Diary

2 May 2009

Dylan Jones opens his diary

To paraphrase Tony Benn, if capitalism depended on the intellectual quality of the Labour party, it would end about lunchtime tomorrow. But it won’t be the economy that ultimately undermines this government, and it probably won’t be sleaze; it will be the disharmony. On the morning the Damian McBride story broke (in which he was rumbled sending emails to Derek Draper trying to smear David Cameron and George Osborne), I emailed a senior Tory figure: ‘McBride: couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke.’ Five minutes later came the response: ‘Quite. That Labour think all this is rather amusing tells you all you need to know.’ Like Ed Balls, McBride has always been one of those figures who is disliked by some of his own party as much as by those in opposition — a volatile man with an unerring habit of getting under people’s skin. Having made it crawl first, that is.

This week I’m celebrating ten years at the helm of GQ, a decade in which I have helped with a few literary and Hollywood trajectories, ruptured a few political careers, and attracted more than my fair share of flak. Predictably, some of the insults have been triggered by professional jealousy (and there’s a small, dumpy queue of hatchet-faced viragos forming as I write, waiting to compose their green-ink emails). Some have been funny (‘He’s a snobby, gobby, nasty, balding faceache... and he’s got the cheek to call us thick and ugly,’ ran the headline in a local Tyneside paper after I appeared on a reality TV show up there), but only one has been truly offensive. It appeared earlier this year, in the Guardian, in a piece written by Brian Schofield, someone I once fired. He called me ‘evil’ and compared me to, of all things, a Nazi. ‘He doesn’t just look like Goebbels, he channels him,’ wrote Schofield, obviously very pleased with himself. When I complained to his line manager, Steve Busfield, saying this might be actionable, Busfield merely acknowledged that I had been called a Nazi, rather than apologising. Schofield then wrote a piece the following day refusing to apologise for comparing me to Hitler’s propaganda minister. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I remain slightly bewildered by this.

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