The 24 worst columns of 2024, part two: Noxious 90s nostalgia, racist dogs and Trumpian compliments...

Our annual look at the commentariat's most contemptuous content continues.

This edition was meant to follow swiftly after part one of the rundown, but inevitably, I received the early Christmas gift of a virus that knocked me out for a few days. Now we’re back on track.

Expect part 3 later this week and the final countdown on Christmas Eve.

It’s time to hit the music again…

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18 Janan Ganesh (⬇️ 15)
’The last best hope against populism is to expose it to government’
The Financial Times, June 11 2024

The last best hope against populism in Europe is to expose it to government. The pressure of office might force anti-establishment parties to moderate, as Giorgia Meloni has done somewhat in Italy. Or it might reveal their incompetence and turpitude, as happened to Boris Johnson in Britain. Sometimes, of course, it will do neither: power will neither tame nor shame. (See Viktor Orbán.) But even then, these parties should at least become subject to the pendulum of politics. Time spent in government is time spent alienating voters with tangible decisions.

Nestled behind the Financial Times paywall, Janan Ganesh often avoids mention in discussions of Britain’s worst columnists but not here. Last year, he made the podium in third place, claiming that his life is insulated from the effects of politics. This time, he makes the (failing) grade with a ‘boy, it sure is great here in the Weimar Republic’ argument that the best thing to do with the far right is to let them get into government. It’s almost as if that feeling of being exempt from the effects of politics makes him very relaxed about who’s in power.

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17 Isabel Oakeshott (⬇️ 11)
’How on earth do we find out whether our dogs are racist?’
The Daily Telegraph, November 16 2024

Is my dog racist? Perish the thought. Here in the not terribly ethnically diverse Cotswolds, he seems fully signed up to the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion agenda, but who knows? Perhaps I need to take him to Wales – where anti-racism campaigners are calling for dog free zones – to put him to the test?

All this time, I’ve blithely assumed that eight-year-old Burford the cocker spaniel does not have a bigoted bone in his furry little body. I certainly did my best to raise him right. Born a few months after the EU referendum, I wanted to call him Brexit, but quickly realised he might be discriminated against, especially in this staunchly pro Remain neck of the woods. 

Isabel Oakeshott broke into the top 10 worst columns last year by attacking the Covid bereaved. Her inclusion this year is far less obviously evil and a lot more blatantly silly. Cranking out 800 words on a spurious story about dog-free zones, she tried to excite Telegraph readers with the idea that she might have called her dog Brexit and that it would have done anything other than make her look a bit pathetic. Instead, she named him after… her “favourite garden centre”, which is only slightly less odd.

Oakeshott’s column earns its spot in the list as a perfect example of that Telegraph favourite genre ‘the world’s gone mad!’ She knows and her editors know that no one was suggesting that there’s an epidemic of racist dogs but she still cranked out paragraphs about her dog living with a white cat and a black cat, his “tireless pursuit of certain species”, and his “quite shameless theft” of any food he can get his hands on. This kind of thing has the shape of humour but with none of the actual content.

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16 Piers Morgan (⬆️3)
’Donald Trump called me last week… now I’m scared he’s going blind like Elton John’
The Sun, December 3 2024

I had a missed call from Donald Trump last week and assumed he was seeking to recruit me as his new White House Communications Director. But, in fact, when he rang back, he said he was watching me on TV in America and thought I looked so great that he had to ring and tell me that.

I know, I know, it sounds utterly preposterous that the President-elect could take time out of his ridiculously busy schedule to compliment me on my aesthetic quality. But he did, and hey, if the world’s most powerful man wants to do that, who am I to argue?

Egotism, self-aggrandisement, and boasting about knowing celebrities have been Piers Morgan’s calling cards since he first slithered into the mainstream as the editor of The Sun’s Bizarre showbiz column in 1988. Sucking up to Donald Trump in return for access to the orange overlord is also one of his favourite tactics so it’s no surprise that he combined all of the above for this late entry into this year’s chart.

What makes Morgan’s columns even more egregious is just how tossed off they are. The Trump story — which barely makes the grade as an anecdote — comes with no attempt at insight or reflection, beyond the joke inserted in the headline by the sub-editors, and is stretched into four two-line paragraphs in its original form. Just another sign that Rupert Murdoch is reaping the rewards of Morgan’s vast contract.

