Early on the morning of May 2 1997, I woke up and switched on the tiny TV in my bedroom. I was 13 and watching the first Labour Prime Minister of my lifetime walk into Downing Street. Almost all the details of that historic moment have dissolved from my memory. All that remains is that Cheshire Cat grin and those insistent hand gestures.

I was an odd kid who listened to Radio 4 and was about as popular at school as condoms in a Vatican vending machine and I was sat there in bed supposedly watching Britain change. 

For my entire life up until that day, the Prime Minister had been a Tory.

Television news was stalked by the big beasts of the Conservative Party, themselves boiled down to cartoon characters in my adolescent mind – Norman Lamont as Billy Bunter gone off sandwiches in favour of sums, Kenneth Clarke chomping a cigar, Heseltine swinging past on a vine and John Major, the before picture in one of those Charles Atlas ads in the old comics I bought from the second hand bookshop.

I don’t remember a word that Tony Blair said as he stood in Downing Street that day. I just remember the sound of D:Ream assuring us all that Things Could Only Get Better and the new Prime Minister glad-handing the adoring crowd which I naively didn’t realised had been bussed in by party bosses. So I went back and looked at the speech Blair gave that day.

One paragraph stood out more than any other, three short lines that demonstrate the gulf between New Labour’s promise and what it delivered:

“It will be a government that seeks to restore trust in politics in this country. That cleans it up, that decentralises it, that gives people hope once again that politics is and always should be about the service of the public. 

And it shall be a government, too, that gives this country strength and confidence in leadership both at home and abroad…”

The Conservative Party is now whistling that tune. In the wake of the Lobbygate scandal, Stephen Byers offering himself up for hire like the least trustworthy minicab driver you’ve ever clapped eyes on, David Cameron has pulled on the rhetorical lycra to become, The Change:

“After the election we will have a once in a generation opportunity to bring about real change. To bring transparency and accountability to the system.…restoring trust and confidence in our politics. 
Above all, to show that a new generation of MPs, a new generation of Ministers understand the anger and disgust people feel with politics today, and are determined to put things right, and to show what public service really means.”

Change is like a Harry Potter spell for politicians. They peer across the Atlantic at President Obama and indulge in wishful thinking: “Maybe we can do what they did.” But the simple fact is David Cameron is another man in another suit. Gordon Brown is the man in the suit that we’ve got but don’t really want anymore. Nick Clegg is the man in the suit who says he’s not like the other men in suits.

As a precocious teenager with an over-developed interest in politics, I couldn’t quite believe Tony Blair when he spoke early on that May morning. As a 26-year-old man disappointed with the way things have panned out, I don’t really believe any of those men in suits with their pretty accessory wives and pretty similar policies. I want to but I can’t. Hope is a commodity they trade in, change is a word that looks nice on posters.

When I wake up early on the morning after the election and open up my laptop to see who’s won, I’m afraid that I’ll feel like the 13 year old me did, confused by all the cheering. For 13 years of my life we had Tories. For 13 years of my life we’ve had Labour. What could they possibly offer over the next few weeks that won’t leave us all thinking – same shit, different day?

Liz Jones is a misogynist trapped in a woman’s body. One of her big fascinations is breasts. They hold a grim allure for her. She returns to them in her columns time and time again, working herself up into a horrified frenzy, casting other women’s cleavage as the monstrous antagonists in her personal nightmare.

Her latest take hangs on the idea that big breasts are suddenly back in fashion on catwalks, designers apparently deciding to acquiesce to the reality that women come in a variety of shapes. As with any Liz Jones piece, it’s an opportunity for her to whip round and peer at herself in the mirror.

She’s written with frightening frankness in the past about her decision to have a breast reduction. It’s not the choice itself that’s disturbing – plenty of women make that choice – but the way Jones describes it. In a column last November she said:

“I used to have big breasts. They reached almost to my waist…they looked obscene in a T-shirt. I had them cut off.”

In today’s column she goes further, describing the aftermath:

“Even though the operation was painful, expensive and meant I couldn’t drive a car or lift anything or lie on my front for six months, when I got home and looked in the mirror, I realised I instantly looked younger and thinner – and here’s the thing – so much more fashionable.”

There’s a demented sort of logic at work there but still it was her choice and her right to make it. The problem comes when Jones turns the hatred she directs at herself outwards at other women. She machine-guns it out in a paragraph of particular viciousness:

“I now hate women with breasts: I look at those who expose their sweaty cleavages and think, hmm, how slutty, I bet they use them to get ahead at work.”

Defenders of Liz Jones’ columns in the Mail often say she’s just telling it like it is. But her opinions come bouncing through a prism of mental illness. “Jeffrey Bernard is unwell” used to appear on a blank page when the late Spectator journalist was absent or too incapacitated to deliver his copy. The equivalent should be appended to any piece Liz Jones submits.

Read more Liz Jones Watch columns:

A Cash-strapped freelancer on Liz Jones “Queen of the overdraft”

Linking money from movies with murder: this time she’s gone too far

Liz Jones: hates humanity, loves shoulder pads

Duncan Bannatyne has a magic lawyer. This invisible creature has the power to turn an slightly ill-advised Twitter joke into the grounds for a legal action that would make the Iraq Inquiry look like a bunfight. Thankfully Duncey Wunky (as I like to call him) chose not to deploy his pinstriped dogs of war and instead encourage his army of spelling-mistake-scattering, ignorance-embracing followers on @sharongooner.

