It’s so strange now to think that I spent several happy years as a Guardian columnist, the only billet from which I’ve ever garnered a stand-alone anthology – The Guardian Columns 1998 – 2000:
There is no other commentator who can turn received wisdom on its head like Burchill… no other journalist who can combine such relentless insight, malice and warmth to deserving causes. She is one of the best columnists around – an antidote to the glut of confession columns that saturate the weekend papers.
Huzzah!
Admittedly we fell out when I asked for a raise and they offered me a sofa instead – is it ‘cos I is a chav? – but then, they offered my friend, also a woman of working-class origin, a new kitchen. And there was the fact that by 2003 I was finding the ceaseless obsession with the wrong-doings of Israel suspiciously like the Socialism of Fools. And then the Times offered me three times the money to leave.
Nevertheless, I have fond memories of the Guardian for bringing my career back to life after one of my regular stints on the Naughty Step and thus I’m not altogether triumphalist about what a mess it’s in now.
To lose one talented prima donna (moi) may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two (Suzanne Moore) looks like carelessness. And now the Guardian has also lost Hadley Freeman (who has toddled off to the Times as I did). Semafor, a global news company launched last year ‘with a focus on global news for college-educated readers’ (get you), just ran a long piece called ‘Inside the Guardian’s civil war over trans coverage’ and my word, it makes amusing reading for those of us who are proud to fight for Terf Island.
For the Guardian, this news is not good news. It has become the story rather than the reporter
Starting off with 2021 when that regular little ray of sunshine Judith Butler decreed that women who won’t call a bloke Belinda are, yes, literally Hitler – ‘anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism of our times’ – Semafor then does a deep dive right back to 2013 when some very un-college-educated loudmouth called Julie Burchill abused transies in the Observer and spoilt all the lovely inclusive fun.
My bad! As a charming young lady said to me at one of Posie Parker’s early rallies: ‘My gran says you were the one that started this!’
The background to the piece I wrote is indicative of the Guardian/Observer’s decade-long weakness and duplicity from day one. I’d been passing the time on Facebook waiting to go out one evening when news came that Moore was being monstered by the newly emerging trans-lobby; naturally I weighed in on her side in with a few choice insults.
Imagine my surprise when, after it was denounced by some loony Lib Dem in the House of Commons, the Observer withdrew it and apologised. The editor, John Mulholland, rang me up saying he hoped I’d carry on writing for the Observer – then never asked me to write for him again, the big girl’s blouse.
The sheer cowardice and dishonesty of the paper – not just commissioning a piece it knew was sceptical of trans activists, but actually commissioning the piece on the strength of a string of social media disses only then to have a fainting fit.
Mulholland’s grovelling set the tone; a predator goes for the weak member of the pack first and so since then the Observer/Guardian has become an arena in which both sides in the gender wars seek to turn each other into twelve tins of cats food.
A decade on, the tiny minority of angry transexuals who work at the Guardian, urged on by their ‘allies’, have attempted to drive out anyone who doesn’t agree that a penis can be female. Their most recent targets have been Sonia Sodha and Catherine Bennett.
Sometimes it seems like the mob won’t be happy until all the uppity women who work there are replace by either trans-maids or female impersonators. The editor, Katharine Viner, has sent many a memo to her fractious columnists asking for the social media monstering to stop, but she can hardly be seen as the voice of reason after awarding her husband Adrian Chiles his very own column. In it he ponders such burning issues of the day as ‘We can go to the moon – so why can’t we stop my glasses sliding down my nose?’ and ‘You’re never too old to climb a tree – and I should know’.
So now the Guardian Terf Wars has turned up on Semafor and my goodness, it makes a juicy read. It says that ‘a person close to Hadley Freeman…told Semafor she believed Viner and other editors generally shared her scepticism of trans activists, but were scared of criticism from younger pro-trans staffers. The person said Freeman first spoke to Viner about writing about trans issues in 2015, and came away with the impression that Viner agreed with her view.’
The report also claims that ‘several trans contributors to the Guardian have announced that they will not write for the paper “until it changes its trans-hostile and exclusionary stance”’. Maybe Viner’s smarter than she looks, because it’s a cold hard fact that gender critical types are far better writers than the Verruca-Salt-joins-the-Stasi mob – apart from the obvious merit of not being liars about basic biology.
To conclude, in-depth pieces on newspapers are fascinating for me, who could gossip about other hacks till the sacred cows come home, but for the Guardian, this news is not good news. It has become the story rather than the reporter, and a rather silly story at that.
A newspaper can survive being callous, or hypocritical, or dishonest, but once a paper is branded as silly (those savagely amusing memes of Guardian writers getting upset about everything from asterisks to zebras) it’s a long haul back. And it couldn’t have come at a worse time, credibility-wise, with the news that, rather like Mitchell and Webb’s slowly comprehending Nazis, the holier-than-thou Guardian has been hectoring the rest of us from atop a platform made of the broken bodies of the slave trade all this time.
As Jonathan Sumption wrote for Coffee House: ‘This has caused something like a nervous breakdown in the paper’s York Way offices. The editor, Katharine Viner, writes that the revelation made her “sick to my stomach”. The paper’s staff are said to be “tormented” by the thought. There have been abject public apologies, promises of amendment, and all the usual apparatus of cringing self-laceration.’
But will this awful revelation have any real effect on the bumptious blowhards who act as the Guardian’s star columnists? Will George Monbiot give up lecturing for Lent? Will Zoe Williams flagellate herself over the way we heteronormative types have overlooked the trials of trans people? Or will they keep telling the great unwashed how they should feel about everything from breakfast to Brexit while the paper’s sales dwindle and their heads disappear further up their fundaments?
I certainly shan’t be observing any inter-hack loyalty while they make fools of themselves, as Owen Jones and his colleagues have thrown words like ‘fascist’ and ‘white supremacist’ at this magazine’s writers for too long. That The Spectator was one of the few publications of the time to stand against the slave trade while the Guardian filled its coffers from profits from that heinous trade is almost too poignant. Wrong side of history, anyone?
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