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15 Dylan Jones (⬆️1)
’King Charles can win over anybody and has one surprising similarity to Keith Richards — this is the man I know’
The Evening Standard, February 6 2024

When doing his rounds, Charles had a spontaneous laugh, not unlike the one employed by Keith Richards. Now and then, Richards laughed for no apparent reason, almost as if the ridiculousness of his life had just occurred to him, wheezing and giggling at the preposterous nature of his good fortune. HRH’s face would occasionally explode into paroxysms of good-natured gurning, in the way it probably did 50 years ago when he mucked about with Spike Milligan and the rest of the Goons. It would be easy to assume that the laughs were designed to convince people he was having a good time and yet it looked to me like a double bluff, with the laughs disguising the fact that he actually was having a good time.

It takes something to beat Piers Morgan for obsequiousness, but if anyone can, it’s Dylan Jones, the former GQ boss and recently departed Evening Standard editor, who has spent his career cosying up to every sort of celebrity. Even in a back catalogue filled with back-slapping and arse-kissing though, his column in praise of King Charles stands out. There’s false modesty, a suggestion of far greater connection than exists, and the elevation of what might be considered vaguely normal behaviour to evidence of exceptionalism.

It’s no surprise at all that the headline’s promise of “one surprising similarity to Keith Richards” didn’t end up being Charle’s secret ability to bash out Brown Sugar or a previously untold story about him falling out of a coconut tree. Jones’ desperation to make the King sound special leaves him flailing around for anything he can grab onto and landing on laughter as proof that he’s both just like us and a cut above.

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14 Nick Timothy (⬆️3)
’The response to the riots reflects terribly on our political class’
The Daily Telegraph, August 4 2024

We should be honest about what all of this means for our future, and what we can do to change it now. The danger is that the Government – wedded to its belief in multiculturalism and abetted by the wider Left – continues the denialism and responds only in political fashion. Already, the signs are there that they see an opportunity to tar all those with mainstream conservative views – about immigration, violent crime and policing policy – with the same brush as the rioters and the instigators.

Nick Timothy made it into last year’s chart when he was merely a Telegraph columnist, former joint chief-of-staff for Theresa May, and prospective parliamentary candidate for the Conservative Party. Now he's the Tory MP for West Suffolk and still a Telegraph columnist. Following in the footsteps of Boris Johnson, he’s retained his bully pulpit while sitting in parliament and unsurprisingly his tune hasn’t changed.

Last year’s entry saw Timothy blame the left for misinformation while this year’s sees him… blame the left for the fragile state of the country following this summer’s riots. Notice that his political rivals are responding “only in political fashion”. He’s doing nothing of the sort, of course. It’s just common sense when he says it.

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13 Sarah Vine (⬆️1)
’No social media. No smartphones. No men in women's loos. Just wine bars, Wonderbras and loads of fun. The 90s was the last great decade’
The Daily Mail, September 20 2024

God, the Nineties were fun. Especially if you happened to be living in London, as I was at the time. You could still smoke in restaurants (they only banned it on the Tube in 1987), the West End was full of clubs (not coffee shops) and you could get up to all sorts of things at parties without someone snapping the evidence on their phone and ruining your entire life.

You could rent a flat without having to sell a kidney, get your telly from Radio Rentals, pay your gas bill by cash or cheque at the Post Office. Landlines were still in use. People had answer machines and Rolodexes. You could go to a concert without every other person holding up their mobile phone in front of you. You didn’t need an app to park your car, or a loan from the IMF to pay for it either.

As we saw in part one, the news of the Oasis reunion was catnip to columnists. While Sarah Vine’s 2024 output contained plenty of other horrific contributions, this one earns its spot for metastising Facebook memes about the “good old days” into their most malignant form yet.

Come for the implication that everyone was “[bumping] into Madonna at 192”, stay for the sheer clunkiness of lines like “the world was unfiltered, like our cigarettes”. The best thing about all this noxious nostalgia is that at the time, the Daily Mail was disgusted by the whole affair. Imagine what kind of reimagined 2020s we’ll be served up by the Sarah Vine of 2054. Unless, of course, the Sarah Vine of 2054 is just an AI trained on the one we’re stuck with right now. The future does not look bright.

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Stay tuned for Part 3. Thanks for reading.

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