The Legion of Tactical Amnesiacs: Towards a new unified theory of "Columnist's Brain"...
The Legion of Tactical Amnesiacs: Towards a new unified theory of "Columnist's Brain"...
The gulf between what columnists believe they do and their actual function is so vast that even Evel Knievel would have demurred at trying to jump it.
YouGov, the polling company/Tory Party roach motel, regularly asks its online panels about their opinions on public figures including (obviously) politicians and celebrities but also columnists (who are, effectively, a hideous chimaera of the first two categories). According to the Q3 2021 YouGov rankings, two of the Top 10 columnists in Britain are dead and have been for some time.
Victoria Coren Mitchell, who writes weekly columns for The Daily Telegraph, sits at number one (her husband, comedian and Observer columnist David Mitchell, doesn’t make the list and, delightfully, her brother, Britain’s unluckiest car owner and most consistently bylined shithead Giles Coren comes in at number 10).
Plummy-voiced Times Radio host and emergency Joan Bakewell stand-in, Mariella Frostrup, holds the number 2 slot. At number 3, we get our first dead man: Jimmy Young. The long-serving Radio 2 presenter, crooner, and Daily Express columnist died, aged 95, in 2016. He’s followed by Simon Calder, The Independent’s radio and TV appearance hungry travel expert, at 4, and BBC Radio 2/Radio London host and Express columnist Vanessa Feltz, at 5.
In at number 6, comes the second dead man of the top 10: Michael Winner, whose Winner’s Dinners column ran in The Sunday Times for over 20 years, but was curtailed permanently in 2013 when he shuffled off to the great serving in the sky. I’m sure he’d be delighted to know that even 8 years after his death he’s more famous than current Times restaurant critic Giles Coren and ranks four places higher.
Bridging the gap between Winner and Coren, the rest of the Top 10 is completed by LBC’s Nick ‘Austin Allegro’ Ferrari, the FT’s Mrs Moneypenny (aka Heather McGregor) whose column ended in 2016, and Oi!-loving 80s throwback Garry Bushell1 who plies his trade in The Daily Star Sunday and the Sunday Express.
Even Coren-Mitchell who tops the list isn’t particularly popular (YouGov pegs her popularity as 29%, which means the percentage of people who have a favourable opinion of her). Giles Coren is 10 percentage points less popular than his sibling, which is a good result for him, especially given his record of business-casual racism, writing grotesque columns about his children, and laughing about the untimely death of a young woman (for which he has never apologised).
One of the bits of feedback I get quite often about this newsletter is that I write too much about columnists and, on the surface, the YouGov results support that critique. Many of the British media’s most prominent columnists don’t crack the Top 10, with most people surveyed by YouGov having never heard of them and those that have thinking little of them.
But I think what columnists say, how they say it, and the way the newspapers that play host to them promote those thoughts are even more interesting if you consider what a small percentage of the population is listening to them and the even smaller group of people that think kindly of them. Because in defiance of data and anecdotes alike, most columnists believe themselves to be tribunes of the people, rather than marionettes for their proprietors.
I’m a big fan of Hussein Kesvani and Phoebe Roy’s podcast Ten Thousand Posts, which subjects tweets and other social media outbursts to analysis creating across its episodes an ever-evolving thesis on the condition known as “poster’s brain”. This newsletter is, in large part, an ongoing exercise in exploring a comparably debilitating disorder: Columnist’s Brain.
About 10 years ago, a long-standing columnist (no names, no pack drill) told me that she thought writing columns for years was basically mentally damaging. A writer begins their work as a columnist with opinions that are as organic as any opinion can be — subject to the professional and personal pressures, plus the distorting effects of peer group, upbringing and class — but over time, as the weekly drip of the deadline works on their brain they begin to cobble together thoughts on things that they’d otherwise never care about.
Similarly, the intensity of those opinions increases over time as the columnist, drunk on dopamine and adrenaline, chases the initial high of having an audience respond to their thoughts. Columnist’s Brain is a deranged cocktail; it contains ego, entitlement, certainty, doubt and a commitment to always doubling down.
Today, I want to look at three columns (two from the past week and one from last month) that demonstrate Columnist’s Brain in action.
