The 24 worst columns of 2024, part three: Pity for public school boys, the war on traffic wardens, and a headbanger in denial
It's the Christmas gift that was on nobody's list: The penultimate part of this year's countdown of calamitous column writing...
In parts one and two, we’ve already seen some of the biggest hitters in the business of bullshit, so who possibly could be worse?
Well, twelve more terrible columns will come before this year’s chart is done. Here are the next six for you to cringe over.
Hit the music…
12 Jan Moir (⬆️3)
’Wes Streeting, his threat to throw me under a train - and his pompous, self-serving non-apology’
The Daily Mail, June 13 2024
What I meant was the natural duration of the 33-year-old’s life had been tragically shortened in a way that was shocking and out of the ordinary. Certainly, his death was unusual enough for a coroner to become involved and reports had all pointed to enthusiastic consumption of drink and drugs. In my original, unedited column I had referred to the type of dangerous party drugs then popular in gay nightclubs and which were becoming a public health issue — could they have been a factor?A coalition of Mail executives and lawyers — acting with the best of intentions — removed those paragraphs because they believed them to be in bad taste. I know. Cue explosion of the world’s biggest irony-o-meter. This excision, which was genuinely meant to be compassionate, only succeeded in giving the column a different complexion. It made it easier to negatively misinterpret my words were you minded to do so, and plenty of people were —perhaps understandably so.In October 2009, Jan Moir wrote a column for the Mail that concluded that there was “nothing ‘natural’” about the then very recent death of Stephen Gately. The Press Complaints Committee received 25,000 complaints about the piece, there was a brief advertiser boycott of the Mail, and Moir issued a partial apology to Gately’s family, followed swiftly by a self-justifying column.
Fifteen years later, Moir is still arguing that her awful column was not, in fact, awful and that she was simply misunderstood. That she used a hyperbolic tweet from a man who’s now a prominent politician as the hook for her relitigation of the issue is particularly ironic given her paper’s obsession with cancel culture. Moir knows full well that Streeting had no plans to literally toss her under a commuter train but the Mail’s always allowed to take offence while arguing that nobody else should.
11 Will Lloyd (🆕 entry)
’After 8,280 hours’ reading, I’ve realised books are a waste of time’
The Times, December 15 2024
Yet between 2014 and 2024, I spent eight thousand, two hundred and eighty hours reading. Applying that same level of inhuman willpower to crypto trading would have made me a millionaire. I could have gone to the gym. I definitely should have learnt how to drive, rather than reading all that DH Lawrence. Bless him, but Lawrence was basically a cuckolded psychopath with a sideline in nature poetry.
Those 8,000 hours could be mistaken for a boast. Yet what would I be boasting about? There is no PGA Masters Tournament equivalent for obsessive readers. Most of us do not sit in the pub trading exhortations to read more Milan Kundera novels. The whole point of book learning is to hide it well.It takes a bold columnist — ‘bold’ here being used as a polite alternative to ‘idiotic’ — to suggest that reading is a waste of time. If reading the classics of literature is pointless, what does that say for the collective output of the Times comment desk?
In a column that argues that reading isn’t an improving activity because Mao, Hitler, and Stalin all read a lot of books but still murdered millions, Lloyd completely ignores the notion that liking literature might just be fun and that doing things for fun isn’t a waste of time. There’s no chance Lloyd truly believes that reading is a waste of time so he’s wasted his readers’ time all in the service of a piece of intellectual trolling.
Thanks to reader Richard for this nomination.
10 Giles Coren (⬆️3)
’Public schoolboys are out — but you’ll miss us’
The Times, July 12 2024
Who will speak in complete, grammatically correct sentences with clearly enunciated vowels of the sort that kings and queens have uttered for a thousand years, thereby rendering your own little half-swallowed regional squawks “edgy” and just the sort of hip thing they’re looking for at Channel 4? And above all, after we’ve gone, who will you be able to blame when your basic lack of talent, articulacy and wit means you still can’t get a decent job or university place? Who, then, will you say stole your rightful destiny by a mere accident of birth?Of course, Giles Coren was going to appear on this list. He’s been as much of a fixture in the worst columns countdowns as Shakin’ Stevens was in the 80s pop charts. Like old Shaky, Coren has a habit of covering the same old tunes over and over again.
Coren’s July paean to public school boys like himself belongs in that big category of his columns that can be marked as dressed up as tongue-in-cheek but utterly serious beneath that smarmy sheen. It takes a special level of arrogance for a hereditary columnist to end a piece sneering about mere accidents of birth.
