The 24 Worst Columns of 2024, Part 4: Sexy Starmer, doctor dictators, Farage fan fiction, and armageddon...

After climbing through an avalanche of awful columns, we've finally reached the summit of 2024's most egregious opinions.

The gifts are under the tree and the stockings are filled, but what better gift to give you than the bottom six columns of 2024?

You can catch up on parts one, two, and three here, but now it’s time to hit the music again…

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6 Melanie Phillips (🆕 entry)
’It’s no coincidence dictators are often doctors’
The Times, December 9 2024

The fall of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has revived a question that has intrigued me for years. Why are some of the most bloodthirsty tyrants also qualified doctors? … 

… Maybe the reason so many tyrants and terrorists turn out to be doctors is because the idealistic impulse to treat sick people translates, under the pressure of ideology or perceived injustice, into a desire to remedy the apparent sickness of the body politic.

Melanie Phillips last appeared in this chart at no.15 in 2021 with an astonishing act of amnesia about her role in fearmongering about the MMR vaccine. She rockets back this year with an incredible act of intellectual gymnastics — cobbling together a handful of dictators who trained in medicine and contorting herself into bizarre shapes to find causation to go along with the correlation.

Beyond the shocking headline and laughably shaky central premise, there’s the fact that Phillips, committed ideologue and Anders Brevik’s favourite columnist, leaps from discussing dictators to concluding that “those pursuing ideals such as the eradication of want, prejudice or war end up browbeating, scapegoating, or wiping out those perceived to be standing in their way”. Her next visit to the GP should be interesting.

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5 Janice Turner (🆕 entry)
’Suddenly Reform is starting to look plausible’
The Times, December 6 2024

Previously appeared at no. 17 in 2021.

[Reform] is developing an electrifying USP: it posits itself as a truth-sayer about issues other parties avoid, speaking for voters who feel shut down. “You wonder why you can’t get a house,” Nigel Farage told one attentive crowd. “You wonder why your rents have gone up. You wonder why our infrastructure is struggling.” And with this vast sudden influx, how can this not be true? ...

And Reform is on a roll, demanding facts about foreign criminals, how many reoffended, the cost of housing small boat arrivals. “What is the government trying to hide from us?” Farage cries. And it is hard to deny these are valid questions.

... With a million TikTok followers, [Farage's] rascally celebrity cuts through with younger voters. What if Reform finds a star to speak to disaffected youth, like the French National Rally’s Jordan Bardella, 29, or an articulate, plausible woman like Marine Le Pen herself? What if Reform gets “lucky” with events: a terrorist attack committed by illegal migrants perhaps. Add that to the immigration numbers, which Labour may slow down but cannot reverse, and Reform has a mighty armoury for 2029.

Janice Turner’s column is a classic example of the ‘reasonable concerns’ trope so beloved by comment writers. It’s worth dissecting that line about Reform “[positing] itself as a truth-sayer”. Turner doesn’t look at whether the party is actually telling the truth or whether it’s the political equivalent of one of those very cheap bottles of plonk that have to legally be labelled as ‘wine-style drink’.

The column is an act of fantasising while pretending to be a disinterested analyst. What if Reform gets some telegenic young racist to peddle its message? What if there’s a convenient terrorist attack committed by illegal migrants? What if Nigel Farage develops superhuman strength and the ability to shit gold?

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4 Tim Stanley (—)
’Mummy is in charge of the Tories now’
The Daily Telegraph, November 5 2024

A volunteer emerged with tears in his eyes and a sore bottom, to tell the press: “Following a robust debate we have agreed that Kemi will do all the talking.” Mummy is in charge.

Holding his place as the fourth worst columnist in Britain for another year, Stanley could have earned his spot for many of his contributions in 2024 but makes the grade for a single sick-making paragraph that kicks off another five years of traumatic Tory mummy fantasies.

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3 Jeremy Clarkson (⬆️18)
’The Government is out to destroy farmers & won’t let us fight… I’m convinced it’s part of PM & Reeves’ sinister plan’
The Sun, November 8 2024

I’m becoming more and more convinced that Starmer and Reeves have a sinister plan. They want to carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants and net zero windfarms. But before they can do that, they have to ethnically cleanse the countryside of farmers.

Being casually offensive is Clarkson’s default mode but this contribution to The Sun back in November manages to cram so many objectionable thoughts into such a short amount of words that it had to earn him a podium place. What might be dismissed as hyperbole for comic effect spewing out of the mouth of some old bloke at the end of a bar becomes sinister itself when offered from a national platform by a man whose pronouncements are taken deadly seriously by his fans.

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2 Caitlin Moran (⬆️21)
’Keir Starmer has turbocharged my arousal levels. I feel fruity’
The Times, July 9 2024

In all the analysis of last week’s election — looking forward to the economic, diplomatic, environmental and infrastructure developments to come — there was one seismic change that was overlooked by every major news outlet. Which is this: every middle-aged woman I know feels, right now, kind of … fruity. Turned on. As erotic as a British woman can feel during a wet summer.

“On the morning after the election,” one of my friends whatsapped, “I realised I’d got up and shaved my legs, put on a face mask and blow-dried my hair. Like I was subconsciously preparing for a date.”

Labour’s election win inevitably led to an outpouring of frothy, over-excited columns but Caitlin Moran’s contribution was the queasiest. And it wasn’t just because it raised the prospect of Keir Starmer’s erotic potential but because it typified the hailing of style (or perhaps the absence of style) over substance.

Before Starmer’s government had done anything, Moran was excitedly writing about the new Prime Minister “[hiring]… the best people for the job” and having “a lot of really full box files with ‘DETAILED PLANS’ written on them”. Regardless of what may or may not have been turned on, any sense of proportion was resolutely turned off.

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1 Allister Heath (⬆️4)
’Armageddon is upon us, and Britain will never be the same again’
The Daily Telegraph, June 26 2024

Make the most of living in Conservative Britain: Armageddon is upon us. In a little over a week, the Tory government – that last, oh-so-imperfect, infuriatingly porous roadblock to Left-wing hegemony – will have been obliterated. The removal vans, symbols of regime change, will be on their way. Parliament, the last major institution in Britain still nominally controlled by the centre-Right, will have fallen, in a wipeout without precedent

Of all of the Daily Telegraph’s columnists, one stands out as the most committed to stoking its readership’s paranoia: Allister Heath. He’s a one-man meme machine, using his column to make increasingly apocalyptic predictions.

The column above, written just before the general election, is the one I’ve chosen as an example but it might easily have been ‘It’s over for Britain, crushed by Labour’s war on the middle classes’; ‘For the first time in my life, I’m now beginning to think Britain is finished’ or ‘I have glimpsed the terrifying future of lazy, defenceless, near-bankrupt Britain’. It’s a game Heath has been playing for some time. Check the archive and you’ll find his 2022 classic ‘Britain is in ruins thanks to the failed dogmas of our permanent Leftist elite’.

Heath claims the sky is falling so often his Telegraph colleagues call him “Chicken Little”. With luck, he’ll take his top spot here as another harbinger of doom.

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