If Mephistopheles turned up clutching a contract and wearing Paul Dacre’s face like a cheap halloween mask, would I kick him out as unceremoniously as the salesman selling brushes who snuck through the security gate last week? No, I probably wouldn’t. 

In my luxuriously salaried days (the dizzying heights of £28k a year), I would do my party piece rant about never writing for The Daily Mail at the drop of a canapé-sized sausage and mash. I’d be too ashamed to write for them, I said. It’s a hate sheet staffed by journalism’s crew of the damned. Home to the screaming skull of Melanie Philips and the unctuous babbling brook of bile that flows through Amanda Platell.

But then a few things changed. Through a series of Twitter-enhanced coincidences, I ended up becoming friends with Suzanne Moore, the excellently shod R.P. McMurphy of the Mail stable, the only half-sane one in the asylum. Why does she write there when the paper stands for almost everything she disagrees with? Because it is the biggest popular platform in Britain and she doesn’t just want to preach to the mostly converted in her Guardian column. Of all British commentators, she’s most shot by both sides. 

The other reason Suzanne writes for The Daily Mail is because it pays. Because she’s been making money writing for a living since before I was born. You can waste hours ruminating on what you want to write and where you’d most like to write it (believe me I do) but unless you’re actually getting paid for it, you’re as much a professional writer as the wistful lad in the coffee shop is Hamlet. For a good run of seven years, I got paid to write consistently. In the past year, that’s been a little trickier. 

I would pull my left arm off for a national newspaper column. I would dip my arm in gold paint and present it to Alan Rusbridger as an award for having the most wilfully dishevelled hair in British journalism. I would take my left arm and use it to prod some immigrants or point to a bizarre waste of public money by the BBC in their pursuit to destroy Christmas and replace it with Winterval. I would set alight to my arm like a fleshy fire lighter and use it to burn all my morals on a big bonfire.

Once my left arm was nought but ashes, I would stare up to the top of Mount Olympus where the national newspaper columnists gather on nights when Richard Bacon goofing about in the Groucho Club is just too much to bare. And my eyes would fall upon the king of the columnists, the one to whom even Richard Littlejohn, an adjutant of hell, must bow – Jeremy Clarkson. I would recall the words of Stewart Lee and recite them: “Behold, his outrageous politically incorrect opinions which he has for money.”

I would notice creatures swimming around below Clarkson in a kind of primordial ooze of bitterness and juicy innuendo about groups without the ability to deliver snide put downs on a weekly basis. Looking closely, I would realise that it was Rod Liddle and James Delingpole, swimming after each other, playfully nipping at each other’s tails, competing to see which of them could make the most objectionable statement.

But that day will never come. However eager I am to rip off my own arm in the pursuit of a column, I lack the killer instinct required, the switch in my mind which would allow me to generate artificial anger to froth up a stew of angry commenters. Yesterday on Twitter I watched as James Delingpole tweeted enviously about the storm that Rod Liddle created with his Sun column attacking the disabled:

“The self-pitying left-liberal wankocracy are going batshit crazy about Rod Little in the Sun on ‘fake disabled’. Keep it up, Rod!” 

From an opening salvo that read “My New Year’s Resolution for 2012 was to become disabled”, Liddle descended into a rant about the plague of fake disabled people costing good honest tax payers. That the only figure he quoted in his entire piece was an offhand reference to “latest figures” which “estimate that 80 per cent of people claiming sickness benefit are actually fit to work”, is not surprising. This was dog-whistle, will-this-do? keyboard bashing of the highest order.

Inevitably, Delingpole could not resist joining in and penned his own column defending Liddle. Also inevitably, it drew nearly 600 comments from the ravenous beasts in the Telegraph comment threads, a group so brutal that they would be thrown out of a horde of orcs for being just that little bit too unhinged. 

When I suggested that Delingpole’s tweet might be more than a little envious of all the fuss Liddle had stirred up, he replied immediately asking if I was a “self-indentiying left-liberal wankocrat”. He concluded that I’d be skint doing his job after I asked whether the role of wankocrat is better paid than his position as a controversy-baiting contrarian. 

As incredibly unpleasant as it is to say the phrase: James Delingpole is right. If I were a national newspaper commentator like him, I probably would be skint because the metric of success is controversy. The Daily Mail is the top online newspaper in the world according to at least one analytics company. It gets its clicks through gossip and outrage. Its columnists draw heat and every week they need to manufacture some more outrageous opinions for money. 

Over at The Guardian, alongside the usual suspects like Polly Toynbee, there’s celebrity recruits like Lauren Laverne and David Mitchell who treat having a column as if it’s a lovely accessory they found at the bottom of a gift bag. Mitchell just blithely picks up and puts down his Observer column when he has something better to do. It’s not a vital source of income for him obviously but rather a nice trapping that comes with being an actor and panel show main-stay. 

The biggest reason that I will never be a national newspaper columnist is highlighted every Thursday night when Question Time rolls around. Just watch Melanie Philips, a woman paid handsomely to pass down her judgements on society, talk solemnly about the value of hard work. Newspaper columnists are, by and large, finger pointers and not problem solvers. They are an overpaid Greek chorus, yah-booing from Islington townhouses, warmed against the woes of the world by their Agas. 

I would still rip off my left arm to get a national newspaper column. But would I want to lecture the poor on how to bring up their children or what it is to work hard? No. Never. Because, whatever dip my career might be in currently, I write words for a living and ultimately that’s a doddle. Columnists love to finish up with a bit of homespun wisdom so, as my dad always says: try going to war and then talk to me about stress.