YOU have to feel for those poor right-wing newspaper columnists, forced to toil unnoticed as an unfeeling world does them down.
Please lend your pity to Richard Littlejohn. All those years of ranting away in the Daily Mail and other unseemly locations. All those years of the world being against you. Just the other day, Littlejohn could be heard complaining again about that rotten left-wing plot.
“The vengeful Left is cynically using a rift in the Royal Family to launch an all-out assault on the British Press,” ran the headline above his column.
To misquote Kenneth Williams in Carry On Cleo, “infamy, infamy, those scheming lefties have all got it in for me”.
Just imagine the torment of being a right-wing columnist for all those years. Your side wins the elections, pulls the levers of power – and yet still those devious lefties want to spoil your fun with their liberal establishment and their wicked woke ways.
In this instance, the leftie avengers had ganged up on the misunderstood chief of the Society of Editors, Ian Murray. This is a journo-centric matter in a way, but stick with me. After Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which they accused the British press of racism, Murray issued a tin-eared rallying call, declaring that there was no racism in the press.
Assorted journalists – many black, but by no means all – protested about this statement; assorted editors – some vaguely left-wing, but by no means all – protested about this statement. And Murray stepped down, clearly having erred.
Yet he was the victim of his own actions, not of the vengeful left. It’s telling the way right-wing columnists play the poor us card in order to make themselves the victims. They wilfully exaggerate the power of the lefties and the liberals, conjuring up an enemy far more powerful than the puny reality.
As for what Murray said, the newspapers don’t get to decide if they are racist. That’s for others to say. And the same observation does royal service with the Duke of Cambridge who, when ambushed by a reporter’s impudence, declared: “We are very much not a racist family.” What else could he say? Not much, but again that’s for others to say.
In case you should be wondering what a right-wing columnist might make of last night’s appalling scenes on Clapham Common, think no more. Sarah Vine is on hand in the Mail on Sunday to give her view on the aftermath of the murder of Sarah Everard, a death that lies heavy on the heart of York, where Sarah grew up.
To be fair to Vine, her column would have been written before last night’s appalling scenes in which women protesting about violence against women found themselves being manhandled – a word used advisedly in this context – by police officers.
But still…
“How wrong for Sarah’s death to be hijacked by men haters,” runs that headline. As for what lies beneath, I’ve not read it and have no intention of doing so. But I did read Littlejohn’s efforts, so feel free to cut me some slack.
Home secretary Priti Patel might say “questions need to be answered” over the police handling of that vigil in Sarah’s memory. But a wider question needs to be asked about her new Policing Bill that aims to extend temporary pandemic restrictions on protest marches.
Sadly, Patel is intolerance personified. She is also a publicly alleged bully whose reportedly intolerable behaviour cost the government – in other words, you and me – £340,000 to settle with ex-Home Office chief Philip Rutman.
Still, there’s probably a right-wing column to be written about how the ‘Pritster’ – to borrow the prime minister’s absurd nickname for her – doesn’t deserve any of this and has been set up by vengeful lefties.