Gooner (not her real surname) has a good line in clever and not so clever puns which she sprinkles through her timeline. She’s like Bob Monkhouse with boobs, a cheesy joke machine – entirely harmless and often pretty hilarious. But she made the fatal mistake of mentioning the beast of Bannatyne and the wrath came down upon her from Dragon Mountain where Peter Jones and Theo Paphitis play table football with adult male footballers kebabbed onto skewers (Legal note: this is a surreal image for effect. They actually use dwarves).

Sharon Gooner’s joke was innocuous and wasn’t directly addressed to Bannantyne (there’s was no pointed @duncanbannatyne there to goad him into action). Her joke, a pun predicated on knowledge of tedious pre-antisemitism-and-wife-beating Mel Gibson vehicle Brave Heart and Bannatyne’s fellow Dragon’s Den judge Deborah Meaden:

“Duncan Bannatyne’s wife is having an affair. He bellowed at reporters: “You may take my wife but YOU’LL NEVER TAKE MY MEADEN.”

It’s neither hilarious nor harmful, it’s just a clever little quip in a string of puns. There’s context all around it. It’s clear from the construction that it’s a joke rather than a factual description of marital relations. Well, to any sane human it is. But not to big DB. He stormed in to Sharon Gooner’s timeline with firing off threats like a drunken sheriff in a low-budget western:

“Just so you know, if anyone believes your silly tweet & if it hurts my family I will sue you for as much as I can.”

And so the war of the retweets began after Bannatyne claimed Sharon Gooner refused to delete her tweet or apologise (which seems not to be the case). Beleaguered by attacks from Bannatyne’s vastly larger army of followers (he has 17,000+ compared to her 3000+ pun loving friends) Gooner began to retweet both the support and abuse she was receiving. 



Meanwhile over at the Bannantyne Cave, Duncan threw a spotlight on Sharon Gooner, nabbing her a nice collection of new followers but also an almost unstoppable torrent of bullshit and a fair smattering of death threats from knuckleheads.

The war is over now but the shouting still echoes in my head. How did Bannatyne come across the tweet, which was not directed at him? There’s two options: either someone who follows him and Sharon Gooner squealed (unlikely) or he has an ego search set up to tell him whenever someone mentions him on Twitter. The latter is more likely and it’s more common than you might realise.

I’m constantly nattering on Twitter and a big part of what I talk about is TV shows and radio. I’m not always that complimentary about the stars. I make what I like to consider light-hearted quips but some might characterise as caustic attacks. I’m like a TV critic with the tap turned on constantly, a stream of commentary, catcalls and occasional praise. That’s fine when you think the targets of your ire are trapped in the talky box but on Twitter, they tend to talk back.

Nicky Campbell seems capable of both wrangling the fundamentalists and borderline mental health cases that call into his morning show and responding to tweets that mention him (with @ or without). Either the 5Live presenter has the fastest fingers in show business (a potentially frightening thought) or he has someone monitoring all references to him and operating an instant rebuttal unit that would put New Labour in its propaganda prime to shame.

A few weeks back when Campbell was discussing Chris Moyles’s giant baby temper tantrum over pay, I commented on Nicky’s approach to the issue. Without referencing him with that pointed @ sign, I got a message within minutes from @nickyaacampbell challenging my points and then bounced back and forth in a conversation while the human Campbell batted away the most severe maniacs live on air.

Another incident happened a few days later when bemoaning the presence of corkscrew-haired restaurant critic Jay Rayner on two channels simultaneously and challenging him (in a tweet not addressed to him) to actually cook something himself, I swiftly received a retort from the man himself. Once again, a celeb’s Twitter ego radar had caught me in its beam. In fairness to Rayner he took my jibes in good humour and seems to have a tendency to engage with people on Twitter in a way a lot of well known tweeters don’t.

But these incidents – from the severe abuse suffered by Sharon Gooner to my vaguely embarrassing run in with Jay Rayner – show celebrities are actively scanning Twitter to see how they’re coming over. If the analogy of Twitter as one vast cocktail party holds true, these celebrities have installed vast ear trumpets which they can point towards your conversation and if they disagree, a megaphone to tell everyone what a tit you are. Beware: the Twitter ego radar is operational and you become the next victim.

The Iraq War Logs make me think of my dad and his friends as young men. My dad was in the navy while I was still a baby. I don’t remember him being in uniform and his role as a medic onboard ship meant he was never in direct contact with ‘the enemy’.

In my dad’s case the enemy was the Argentinians in the Falklands War, a conflict he shipped off to straight after returning early from holiday with my mum. If he had chosen to he could have ducked his responsibility to his ship and colleagues – simply ignored the message left on his door. But he didn’t.

The Falklands was a very different kind of war to the ones we’ve fought in recent years. While it is still a controversial part of Margaret Thatcher’s divisive tenure, it comes with the mitigation that British civilians were under threat. Thatcher deployed the task force to a British colony to free it from foreign invaders. It was a legal military action in the face of an act of an aggression.

The Iraq war was a conflict prosecuted in defiance of international law without the shield of a UN resolution and predicated on a lie. It was undertaken to institute regime change and resulted in the fracturing of the imperfect secular state held together by Saddam Hussein’s reprehensible regime into an constantly shifting patchwork of dangerous political and religious factions.

In Afghanistan, we have failed to defeat the Taliban just as the Soviets failed to defeat the Mujaheddin. We are fighting a war in the cradle of guerrilla warfare, the spiritual home of the resistance fighter, a region that has repelling the foreigner knotted into its DNA. Whatever the politicians and generals claim, it is an unwinnable war in a nation that has never truly been a nation.