In the pantheon of Daily Mail writers willing to fillet their own lives for the readers’ grim, sniggering delight, Liz Jones stands above all others. Her case of Columnist’s Brain is so severe that no event in her life cannot be minced up and stuffed into the translucent casing of a “piece”2. Jones is a walking Russian doll, which, if you travel through the layers of irony, sincerity, self-hatred and spite, concludes with a scrunched up invoice at its heart.
The latest instalment of her long-running art project on the theme of narcissism and misanthropy, Liz Jones’ Diary, is headlined In which I object to being called a bully and takes a turn for the meta as she catches a reference to her in a new documentary about Amy Winehouse…
The tweet landed the second after a sentence had been uttered on TV, during the Amy Winehouse documentary, A Life in 10 Pictures. One of the late singer’s best friends said that a turning point for Amy’s mental health was a headline in a tabloid: ‘Amy Decline-house’. It turns out I had written that piece.
Having received the tweet, accusing me of effectively killing the star, I feverishly googled the article. It was published in 2007.
There indeed was that heading, with a shocking photo of the singer… I hadn’t been mean at all.
… which sends her rushing, like Proust with a Prada addiction, to pick over her past as a columnist and present her theory of what it takes to be one:
As a columnist, it’s a conundrum. The defence when writing critically about others – boyfriends, husbands, family, celebrities – is that it’s all true. They shouldn’t do bad things – shouldn’t cheat, or call you the C-word, or get an ecstasy tablet out of their wallet in front of YOUR BOSS at dinner, or demand to be reimbursed for a £25 book on barn conversions when you’ve just bought them a house.
Men shouldn’t date a columnist if they’re going to be precious. For any writer, the personal always seeps into the copy. If it doesn’t – if you remain invisible and spare anyone close from having their gory details exposed – you are short-changing the reader, and are, to be frank, bloody boring.
Liz Jones is like the proverbial elephant — for the benefit of Liz, who with her super-human commitment to self-Googling will read this, that’s not an allusion to weight — in that she never forgets. She had ‘main character energy' long before it was a TikTok trend and when side-characters sleight her (be that an ex-husband who thankfully for Liz continues to write about her too or country neighbours who object to being insulted in a national newspaper) it all goes into the script, grist to the ever-expanding epic of her ego.
While most other columnists are willing to be something other than a columnist, to debase themselves on Times Radio or coin it in by turning their insights into tedious position papers for sinister think-tanks, Liz Jones is a columnist to the centre of herself, powered by a dark star of self-hatred and spite. She writes:
When I first met my future husband, he’d chirrup, ‘I quite like my high-profile naughtiness.’
The ex said, ‘Publish and be damned,’ only to change his mind later.
But when they do, inevitably, behave badly, then it’s my job to tell you. Anything else would be dishonest. You deserve the highs and the (frequent) crashing lows. Because your lives are like that. You don’t live in a fictional world of happy families and orchards, the only conundrum which Farrow & Ball colour to choose. And neither, sadly, do I.
Earlier in the piece, Jones includes a telling piece of self-justification (“Such writing isn’t just about selling papers or records, it’s about making others feel less alone…”) but the truth is that the Mail titles’ editors adore her because she is so willing to be devoured and to cut every part of her life into morsels to feed a readership ravenous for well-marinaded schadenfreude.
The best way to understand Liz Jones is to think of her as the column-writing equivalent of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s Ameglian Major Cow (aka the Dish of the Day), which Arthur Dent and companions first encounter at Miliways, the restaurant at the end of the universe:
Dish of the Day:
Bweeeh... Good evening, Madam and Gentlemen. I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?Ford:
Oh, well.Dish of the Day:
Something off my shoulder, perhaps, brazed in a little White Wine sauce?Arthur:
Your shoulder?Dish of the Day:
Well, naturally mine, sir. Nobody else's is mine to offer. [clears throat] The, uh, rump is very good, sir. I have been exercising and eating plenty of grain so there's a lot of good meat there. [moos] Or a casserole of me, perhaps?Trillian:
You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?Ford:
Me, I don't mean anything.
Liz Jones is an Ameglian Major Cow with ever-replenishing meat and I am your Ford Prefect; I don’t mean anything.
Our second case of Columnist’s Brain comes from The Daily Telegraph, Britain’s premier fanzine for tweedy racists, UKIP casualties, and proponents of flat-roof pub thinking, which also serves as a home for the permanently furious and terminally columnist brained.