9 Camilla Tominey (⬆️2)
’Feral children and their feckless parents are leaving the rest of us living in fear’
The Daily Telegraph, September 6 2024
We’ve always had to put up with our fair share of feckless parents, letting their feral children run amok while the rest of our offspring mind their Ps and Qs. You know the types I’m talking about here; they’re loud, they’re objectionable and they’re prone to ruining your pub lunch. (It isn’t a class thing, by the way. “Posh” children are invariably the most irritating on account of their unself-aware and entitled, Boden-clad Mamas and Papas). But the pandemic appears to have unleashed a new subgroup of brats whose bad behaviour extends well beyond the mere annoying.
There’s a new element of fear in Britain today; a feeling that things aren’t as safe as they used to be; that the social fabric is fraying. We used to attribute those feelings to men behaving badly – but part of it is now undoubtedly down to the way that some children are carrying on.Last year, Camilla Tominey made this chart at no. 11 with a column headlined “Our children are bleeding us dry”. This year? It’s all about other people’s awful offspring. This one manages to fulfil a permanent requirement of the Telegraph comment section: Making readers feel both superior to other people and terrified by them. Stoking paranoia in their audience is where Telegraph columnists excel and Tominey earns her spot for turning an increase in the number of under-18s being arrested into a harbinger of total civilisational collapse.
Of course, the governments that the Telegraph supported had nothing to do with that situation and the paper’s readers are exempt from any accusations of bad parenting. It’s always those other people, you see.
8 Richard Littlejohn (re-entry)
’The war on motorists has gone nuclear. No wonder traffic wardens are being kicked, strangled, headbutted and shot’
The Daily Mail, October 22 2024
Last appeared at no.9 in the worst columns of 2022.
No one can condone these vicious assaults on low-paid staff simply doing their job. But it's not difficult to understand the frustration which tipped some people over the edge and led them to resort to violence…
… Fortunately, physical attacks on traffic wardens while reprehensible are still few and far between. One would be too many. But I'm prepared to bet that some were carried out by tradesmen and delivery drivers trying to go about their lawful business being slapped with tickets for stopping temporarily on a yellow line.
Wardens are given no discretion and are incentivised to hand out as many fines as possible.
Zey are only obeying orders, but confrontations with furious White Van Men trying to make an honest living are a dead cert.This one’s a prime example of the load-bearing ‘but’ which allows Littlejohn to say he condemned the violent attacks on traffic wardens while glorying in them. It’s a huge twat signal in the sky to the white van men he imagines are reading his column and pumping their fists at the thought of bloody jobsworths being bloodied.
Of course, this being Littlejohn, you get an Allo Allo-style evocation of the Nazis and the alliterative swipe at “Net Zero nutjobs”. And while he barely pretends to condemn attacks on people, he’s delighted about the kind of vandalism the Mail would usually be the first to chunter about: “Speed and ULEZ cameras are regularly attacked with everything from chainsaws to paint, to the delight of most motorists – even if they are reluctant to say so publicly.”
7 Matthew Syed (-)
’I want our country to stay solvent — if that makes me a headbanger, so be it’
The Times, November 17 2024
‘Why have you moved so far to the right?” “What happened to the bloke who once stood for Labour?” “Does The Sunday Times pressure you to parrot right-wing talking points?”
What do these messages have in common? Well, they’ve all been sent to me in the past few weeks, including by a former university friend whom I’m seeing at a reunion on Thursday. To be fair, he added a wink emoji at the end and was clearly ribbing me a bit, but still. And it isn’t just people from the left getting in touch. Another recent message, from a Conservative Party member, was: “Glad you have finally seen the light”. And, on social media, rather more archly: “Welcome to the dark side!”
So there you have it: your correspondent has become a far-right headbanger. Columns in this space calling for cuts to immigration, asylum, deficits and welfare prove the point.As you might expect from a former professional ping pong player, Matthew Syed is a consistent entrant in these countdowns. Having landed exactly here last year, he’s back with another reliably awful take. Has he moved rightwards? No! It is the rest of the world that is wrong and he has stayed stock still and immovable in the centre.
Self-described ‘centrists’ rarely admit they’ve stepped even slightly away from their previous positions. And those who are paid to present their opinions in right-wing newspapers definitely don’t. What Syed doesn’t want to admit is that if the Sunday Times had to remotely pressure him to offer right-wing talking points, he’d be quickly out of the job. The constraints are implicit, not explicit.
Part 4 will be with you on Christmas Eve. Thanks for reading.
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As an Australian I live a blissfully Giles Coren-free life, but surely any decently educated public schoolboy should know that for much of the last thousand years, the kings and queens of Britain spoke either French (Norman or otherwise) or German (as well as Scots or Gaelic, I'm not sure which), and if they did indeed lower themselves to speak English, it was undoubtedly with a strong accent.
His parents should demand their money back.
Eagerly awaiting Brendan Oneil.
I'm surprised that cunt hasn't wrote and article saying Gisèle Pelicot is just as bad as her husband.