When my dad and his shipmates sailed for the Falklands, they were sailing to a war with a known enemy and a defined goal – defeat the Argentine forces and recapture the islands. It made it easy for civilians to flock to the docks to see them off and flock there again to see them return.

But even in a war with such a clear narrative – Britain vs Argentina, the Malvinas vs The Falklands – there were incredibly complex moral questions at play. War is a dirty business, you cannot wage it and leave with clean hands. The sinking of the Belgrano (justified in my view) is still an act that raises tempers while the Argentine troops that invaded and tried to hold the Falklands was made up in large part of teenage forced conscripts send to battle by a military dictatorship keen to bolster its position on the domestic stage with an act of force. 

It was once a truism that the narrative of any conflict is written by the winners. The dominant force would define the parameters of the media coverage and place documents in shields of secrecy for years, diminishing their power by the time they are rolled out in disclosures. Many an old soldier’s memoirs include acts that would be defined now as war crimes. The pop culture notion that World War 2 pitted the moral Allies vs the dastardly Nazis is a reductive playground dream.

The Nazis war crimes were more systematic, more documented. They geared the German state up for the task of warfare and extermination and provided a perfectly minuted record of their planning. We know when the Final Solution was born because we have the minutes of the Wannasee Conference that coined the term. 

The Iraq War Logs that have been released in a coordinated effort by Wikileaks and its chosen media organisations is a leap on in breaking down the ability of the government and military to control the narrative. In the Gulf War, embedded correspondents and night vision footage of smart bombs gave us the illusion that we were seeing the real war but it was only ever a sanitised fireworks display.

While correspondents consistently brought the true and unspun stories out of the conflicts in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, wars waged by the powers in the West have always been more controlled, more packaged up for our consumption. The dirtiest, darkest incidents have only ever slipped out in drips and drabs.

The Iraq War Logs show us the true horrors and corruption of war in something closer  to real time. These are the brutal rough edges of conflict shown to us without the censors red pen, the historian’s desire to show us reality but not too much reality. Even when we’re given the blood-soaked beach scene of Saving Private Ryan, it’s still the ugly face of war with a dash of blusher and rouge to take the edge off.

The Iraq War Logs are the uncensored stream of horror that happens every day in a war zone. It is the story of soldiers, sailors and airmen doing terrible things and having terrible things done to them. People are fed into the machine and what they do within it often defies our everyday logic, shatters our everyday morality.

The Iraq War Logs are studded with shocking details. The full extent of Iranian complicity in IED attacks is exposed as is the use of Iraqi civilians as minesweepers by Coalition troops, the failure to capture the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and among the most shocking disclosures – Apache helicopter pilots firing on surrendering civilians. It is a list of horrors that makes a long and brutalising read.

Its disclosure occurs while men like my dad, the product of a council estate who joined the Navy as the best option to get out of a dead end town with a paucity of options in a time of economic uncertainty, are still far from home. The Iraq War Logs don’t make things any easier for them as they try to do their jobs in operations the public don’t understand or wholeheartedly support. The best product of these documents would be to end the deployment of British servicemen and women in Iraq and Afghanistan far faster than is planned.

Our continued presence in those nations does not make us safer. That is a fallacy repeated ad-nauseum by politicians whohave failed to provide evidence to justify their claims. We are sending men and women to die on a false premise and while we do we have supported and condoned torture and despicable conduct.

I wasn’t born when my dad went to war and I was only a baby when he was deployed to the Falklands on a second tour. He didn’t see me until I was three months old. There are thousands of men and women who are enduring trying conditions far from home and thousands of Afghan and Iraqi men, women and children who have been ill-served by the decisions our governments have made.

The release of the Iraq War Logs should be used as a catalyst to ask serious questions about our foreign policy but we should also not let Julian Assange go unquestioned. He and Wikileaks are an unchecked organisation, operating only by their own rules. 

Julian Assange showboats and enjoys his role pricking at authority but neither he nor media organisations like The Guardian can truly guarantee that their revelations will not put men and women on the ground in more danger and exacerbate an already combustible situation.

The Iraq War Logs sit in a vast library of documents that previous wars produced but were kept from our gaze. Modern tools have made the disclosure possible but an equally shocking library of evidence could have been produced in 1945 on Allied conduct during World War 2 or 1992 after the Gulf War.

War is a time of brutality and barbarism. It is an experience that can elevate men and women and bring out the best in them in the defence of themselves, their comrades and their ideals or lower them to a bestial, barbarous low that produces inhuman acts and true cruelty. 

For us to judge from in front of our monitors, hands poised at our keyboards is easy. To know how we would truly behave is not. Would you be implicated in one of those articles of shame if you went to war?

“A pirate nation, moving under our own flag, with lawyers, clowns and attendants.” – Keith Richards, Life

As a teenager I was enthralled by the music journalism of a long gone age. It wasn’t the contemporary hacks coughing out words on Pulp or Oasis or…god forbid…Northern Uproar, that got me desperate to get my words in those inky rags. It was the big beast of the 70s that intrigued me.

I was fascinated by Nick Kent, all leather and bad intentions hanging out with The Rolling Stones, Julie Burchill – a malevolent fairy flung from surburbia into a barbed wire encampment at the heart of the NME, Charles Shaar Murray – all curls and spiky put-downs and Lester Bangs, the sweaty prophet of pounding the typewriter until it groaned, dead at 33 but always looking 10 years older.