Tim Stanley, Telegraph columnist and former leader-writer — he’s just been ‘promoted’ to share the parliamentary sketch writing job with hereditary Telegraph hack and close friend of Lawrence Fox, Madeline Grant — contributes a column headlined Ditch ‘ladies and gentlemen’ and you lose values.
This has long been Stanley’s brand. He’s 39-years-old but, in common with a lot of people who convert to Catholicism as grown-ups, he pretends to be at least 20 years older. Having played a character since university, he’s a variation on John Updike’s theory about fame…
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation.
… with column writing as the mask that has burned all the way through to his skeleton, pushing him further and further into the cartoonish corner where he now resides. That his column opens with pooterish irritation at British Airways dropping “ladies and gentleman” as a greeting…
I feel safer with the ladies who call me “gentleman” on upper-crust BA because they make a plane seem more than just a coach with wings.
… is entirely on-brand for a man who is infamous to many as the author of this unforgettable tweet:
I really do despise the English. You make the effort to wear a bowtie and you just get laughed at by builders.
But getting hyper-ventilating angry about the most minor of changes is par for the course at The Daily Telegraph (its technical name is Hefferism) and the part of Stanley’s column that’s truly of interest is the one where he, like Jones, starts to talk about being a columnist:
… I’m switching Telegraph jobs from weekday leader-writer to political sketch writer – partnered with the magnificent Madeline Grant3. It’s been seven years full-time; longer, freelance. My first leader was on the US 2012 election, in which the paper delivered the verdict that “A Romney presidency is not as terrifying a thought as his critics would have us believe” (in 2012, Mitt was considered extreme, and that was a compliment).
In 2017, this is absolutely true, I was asked to help write a standby leader/obituary in the event of Donald Trump’s assassination: there was a theory that someone might try to blow him up at his inauguration, perhaps with a drone. This was of particular interest to me because I was assigned to attend said inauguration – in fact, the Trump people had kindly given me a seat in the front row. There’s a reason why in many of the photos, I’m looking at the sky.
This column will continue, if only to keep readers up to speed with Bertie, the naughtiest dog in the world, whose current obsession is with feathers. He picks them up off the field and collects them in his mouth. By the time he gets home, it looks like he’s eaten a pigeon.
Those paragraphs illustrate the inherent contradictions of the Stanley persona: On the one hand, he frames himself as a kind of column-writing clown — Pooter with a permanent invite to appear on the Moral Maze — while on the other, he is treated as a serious commentator (his latest book, seriously titled Whatever Happened to Tradition? comes out on Thursday and, merely by dint of being Catholic he is a regular on Radio 4’s vestigial Thought For The Day slot).
And, in his sureness that readers care deeply about his dog, Bertie — a variant of another Columnist’s Brain symptom (believing that readers care to read about your children) — there’s a clear example of the banality of the modern columnist mixed with the simple requirement to bulk out the word count.
The final example of Columnist’s Brain has already appeared in this newsletter: Hadley Freeman’s final regular column for the now deceased Guardian Weekend magazine4(see So long, farewell, we Hadley knew you: The real function of columns vs. what columnists pretend they're doing, September 19). Reflecting on 21 years as a Guardian columnist, Freeman wrote:
[Back in 2000] column-writing was seen as something of a private members’ club: elitist, dusty and distant. Back then, young journalists wanted the fun, scrappy jobs: investigative reporter, music reviewer, features writer. But ever since the rise of blogging culture in the 2000s, when anyone with an Apple PowerBook (RIP) could knock out a column, pretty much every aspiring journalist I’ve met has told me they want to be a columnist.
Stating your opinion online has become the definitive way of saying who you are, so of course more people want columns. Yet, here’s a funny thing: I can’t recall a single day – and there were thousands – that I spent sitting at my desk writing a column. I can, however, recall going to the Oscars to cover them, or the weekend I spent with Judy Blume to interview her. Columns pump up the ego, but going out and finding stories is a lot more fun.
This is another set of Columnist’s Brain symptoms: The pretence that you never really wanted a column anyway despite the handsome pay packet and chance to have your say endlessly coupled with the notion that the narrow selection of columnists offered up by newspapers is, in fact, not a club and the argument that opinion-writing is worse because the internet means anyone can do it.
