Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

It’s not misogyny, Professor Beard. It’s you

Oh, this age! How tasteless and ill-bred it is.’
— Gaius Valerius Catullus

‘I do not know whom Mary Beard is but wyth a name lyke that she surely has a third teat and a hairy clopper.’
— Internet posting following Professor Mary Beard’s appearance on Question Time

So Catullus, mate — things have not got much better over the last two thousand years. People, it seems, are still ill-bred and tasteless, as that second quote up there would suggest. It was not the most tasteless comment on the internet over the last week or so, or even the most tasteless to be directed at Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge. There are others, most so vulgar even I wouldn’t repeat them, from quite the most ghastly ill-bred people. I suppose it is shocking that someone of Professor Beard’s standing and breeding is forced to suffer its hideous manifestations.

What happened was this. Professor Beard was invited to take part on the BBC’s Question Time programme, where she made what can be politely described as an utter fool of herself. I run a small, light-hearted competition every year on my blog for people to vote for the most stupid woman to have appeared on Question Time in the past 12 months. It is but the third week of January and Mary is already a shoo-in, I fear, unless they ask Lynne Featherstone — the Manchester United, nay the Barcelona, of this particular award — back on to the show.

Anyway, having performed with stumbling vapidity in her earlier answers, she turned to the question of immigration and the influx of Bulgarians and Romanians we are all looking forward to welcoming to our shores next January. Mary managed to appear smug, patrician and fabulously ill-informed in her answer, which was to the effect that a study in Lincolnshire had suggested that immigration had caused nary a problem at all but had added immeasurably to the rich diversity of the area — and so, she concluded, there would be no problems at all from this next wave.

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