They worked in the time when rock was in its teenage years, boisterous and unruly, spitting and snarling, wrecking its hotel rooms for the first time, awkward and interesting in ways that just seem boring now.

Rockstars had entourages and hangers-on but they hadn’t formed an impregnable phalanx yet. The Roman legion of PR people and marketing types hadn’t got into their stride then, they weren’t armed and dangerous.

The music press was teenage then too. Experimental and wild at times. It had shaken off the fustiness of its school days, the precious hagiographies and boring news stories. It want to make friends, fuck, fight, drink and drug just like the bands it was writing about. 



The seventies was the golden age of the gonzo music hack, vampiric in their desire to gobble up the free booze and drugs and backstage passes flowing through the veins of the music industry. At every turn their was an opportunity for excess, to sample the “fruit and flowers”.

The barrier between the music press and the music industry was far more porous. Mick Farren could be a journalist and a musician at the same time, My good friend Andy Giles could get his typewriter confiscated for turning to the dark side and pounding out press releases for Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin while still taking the NME shilling.  

It was also a time when music papers could be self-indulgent and allow writers to be brutal and funny and daring. The music industry needed the music papers as much as they needed the music industry. Things were not so predicated on a conveyor belt promotional schedule and complete control. Artists could swerve round managers and PRs to talk directly to writers and built relationships with them.

Nick Kent was effectively embedded with The Rolling Stones for months at a time, a situation that helped to increase the time he spent with a needle embedded in his arm. Lester Bangs could publish an epic on The Clash that stretched across two issues of the NME and sparked controversy and ire from the band and its fans for depicting an episode where a roadie wailed on fan. Bernie Rhodes tried to set him on fire.

On the road pieces now are carefully choreographed, a few hours dropped into the humdrum precision of a tour. Shepherded in to talk to the band before the gig, allowed a brief window of socialising afterward. Rock’n’roll as a Disneyland attraction. True access like the kind Nick Kent got with the ‘Stones is a rarity. The last piece of truly surprising writing in the vein I saw was Caitlin Moran on Lady Gaga, Gaga pissing through her tights and taking Moran out to party late into the night.

But it’s unlikely that any writer will ever again get as close to a band as Kent did to The Rolling Stones when they were one of the biggest bands in the world, watching Keith and Mick looking down from thrones as two girls wrestled in flames on the floor, the decadent and dead-eyed rulers at the heart of the pirate nation.

The new world of music writing as its own stars but their domains are small and more fragmented. They don’t speak to grand narrative or thrilling access but speed and specificity. It is a world of experts in limited domains, not stowaways in music’s pirate nations. And the ones that did sneak onboard back then, they’re either dead or dull. I saw Charles Shaar Murray speak a few months ago. He committed the cardinal sin: he was boring.

Stephen Fry has opinions. In interviews they gush forth from him without much recourse to first travelling through his enormous brain. Like a newly completed bypass, his bon mots trundle straight from some hidden quip gland to his tongue. The latest one to cause ructions is that he is curiously mystified that women aren’t all about cottaging. We straight men do suffer so.

But the quote that really rankles for me is yet another of his slams on journalists. Turning his oracle like gaze towards my nasty, nasty profession Stephen Fry opines: “Many people would no more think of entering journalism than the sewage business – which at least does us all some good.” Frankly, he insults both journos and the good people of the sanitation business.

The big problem with Stephen Fry’s irritation and disgust with journalists is that he brands himself one whenever he fancies it. He’s never been shy of taking a hefty chunk of change to give his opinions in print or on the web. Obviously national newspapers are not sewage factories when he deigns to put his byline in their hands.

I like Stephen Fry. I think he’s talented and interesting and funny. But in recent years he has become as overexposed as Jordan’s boobs. Like them, he bounces up to the opening of anything and, sadly, unlike them will witter on about just about anything. Look! There he is compering at the T3 Awards, taking a shilling from the press to prance around just after prostrating himself for Microsoft at the Windows Phone 7 launch.

Stephen Fry sees the world through the prism of his own ego. That’s fine, so do most of us. But before thinking his comments through he wants to dance around for the interviewer, to give them some juicy and play to the gallery. For the Attitude interview he condescends about straight women, for the public who HATE journalists he spits out a nice little bit of bile.

If the sewage works stink too much for you Stephen, don’t keep turning up here to work. There are plenty of us who need the money a damn sight more than you do. I fear you’ve been struck down with a case of the Morrisseys – a mouth that’s permanently stuck in overdrive.

Yesterday my first Comment Is Free piece was published on the Guardian website. Surprisingly, the comments were generally quite positive and the debate was interesting but the one above got to me. The guy has visited my website (www.micwright.co.uk) and read my biog. From that he extrapolated that I’m essentially Lord Snooty with a Macbook.

It’s a mistake a lot of people make when they see Cambridge on your CV. Immediately they assume you’re some entitled posh boy who leapt straight from your public school to university and then into the hot seat at magazines and papers feasting greedily on daddy’s connections.

My parents worked hard to give me opportunities they didn’t have (my dad joined the Navy at 16 and now writes and builds websites, my mum is now a senior executive leading teams packed full of PHDs but never went to university herself). I am the first person in my family to attend university – I was able to go there thanks to hard work and determination.

When I left Cambridge, I didn’t have the connections that some of my contemporaries did. While many of them were parachuted into cushy internships where family money could pay for them to live in London without a salary, I took a job on a trade magazine. Pensions World was a hard gig – I knew nothing about finance – but it taught me how a magazine works and the skills you need as a writer and reporter.

