The weeping controversialists support group: Giles Coren’s pity podcast and Littlejohn’s victim complex are beyond parody, but let’s try…
No creature is more threatened than the ludicrously well-paid columnist.
Previously: Remember Foster's Law: A new method for dealing with Giles Coren
The animal kingdom features many startling defence mechanisms, including the boxer crab using stinging anemones as gloves to smack its enemies around and the seacumber firing its poisonous internal organs out of its anus. But even an undersea arse cannon cannot compete for embarassment with the high-pitched whine emitted by British columnists when threatened.
Despite their newspaper habitats being in decline, columnists aren’t threatened by extinction; their mating call (“I’m being cancelled! I’m being cancelled!”) rings out even as their contracts are renewed and they add second and third jobs on associated radio stations and in god awful ‘documentaries’ about (posh) trains, (posh) food, and (posh) hotels.
While there are a small number of younger members, such as The Telegraph’s Sherelle Jacobs — who today uses Tory donor and Rishi Sunak-mentor turned BBC Chairman, Richard Sharp, as evidence that a “Blairite elite” still runs Britain — and The Times’ James Marriott (whose young fogeyish act kicked in before he turns 30), most columnists are staring a middle-age in the rearview mirror.
When columnists like Giles Coren1 (who’s been one for 28 years — more than half his life) and Richard Littlejohn (who just gallumphed into his 33rd year of being unpleasant for money) feel threatened they strike out wildly, emit a sustained whine, and curl up into a ball, declaring themselves victims. In today’s newsletter I’ll examine the latest examples from Coren and Littlejohn:
Coren and his wife Esther Walker decrying the mistreatement of columnists (and, in particular, Giles) on their Times podcast Giles Coren has no idea, and Richard Littlejohn rumbling into the 90s with an Ali G-referencing, sub-Roy Chubby Brown style Daily Mail column (headlined Would you feel comfortable applying for a job when you know the chips have been stacked against you in advance? Is it coz I is white?)
In the November 5th episode of Giles Coren has no idea, recorded on location at the Lanesborough as Coren was completing filming on the fourth series of the BBC’s Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond the Lobby, he and Walker spend the first fifteen minutes of the 29-minute episode raging about this tweet…
… which was ‘inspired’ by his previous column (“Men are write-offs when it comes to novels”, The Times, October 29) and the Bad Sex Award-winning, eye-watering, penial physics-flouting sex scene from his novel Winkler:
And he came hard in her mouth and his dick jumped around and rattled on her teeth and he blacked out and she took his dick out of her mouth and lifted herself from his face and whipped the pillow away and he gasped and glugged at the air, and he came again so hard that his dick wrenched out of her hand and a shot of it hit him straight in the eye and stung like nothing he’d ever had in there, and he yelled with the pain, but the yell could have been anything and as she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands and he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro.
Coren protests that he won the Literary Review’s prize for the most unappealing description of what tabloid newspapers are seemingly required to call “sex acts” because he was willing to turn up2, that he thought it was funny (“…it was 2005, irony existed then,”) and that anyway the scene was meant to be bad:
It’s a fantasy! It’s not a real sex scene, it’s a joke sex scene with a ridiculous description.
Walker backs him up:
It’s a joke sex scene written in order to bolster up your character Winkler as a bit of a monster.
Until I sat down to write this edition, I was among the vast tranche of humanity that haven’t read more than that single passage from Winkler. Like Zorro.
However, to assess Coren and Walker’s defence of the prose, I had to join the roughly 2,200 others who have subjected themselves to it (and I’ve included Coren in that number). For the bargain price of £2.99, I purchased the ebook and discovered the grim parade of scatalogical references and unfeasible sexual descriptions isn’t confined to that punctuation-free paragraph.
Winkler does not narrate his story. And the events of the “dick jerking like a shower dropped in a bath” encounter are not introduced as a dream sequence, fantasy, or product of anyone’s imagination beyond that of one G. Coren.
