having jumped from parliament before he was pushed, Michael Gove slipped through the revolving door between politics and the press to become a journalist again. Now editing The Spectator, one of his first contributions in his new role was this review of Boris Johnson’s memoir. Curiously, Gove doesn’t mention stabbing Johnson in the back during the 2016 Tory leadership contest, opting instead to refer cutely to their friendship having had its “oscillations”.

The piece warrants inclusion in this list of the year’s worst columns because of its sheer bum-washing obsequiousness. Despite claiming not to be “an uncritical admirer”, the positive adjectives cascade down the page. In the picture painted by Gove, ‘Boris’ is a mix of Aeneas, Biggles, and Napoleon. His concluding line — “But Boris, like Dilyn, is a creature happiest and most lovable when he is unleashed.” — is enough to put even the biggest dog lover off canines for life.

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23 Rod Liddle (🆕 entry)
Clobbering landlords will just push tenants into the cold
The Sunday Times, August 18 2024

Rayner has attacked landlords for taking an ever bigger cut of taxpayers’ money in the form of housing benefit paid to private tenants – it will soon reach a record £13 billion, apparently. She has also said that everybody will have an affordable home and, perhaps, honey sandwiches for tea. At the same time she seems likely to repeal section 21 of the Housing Act, which makes it possible for landlords to evict skanks who don’t pay their rent or run an XX bully puppy farm in the second bedroom etc, thus making the business of being a landlord even more unappealing than it already is.

Surprisingly, Liddle — author of one of the worst columns of all time (his 2012 Spectator effort explaining that he couldn’t be a teacher because he “could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids”) — hasn’t made this chart before. Unlike a lot of his output, this column doesn’t lean heavily on shock tactics but instead sees Liddle trying to present himself as Mr Reasonable buffeted by the heavy weather of an unreasonable world.

With the broadest of brushes, Liddle casts private landlords as the goodies, while renters are rotters who don’t pay or wreck the joint. While Liddle might usually make it into this list for his personal unpleasantness, he’s made it this time because the column is representative of a general tendency in the British to ride to the defence of landlords. It’s almost like a lot of columnists and the editors that oversee them are private landlords themselves…

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22 Zoe Williams (🆕 entry)
What I learned when I fell off a Lime bike
The Guardian, October 1 2024

A previous chart entrant in 2022 at number seven.

I noticed Lime bikes almost as soon as they arrived in London, in 2018… Still, I never had a go on one until this summer. I spent a couple of months sailing about, feeling like the master of the universe – and then I fell off, although a better word would be “flew”. So many things could have been worse: the oncoming traffic could have failed to stop; I could have been miles from anywhere, rather than at the end of my sister’s road; some nice young people could have walked on by, rather than stopping and helping me find my vape; my sister’s neighbour could have been something other than a GP and I would have had to go to A&E. But so many things could have been better – for instance, I could have been wearing a helmet. And it could have not happened at all, which would have been way better. Anyway, it’s a fortnight on and my head has recovered. I no longer shudder whenever I walk past a Lime. 

Just as Liddle earned his spot in this year’s chart as a representative of the pro-landlord bias of the British commentariat, Zoe Williams achieves hers for continuing contributions in the category marked ‘Will this do?’ This 376-word column features a headline, penned by the subs, that promises revelations but the copy delivers nothing more than the kind of anecdote that would cause you to zone out if a family member or friend was recounting it to you.

What did Williams learn from falling off a Lime bike? That it would fill four paragraphs.

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21 Susie Boniface aka Fleet Street Fox (🆕 entry)
'Dear Australia: yes, kings are a silly idea. But this is why Britain stuck with them'
The Daily Mirror, October 14 2024

A previous chart entrant in 2022 at number 16 with a terrible pastiche in honour of the recently deceased Queen.

1. We got rid of Royalty. It led to getting rid of Christmas, theatres, feathers in hats, and all other forms of fun. In its place we got Old Ironsides, gloom, doom, and political princelings. We told Royalty it could come back if it behaved itself. It has. This is what we in the northern hemisphere call 'a win-win'.