Every other magazine or newspaper I’ve worked for has taken my work on the strength of my ability. I pushed and chivvied my way into those places. I fought hard and I still fight hard to get commissions. I earn just above the national average wage. 

This “representative of the media/PR, Oxbridge privileged something set” doesn’t exist.

I’m exactly the kind of person that most left wing commentators say should get to Cambridge – from a background of people who never had the chance before. I can’t speak for those dispossed young people because I’m not them but I certainly have experience times when I couldn’t buy food or pay the rent.

Just reading the top line of my CV tells you nothing but this: I’ve been brought up to understand the value of working hard and to know that life isn’t fair. Judge me if you want you Guardianista cliche but you’re dead wrong. And yes I know the comment shouldn’t bother me but it sure as hell does.

I like Everett True. Many don’t but I do. He’s a personality and modern music writing has a paucity of those. But that doesn’t mean I always agree with him. This week he’s been posting up the archive of one of his much-missed projects Plan B, a fine magazine which gave birth to many a great up and coming new music writer. But while that’s a brilliant public service it gave me occasion to read his editorial from Issue 0 and now, a few years late, I need to disagree with one of his quips. 

Recounting a trip to lecture some media students, Everett talks about dismissing “NME and Q as being put together by people embarrassed to be writing about indie music…” That’s the point at which he and I take different paths.

Both Q and NME have been terribly compromised publications for years but that isn’t down to the people working on them not caring or not loving music as much as Everett does. It’s because those magazines are cogs within large corporations with confused agendas, turned into toys for editors enthralled with a philosophy of “brand”, “content partnerships” and other phrases that translate to bad magazines. 

Everett’s advice to potential Plan B contributors was “be yourself” but that’s not always been a choice at NME or Q (although NME under Krissi Murrison is 1000% sharper than the dull days of Conor McNicholas running the paper into the ground). Q is like the Borg. It gobbles up writers and pulps them into a bland mush.

The Atlantic has just published a list of what makes great editing in celebration of its 153rd birthday. One point stood out for me as a big failing at Q was this: “Don’t over-edit. You will often estrange an author by too elaborate a revision, and furthermore, take away from the magazine the variety of style that keeps it fresh.” Too often Q has been like a mangle, squeezing until all the writer’s personality is left in the bucket.

That is not the fault of the people who work on Q [I was front section editor there for just over a year]. They are a sharp, smart, committed team with a real love of music. But the product they are made to produce is a sad compromise, under the cosh of powerful PRs trading access for writing about bands that just aren’t up to snuff. Q has to play safe.

Editors aren’t given the scope to be imaginative – they can’t take risks and there have been some terrible decisions (putting Johnny Borrell aka the least palatable man in music on the cover?!). No one in the office besides the boss backed that move but it happened anyway. A few months down the line the revisionist history had begun: “Who’s idea was that then?” 

Plan B was wildly inventive and individualistic. It could never sell more than a nominal number of copies. Q is bland and it struggles to maintain the sales figures it once easily pulled in. Neither is the solution for what a music magazine should be now.

In some ways, the question is whether a traditional music magazine, a bound collection of pages, still has a place. I think it has but a successful one needs freedom of movement that an oil tanker like Q doesn’t have right now. The ship can be turned around but the captain needs to accept that the iceberg it’s headed for is there to begin with. Right now, they’ve got their hands on the wheel and their eyes closed… 

One day, Quentin Letts, Daily Mail sketch writer and all round unpleasant individual, woke up and thought to himself: “I’d really like to get someone sacked today.” So scouring Twitter he discovered @baskers, a civil servant tweeting about her life with a nice big disclaimer stating that her tweets are her “personal views, not the Depts.” 

That little sentence didn’t bother Quentin though. He blithely skipped off to file his copy, taking with his a nice bit stack of @baskers’ tweets with him. He opened his unpleasant and unnecessary attack with a nice distancing statement: 

“Social network site Twitter [Ed: for it is necessary to describe it thus to the General Melchett types that splutter toast crumbs over their copy of the Daily Mail on a Saturday morning], which is increasingly landing its users in legal difficulties for posting foolish remarks, may soon claim another victim…” 

Clever old Quentin, pretending that’s not exactly the aim of the paragraphs that follow. He’s like Machiavelli in slacks this one. So Quentin continues, painting a picture of a vile drunkard [this remember coming from a hack, the most drunken, morally debased creatures known to man besides MPs – I should know I am one]: 

“A Whitehall official has been Tweeting about her drunkenness , boasting about how pointless she thinks some of her work is and how much she dislike the Government’s deficit reduction.” 

That sounds to me like a fair description of the average daily conversations of about 85% of British workers. But in the fairy tale world of Quentin Letts, it’s a bally disgrace. So Quentin did what any snot-nosed, prefect snitch would do in hope of another merit badge, he called @baskers bosses: 

“I rang her department yesterday to tell them, there was a cold pause before someone promised to ‘get back’ to me. He never did.” 

Possibly because he had to go to his boss and share the news that some prick from The Daily Mail had just rung up about an entirely pointless topic but was desperately hoping to spin it into a genuine furore. 

Dear old Quentin, then goes on to castigate Sarah Baskerville for daring to tweet that she has a hangover and the horrendous crime of being friends with Sally Bercow, the speakers’ wife. At no point does he prove that either of these horrific abuses of power have actually affected her ability to do her job. 