Prior to that moment, the woman against whose teeth Winkler’s dick “rattles”, an unusual Australian called Albuquerque, calls it “Uncle Wiggly” and Coren describes it as a “sorry bulb”. There is much more (and much worse) besides and I now understand what Colonel Kurtz meant when he said, “The horror, the horror” at the end of Apocalypse Now.
Coren’s approach to his career is best summed up by Nelly’s line in Hot In Herre (“I’m just kiddin’… unless you gon’ do it.”); he wants to be taken seriously but also to have the “it was all a joke” get-out-clause close to hand at all times. If Winkler had succeded, I doubt he would have dismissed his writing as a joke that other people just don’t get.
Discussing his 2016 Sky documentary, My Failed Novel — which admittedly was a clever way of getting some more cash out of a dead project3, Coren says he experienced “genuine hurt and pain… I always wanted to be a novellist, I thought I was a good enough writer, I thought I was that guy.” That admission and the documentary in which Coren subjects himself to mockery from Jeffrey Archer among others might be humanising were it not for his ego endlessly pulsating like the veins on the Mekon’s head.
After all that feckless conversational foreplay the podcast finally gets to the main event. Coren returns to the ‘young male novellists’ column and says:
It was a fucking joke! and I got a Twitter pile-on of massive proportions about nothing. I’ve done bad things that I regret on Twitter. It has happened…
There was a Twitter user that took the headline, which said “why are there no young male novellists” — didn’t read the piece, which was only the joke— then took the sentence where I said, “And I wrote a novel with some decent words, some of them in the right order, even won the Bad Sex Award…”, then put the link to my embarassing — deliberately embarassing, deliberately silly — that won the Bad Sex Award, and wrote something like, “A play in three acts.” … she got 100,000+ likes and it reopened everything about me…
There it is again, his Hot in Herre defence, wrapped up with self-pity and the barely surpressed rage that lurks just beneath the surface of all of his ‘jokes’.
“This week it’s like every bad thing you’ve done happened last week,” Walker says with spousely sympathy and Coren is off again:
… they dragged up an email that I wrote, which basically started my career as a quote “controversial columnist”, 2007! Still grieving for my father, fucked up in a thousand different ways… slightly pissed, midnight, my column goes online and the guy’s made a mistake, type, type, type, one thousands words…
The email is on The Guardian website so it hardly requires digging through dusty archives to retrieve it but for the briefest segment of a second I almost felt sorry for Coren, yoked to a stupid letter written while he was grieving but then…
It went on the front page of The Guardian — the only time they’ve managed to have my prose in there because they can’t afford to pay my actual rate — which led to the book deal… that was embarassing too. I had to go to a party and have Martin Amis go, “Giles, I really enjoyed your…” — there was time enough for me to go, “Is he going to say novel? Is he going to say recent column?”— and then he said, “… email”. It was 14 years ago and for about five years it was alll anyone talked to me about.
Giles Coren — the hereditary journalist who laughed at Dawn Foster’s death in the week of her passing and has said and done so many other things that would be career-exploding for a ‘civilian’ — is complaining that he had to suffer the mildest consequences of his actions. He didn’t enjoy his cocktail party banter with Martin Amis and people still bring up that he was a total prick. Perhaps he might consider not being a prick anymore?
Still the podcast rant continued:
Now… 100,000 people have expressed their horror again… it’s like literally yesterday I wrote a bad novel, accepted the Bad Sex Award with a shit scene in it, then wrote an evil letter to the subs, and then… literally everything. You wonder: What’s the point of sitting down now and looking at the news and trying to find something new and fun to say about it — which I don’t even really mean, which is just a joke — because some fuckwad on Twitter is going to take it in bad faith and try and end me.
Only Giles’ list there is incomplete. It doesn’t include his mocking tweets about Dawn — for which there has never been a direct apology — or…
…the time he fantasised about killing and then fucking a neighbour’s child for playing the drums, when he baselessly accused another journalist of being a paedophile and threatened to stab them, when he wrote a racist screed against Polish people, when he called going away with his then-three-year-old daughter “the sexiest holiday [he’d] ever had” and the sequel where he berated his then-four-year-old son as “a fat little bastard” (that one had a sequel of its own — the one where he writes in grim, misogynistic detail about the boy’s circumcision).