Freeman hammered away at that last point, arguing that over the past five years — a number picked to place the blame at the charity shop shoe-clad feet of Jeremy Corbyn — there has been “a shift from when readers merely disagreed with a column to disagreeing and therefore assuming the columnist is A Bad Person.” In fact, I think many columnists are Bad People because they have shown themselves to be so in countless columns, sometimes over decades.
A major symptom of modern Columnist’s Brain is a belief that somehow the column writers of the past were treated with more respect and operated in a climate of polite chin-stroking debate before the internet ruined all that. Thinking back to Sid Vicious lashing out at Nick Kent with a bicycle chain or Julie Burchill and Camile Paglia having it out over fax, among many other examples, that’s clearly bollocks.
What bothers the truly columnist brained is that social media means they cannot simply send their columns into the world like beautiful pigeons that will shit on anyone they dislike and be certain that ordure will not be thrown straight back at them. Similarly, despite the Overton Window having been narrowed to a cat flap through which only the most compliant moggies can squeeze, columnists remain convinced they are all incredible original thinkers.
Freeman claimed…
… it’s ironic that at a time when column writing has never been more desirable to so many, there is such an expectation of conformity of opinion.
… and argued that criticism is “not about holding [columnists] accountable for their opinions” but is “a refusal to accept that not everyone sees things the same way.”
But read the newspapers on a daily basis as I do, in a form of professional masochism, and you realise quickly that across the so-called spectrum of the British ‘free’ press, there is very little difference of opinion. There’s a reason why it’s easy to slip from The Daily Mail to The New Statesman or to The Guardian to The Daily Telegraph. The prevailing ideology of the British newspaper industry is journalist solidarity and as long as you are suffering from a severe case of Columnist’s Brain, you can work in any part of it.
Yesterday, in an article for the i paper — Britain’s most annoyingly named publication — Stefano Hatfield, a former editor of thelondonpaper (the now-dead former holder of the ‘Britain’s most annoyingly named publication” title), former executive editor of The Independent and ex-editorial director of London Live, turned teacher5, wrote about lunches with Boris Johnson:
… in a previous life as editor of a London newspaper, it was my job to have lunch with Boris Johnson (and his amiable minder, the renowned knee-taker Guto Harri).
They were jolly affairs, filled with his banter and quips. Back in the office, my news team would be keen to know what he said: was there any news angle? I could never remember, neither policy, nor statement. Boris had played the joker – and I had fallen for it. Why do we always fall for it?
Hatfield brings up the example to make a point about class clowns and politics, but he is, in fact, describing a key element of Columnist’s Brain. Johnson, the most successful columnist brained man in Britain, utilises two symptoms of the disorder to his great advantage at all times: 1) Tactical Amnesia and 2) Lies That Even You Start To Believe Are True.
Stefano continues…
We so often fall for the quip, the joke or the delivery at the very real expense of focusing on the content. This is, of course, entirely what the joker wants – not just in politics but the classroom, the office and even the dinner table.
… but is unable to see, as he is himself engaged in writing a column, that this is the function of newspaper columns and their creators. A column attempts to entertain, persuade, and bamboozle in the moment but if a contradictory line is required the next week that doesn’t matter; it’s time for tactical amnesia.
And for the true Columnist’s Brain sufferer — lifers like Johnson, who will return to The Daily Telegraph once he has finished what is, for him, an underpaid sabbatical as Prime Minister — you’ve only to believe what you’ve written for the brief period that edition is on the shelves and not lining bird cages.
Popularity in YouGov polls doesn’t matter to Columnist’s Brain sufferers because they know that the only metric of popularity that really matters is whether the editor is still on side and the proprietor finds them amusing. That’s why the most monstrous of them seem set with jobs for life.
Appropriately, given that he resembles an animated testicle in some ill-advised and immediately cancelled TV show, Bushell is the singer of Oi! band, The Gonads.
Journalists — and I am no exception — have a depressing addiction to calling their columns and features “pieces”, implying art where there rarely is any. The self-consciously ‘umble version is frequently deployed by the far from humble Marina Hyde who insists on introducing her columns via Twitter as “my bit on…”
Subs, please check this claim.
It’s been replaced by Saturday. If you’ve forgotten how to ‘saturday’, read my review of the first edition here.
I suspect this career change may, in fact, be a kind of penance for inflicting London Live on the world.
I expect Giles Coren will be seething at being beaten once again by his sister, and also by a dead man!