Quentin Letts, like a pigeon that feeds on bullshit swooped down on @baskers and has deposited the full force of The Daily Mail’s crap on her doorstep. She has done nothing to deserve his opprobrium and, as usual, he should be thoroughly ashamed of himself.

See the full Quentin Letts piece here without having to give The Daily Mail any hits. 

I tweet about Question Time a lot. My insults fly like shrapnel from a fragmentation grenade, indiscriminate and directed at all sides besides the saintly Dimbledore. But every Thursday, I always get a smattering of @replies from party political folk asking: what side are you on? For some reason the position that they’re almost to a man/woman/reptillian-tossrag as bad as each other (with a few notable exceptions), confuses the hell out of them. 

Today’s story about the Lib Dems having planned to drop the Tuition Fee guarantee that Nick Clegg unblinkingly promised looking straight down a camera lens is making great running on the 24 hour news networks. “Isn’t this shocking?” they cry. But it’s not. Not in the slightest. The Lib Dems knew they might imminently be jostling for a spot at the top table by holding hands with one of their natural enemies, there would be compromises and that was certain to be one of them. 

That’s not to say the Lib Dems climbing into power on the back of student votes they’ve now effectively pissed all over isn’t an unpleasant sight, but this is politics not a tea dance. And for ex-Cabinet ministers from the Labour ranks to scurry on our TV screens to decry the Lib Dems making concessions for power is pretty rich. These are the people who took us into an illegal war and would have licked cream off Clegg’s nether-regions for the chance to tie up a coalition and keep their ministerial jags. Don’t be deceived by their Damascene conversion to having principles. 

I’d desperately like a fourth option, a party not of the traditional left or right but of common sense and common decency, made up of people committed to making a difference rather than feathering their own nests with perks and excellent pension provision. I might as well stick a unicorn on my Christmas list. 

Watching the student protests this week (which have now been swelled in the media imagination to some priapic cross between the LA riots and May 1968), I grew immediately tired of the return to crap 80s tropes. Ah, it’s Tory Scum time again as if the Labour Party is comprised of these mythical self-less socialists. Let me point you towards a sterling example of why that is a big rattling machine pumping out steaming bullshit – Hazel Blears. 

When Sally Hunt, UCU General Secretary, was leading the student protest rally in a cry of “You say Tories, I say scum,” I just saw the same petty squabbling and cheap name calling that goes on in the Parliamentary chamber every day enough MPs actually turn up to debate something. To stop the damaging cuts and the even more damaging schism along class and economic lines, we need to go beyond that simple insult slinging and realise: the whole political system is no fit for purpose. 

Until me do, I’ll be sat on my deckchair here in no man’s land, my tin hat firmly in place on my head, whistling Lily Marlene and smoking the tarriest fags I can cadge off the rest of the platoon. This class war isn’t going to play out well for any of us and whether you carry the standard of the Lib Dem letdowns, the Labour Liars or the Tory Scum, you’re on a hiding to nothing. Sorry about that. 

Image from LewisPR 360. 

Johann Hari gets much love on Twitter. He’s the cleverest boy in class as I’ve written before but his grandstanding takedown of self-confessed sociopath and full-time dangerous fuckwit Kenneth Tong isn’t the Ali-knocks-out-Frasier triumph some people are making it out to be. It’s Hari letting a fool hang himself and pulling the quotes together effectively.

No doubt Johann Hari is a good writer, sometimes a bloody good writer indeed. And I will admit straight up that I am jealous of the platform he has. But that Kenneth Tong interview? An easy target taken down easily and what’s more: that gives Tong even more publicity.

All right thinking people know that promoting eating disorders whether it’s for some experiment or not is dangerous and profoundly wrong. No one needs to have Johann Hari highlight that for them unless they’re seriously ill already. So he knows some people with eating disorders, so do I. And sure as damn it the world is already buzzing with triggers for people with serious body issues.

Red flagging the sociopathic rantings of Mr Kenneth Tong has done nothing to make that better. People who are starving themselves to death don’t need to look far to find the proof they crave that they are doing the right thing, that they are fat and that fat is disgusting

I think Kenneth Tong is an unwell man himself and from his writing, it seems that Johann Hari believes that too. But rather than pulling the interview and putting an end to this little spectacle that Tong has constructed for himself, he published it anyway.

The interview didn’t just appear on Hari’s blog either, it was in The Evening Standard and on the Huffington Post. For all those vulnerable people that didn’t know that Mr Kenneth Tong, the size zero pill merchant, richboy fantasist existing, Johann Hari just acted as his hype man.

In the interview, Hari answers Tong’s question about his own mental health: “‘Do you think I have a mental problem? You can be honest with me,’ he says pleadingly. Yes, I say, I do. You should urgently seek help for your sociopathy.” If Johann genuinely believes that Kenneth Tong is mentally ill then why put him up as a pinata for the chattering classes? It doesn’t seem ethical to me. It’s a journalist elevating himself on the back of a pathetic case, a sick individual who doesn’t deserve to get even more attention.

The ending of Hari’s piece further highlights the paradox of writing a piece about a person you believe is beneath contempt: “So what can we learn from the twisted Twitter-parable of Kenneth Tong? It seems that of you drill down into women’s insecurities and men’s misogynies, even a talentless, spoiled little sociopath can catch the attention of the world, for a few days. It may be new media, but it’s an old, old story.” Yes, Johann, a talentless, spoiled little sociopath who you just got featured on the Huffington Post and in the Evening Standard, see the contradiction?

“Cullum deserves special mention, because he’s particularly odious – an oily sickening worm-boy, presumably grown in a Petri dish specifically for appearances on middle-of-the-road chat shows like this. 