2. They have far too many houses, free cars, clothes leant to them by designers trying to get noticed, and are surrounded by the sort of hangers-on desperate for a smidgeon of prestige and influence that you'd think they were Parliamentarians. But, unlike MPs, their entire life story is offered up to the public as an international soap opera as payment. It's icky and immoral, but that's the deal, and there are many servants, press officers and palaces for them to hide behind.

Susie Boniface’s last appearance in the worst columns of the year charts was back in 2022 with a royal-themed contribution. She makes her return with another ode to monarchy. This time it’s more sarcastic than soppy but still manages to induce an almost full-body cringe.

Written as a list of reasons that Australians should be in favour of King Charles still ruling over a country thousands of miles away, the column repeats itself, relies on a series of hoary old jokes about Neighbours, and — a glancing reference to Prince Andrew aside — presents the royals as basically harmless. Two weeks later, The Sunday Times published an extensive investigation detailing King Charles and Prince William’s vast property empire that charges millions in rent to the NHS and schools among others. But hey, they’re just guys in funny gold hats, right?

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20 Allison Pearson (⬇️ 19)
When did Easter become an exercise in indulging pointless novelty?
The Daily Telegraph, March 27 2024

I ask you, how far wrong can you go with a hot cross bun, a Good Friday treat decorated with a cross to represent the crucifixion of Jesus Christ? Very wrong indeed. Standing in the queue at Waitrose, several of us reeled from the abomination that is a White Chocolate & Lemon Hot Cross Bun. Yeuch. When another customer mentioned Strawberries and Clotted Cream Hot Cross Buns from a rival supermarket I swear something in me died.

Then came actual sacrilege. Iceland launched a hot cross bun with a tick instead of the traditional Christian symbol. “When I survey the wondrous tick.” Doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?

The holder of last year’s top spot, Pearson could have made it into this countdown with any number of columns from this year. But others on more weighty topics might have validated her endless need for attention and this one highlights what a deeply unserious person the Lidl middle-aisle Leni Riefenstahl can be.

The heft of other stories helps to conceal how confected Pearson’s rage often is but when the topic is hot cross buns, it’s far easier to see just how silly she is. Just picture her hammering out the following paragraph the next time she tries to present herself as a voice worth listening to:

Iceland claims that a fifth of customers prefer their Easter buns to have a tick instead of a cross. So what? Drooling idiots might prefer Kim Kardashian in a thong to the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus, but Kimmie is not yet the widely accepted symbol of Christmas, thank God.

Iceland’s PR team must have been delighted.

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20 Brendan O’Neill (⬇️ 18)
An Oasis reunion is exactly what woke, bland Britain needs
Spiked, August 27 2024

It’s 15 years since Oasis last played live. More importantly, it’s 28 years, three months and 29 days since I last saw them live. That was at Maine Road in Manchester in April 1996, where 40,000 of us, young then, bobbed and swayed in dumb rhythm to the classics. ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol.’ ‘Live Forever.’ ‘Wonderwall.’ It was a different time. No one was ‘sober curious’. No one was genderfluid. No one was getting cancelled for saying ‘Sorry, babe’ to the woman they bumped into at the bar. It was just men and women and cigarettes and alcohol. Two genders, two vices and two brothers on stage marching us toward frenzy.

After topping the inaugural worst columns of the year chart in 2021 and landing as the runner-up in the next two rundowns, Brendan O’Neill has finally run out of steam. Where once he’d attempted to argue that Osama bin Laden was woke, he’s reduced to trying to generate some heat from the return of the Gallagher brothers.

It’s the contrarian equivalent of watching Slade slide down the charts in the 80s as they shifted from glam band to purveyors of lumpen metal. O’Neill has been pumping out the same column about ‘woke’ for so long that his copy now resembles the output of a generative AI trained on millions of aggrieved Facebook posts from men who mourn the days when the binmen were hard, dog poo was bleached white, and birds pecked at the top of milk bottles.

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Part 2 of this year’s chart will be out on Wednesday. Thanks for reading.

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