The self-pity section of the Giles Coren has no idea concludes with Walker assuring Coren that…
… you’re a nice person and you understand that you are paid to have an opinion, in a media where most people are like me and they are too scared to say anything.
I understand that she has to believe that — he’s her husband after all — but his greatest shits suggest otherwise. Coren’s concludes that on Twitter…
… there’s no forgiveness, no moving on, no kind of ‘doing your time’.
After laughing at Dawn’s death, there was no contrition and no apology from Coren and no real consequences for him. The Times closed down comments on his pieces for a time and his front wall was graffitied (“Dawn Foster forever” — a sentiment that I wholeheartedly endorse)4. Despite a recent self-pitying column in which he joked/not joked that…
… as a middle-aged, middle-class, white, heterosexual, cis-gender, public school-educated British male of small “c” conservative bent, I have had to accept that my days in the media are numbered.
… he just concluded filming on a BBC documentary, writes three columns for The Times/Sunday Times and has a weekly slot on Times Radio. Ignore his defensive whine and you quickly realise that consquences are nothing but a party game for the thin-skinned, too frequently spotted Giles Coren.
Coren’s victim cosplay is mirrored by Littlejohn’s howls. Asking, “Is it coz I is white?”, the Daily Mail columnist who was rated the 21st most important hack of the modern era by Press Gazette in 2005, despite or perhaps because of his rampant misogyny, racism, and homophobia, howls:
White, heterosexual men are routinely portrayed as imbeciles. This isn't advertising, it's proselytising. Every cop show features a tough female detective inspector, despite the fact that whenever you see a senior Scotland Yard officer giving a press briefing outside the Old Bailey, he's almost always a balding white male.
Perhaps Dick may wish to look at his own writing for one reason why it’s easy to caricature straight white blokes as “imbeciles”. In the same column, the great thinker winds himself up into a red-faced fury about… Thomas the Tank Engine (or rather a research project into railways and colonialism):
How long before the wokerati come for Thomas The Tank Engine?
The railways are accused of spreading 'colonialism' by the statute-toppling classes. It can only be a matter of time before they demand that all trains are cancelled, for ever. That's if the Network Rail engineering department and ASLEF don't beat them to it.
Littlejohn doesn’t bother to explain to his readers what has made him some furious — a year-long research project into the role of steam trains in colonialism involving academics from York, Leeds, and Sheffield universities as well as curators from the National Railways Museum, the Science and Indusry Museum, and the Leeds Industrial Museum — because that would sound too reasonable. Instead, he pretends that some “loony lefties” are saying “trains are racist”.
The project was announced a month ago and covered by the Museums + Heritage Advisor trade blog with little excitement but having come to the attention of The Daily Mail, Telegraph and LBC newsrooms, it’s suddenly an opportunity for culture war anger and controversy.
While Littlejohn clings to his catchphrase, “You couldn’t make it up!”, he does, weekly, to a deadline in The Daily Mail. Meanwhile Giles Coren dishes it out as he has for nearly 30 years but remains entirely incapable to taking it. Perhaps the solution is the formation of Arseholes Anonymous where columnists of their ilk can gather together to howl about how opressed they are with their big pay packets, prestige bylines, radio shows and TV contracts. We could even tell them it was being recorded. No need to switch the cameras on, mind.
Yes, I know Coren has been a frequent character in these newsletters but there was public demand for me to cover him again.
Anna Jean Hughes on Twitter reports that she was at the 2005 Bad Sex Awards ceremony: “When he recieved it he said, ‘Thank you for this terrible fucking award’. And groooooan did we all.”
Coren received a £30,000 advance for Winkler.
The same thing appears to have happened to the door of his Lanesborough suite.