Swear to God, if I have to see this gurning little maggot clicking into faux reverie mode ever again…I’m going to rise up myself and kill everybody in the world. Starting with him and ending with me…” –  Charlie Brooker, The Guardian,  May 2004  

In 2010, Charlie Brooker stopped writing his Screen Burn column after over a decade of verbally flaying presenters, actors and plain old boorish boobs who’d bounced onto reality TV. He wrote a lengthy mea culpa that simultaneously rescinded all those insults and revelled in them. Why did he switch off the tap of 100% proof bile that had propelled him to fame? Ultimately because he is on telly now and frequently bumps into the very people he used to pick on. Hell, he’s married to a TV presenter. 

I wonder if Brooker would ever have developed that hyper-aggressive style if the targets of his rage had been able to reply instantaneously from the start. Twitter didn’t exist when Brooker was penning TV Go Home, the caustic parody TV listings that help lift him to the high table at The Guardian, becoming that paper’s devil-eyed sayer of the unsayable. An angry letter or email is a far cry from a tweet fired off minutes after your column has gone live. 

The quote at the top of this post is from a piece Brooker wrote about Parkinson. The very presence of Jamie Cullum on the show led him to penning a murderous fantasy where his killing spree ends with the jazz man “sealed in a barrel and kicked into the ocean”. Six years later, after his damascene conversion to the joys of a well-stocked green room and a nice fruit platter, Brooker said: “Jamie Cullum strikes me as a harmless, twinkly-eyed, happy sort of chap”. 

In that same piece, atoning for his decade long imaginary killing spree through the ranks of light entrainment and reality TV fodder, Brooker recalls reading an interview with Jamie Cullum “in which he seemed cheerily bemused as to what he’d done to provoke such fury”. I have an interest to declare at this point: I wrote the press biography for Jamie Cullum’s record The Pursuit. In the process of doing that I interviewed him twice and was struck by just how goddamn nice he is. Before that, I like Brooker (though less aggressively), had joked about the friendly jazz hobbit. 

But once I got to know the human being, the idea of making cheap cracks about him became difficult to imagine doing. For a start, he doesn’t deserve them. He’s a talented bloke who’s worked hard to do a job he enjoys. Seeing him heckled at Glastonbury when he appeared with Spinal Tap at the request of Harry Shearer was an unpleasant experience. Why did certain sections of the crowd seem to believe that his brief appearance playing keyboards was some kind of tolerated stage invasion? 

Perhaps because columnists like Charlie Brooker have long delighted in saying unpleasant things about Jamie Cullum. Those statements might seem like passing slights but the sentiment lingers and comes together over time, feeds a certain sort of troll that likes to take those harsh words a little bit further. They’re the ones that forward tweets to people just to stir the pot and turn up at gigs to heckle. 

Since he sloshed salve on the Screen Burn, Charlie Brooker has discovered a rather high horse to dispense his wisdom on the horror of crowds and the insults they peddle. A notable example was his column on the response to Rebecca Black’s Friday. He was right about how horrific some of the comments directed at a 13-year-old girl were but two paragraphs of that piece showed a startling lack of self-awareness: 

“Many tweeters end up performing their opinions, theatrically overstating their viewpoint to impress their friends. Just like newspaper – but somehow even worse because there’s no editor to keep their excesses in check or demand a basic level of wit or ability. 

And unlike columnists, they often aim their comments at an individual by addressing their username directly: the equivalent of texting hate mail straight to their phone. I’ve never understood the mentality behind this, but then I write to entertain crowds, not harass individuals.” 

Charlie Brooker made his career from performing his opinions, theatrically overstating his viewpoint to entertain his readers. Unlike many tweeters who have extremely small audiences, his funny but brutal critiques of people’s physiques (Saskia from Big Brother had a “face that could advertise war”) were published to an audience of hundreds of thousands. 

Brooker addressed the individuals he joked about directly, he simply did it in print and on a massively popular website. The difference was that The Guardian name gave his words legitimacy and offered a kind of barrier from subjects. There are lots of people on Twitter who are as funny as Charlie Brooker, they’re just publishing their thoughts at the wrong point in history to benefit from the platform he had. 

I use Twitter to make jokes about people on TV and in public life all the time. Some people think they’re funny. Others don’t. The crucial difference from the halcyon days of Screen Burn, when Charlie Brooker could fantasise about brutally murdering popular recording artists or imagine reality TV contestants as foul animals, is that the subjects of my scorn can reply to me immediately and directly. On Twitter, we are all stood in the same massive room and my whispers in the corner can easily reach the ear of someone sat at the top table. 

@-ing someone into a joke about them is the web equivalent of knocking on their door and shouting “twat” in their face. I’ve never done that and I never will. But plenty of people do and they’ll also take something you’ve written about someone on TV and forward it to them, either as a way of being cruel to that person or as an attempt to get you in “trouble”, a snitchy kid giving a note your were passing to the teacher. 

I enjoy writing jokes on Twitter. I don’t do it to hurt anyone’s feelings. But when someone I have written about suddenly pops up in my replies column it stops me short. It’s quite easy to write about television and the people on it as if it is a magic box peopled by pixies that sits in the corner. When the box is off the pixies cease to exist and whatever you’ve said about them can’t hurt them, they’re off in pixie land. 

My latest experience with the mental dissonance of suddenly speaking to someone I’d tweeted happened today. Dawn Porter, the self-described “face of clean bum holes”, replied to this tweet: “Dawn Porter is in Dublin. I assume that means the Washlets Tardis is here too.” “Wanna have a coffee? I’ll bring you a free pack of Washlets x” she said and so began a back-and-forth in which I swiftly expressed contrition about my string of earlier tweets joking about the bum wipes ad campaign. 

Dawn has the right attitude to the whole Twitter jokes thing – in response to my apology: “Oh don’t be silly. I am the face of clean bum holes. It is to be expected x” – but it’s obvious that anyone who appears that frequently on TV and has 87,000+ followers must get their fair share of abuse. With my paltry 4000 odd, I get slagged off enough that my feelings get hurt every now and then.  

The risk of coming virtually face-to-face with someone I’ve made jokes about doesn’t mean I’m going to stop tweeting about celebrities. But it does make me think carefully about what I choose to say and why. Ego surfing is as irresistible for prominent people as it is for Joe Schmos like me. Why is it surprising that Victoria Derbyshire might scan Twitter for instances of her name and pop up to tell me my opinion on her show is wrong? Or that it’s possible for me to pitch my idea for an egg timer shaped like his head to Gregg Wallace? 

While there are plenty of prominent tweeters who act as if the service is an extension of a private member’s club where they need only converse with other celebs, there are plenty who listen to what the rest of us are saying. Sometimes they might not like what they hear. Other times, like me today chatting with Dawn Porter, we’ll realise our preconceptions might be a little skewed or as I said to my new celebrity friend (jokes!): opinions are like arseholes, they can easily be wiped away by a Washlet. 

I was just the hint of a glimmer in the eye when my dad shipped off to the Falklands. He was preparing to go on holiday with my mum and found the notice posted on the door of their married quarters. He could have skipped out on the commitment but he did what he was paid to do and immediately went to start stocking up the ship’s medical bay for sailing off to war. As the task force steamed towards the island, they played Rod Stewart’s Sailing over the public address system. 

My dad was serving another tour of duty in the Falklands when I was born, that time it was HMS Yarmouth (known as “the Crazy Y” during the conflict). If the war had gone differently for him, I wouldn’t be here. 258 British personnel were killed in the conflict, 775 were wounded and an unknowable number still suffer the psychological scars of their time on those wind-blasted scrubby islands. 649 Argentinians lost their lives in the Falklands War, 1,068 were wounded, 11,313 were taken prisoner, many of them were conscripts. 

One of my dad’s friends, Bob Young, was on the flight deck of HMS Ardent tending to a dying man as the bombs came down. Later, my dad, who was serving on the lightly-armoured fishery protection vessel HMS Leeds Castle, was involved in cross-decking the Ardent’s crew from the Canberra to the QE2, which had turned from cruise ship to floating hospital for the duration. 

My dad remembers that Bob sat in the sick bay with him calmly recounting what had happened. He had shrapnel in his ear and leg. He’d been on a surface-to-air missile emplacement when the attack came. The huge structure collapsed onto an officer. As he lay dying, Bob administered morphine to ease his pain and watched the bombs strike the flight deck. One moment it held a helicopter and crew, the next they were gone.  

In an alternative universe my dad would have been on HMS Antelope, which was sunk three days after Ardent. His friend Andy Till was on the Antelope. Firefighting in cramped conditions below decks is as close to hell on earth as I can imagine, the smoke and the flames and the shouting are fixtures of many survivors nightmares. If my dad had not withdrawn his transfer request after my mum, only recently his girlfriend, ran out of a club in tears, he’d have had a 50/50 chance of being on Antelope that day in May 1982. 

I find myself calling my dad to check facts in anecdotes that are drilled deep in to my brain and watching the famous Brian Hanrahan news reports (“…but I counted them all out and I counted them all back…) because of Sean Penn. Just as I stood up to disagree with an ill-informed idiot at university who was lecturing me on the whys and wherefores of the Falklands conflict (“You see, Maggie, wanted a war…”), I can’t stand listening to the laughable activist tit standing alongside yet another Argentine leader after a popularity bump at home by talking big about the Falklands.  

When Penn calls Britain “archaic and ludicrous” for defending the Falkland Islands, he is being openly disrespectful to those who fought and died to defend them. He is being deliberately provocative to curry favour with Argentina’s fragrant lovely of a President, Cristina Kirchner, who has stoked tensions over the Falklands in recent months. Argentina never declared peace after the Falklands War. We are not “militarising” the islands but protecting the inhabitants from the very real risk of invasion. 

To argue that because the Falklands are very far from the UK means we should just hand them over to the Argentinians is just wrong. The inhabitants of the Falkland Islands want to be British and that principle of self-determination is worth defending. General Leopoldo Galtieri was a dictator seeking a boost in popularity amongst the Argentinian people and sacrificed a conscript army in the Falklands to achieve that. 

The Falklands War was a tragedy but it was not one of Britain’s making. Margaret Thatcher undoubtedly benefitted from the success of the task force in regaining the Falklands but she did not prosecute that war for electoral gain. Of the military conflicts that British armed forces have taken part in since 1950, the Falklands was one of a handful that were entirely justified. 

It’s always a cheap shot to attack actors for playing make believe but sod it, Sean Penn’s comments about the Falklands are practically the dictionary definition of cheap. Men like Bob Young, Andy Till and my dad went to the Falklands to do a very real job in defence of those who could not defend themselves. We were right to defend the Falklands then and we’re right to defend them now. I like Sean Penn, I just prefer it when he sticks with words someone else has written for him.