Another conflict of interest and indeed of my mental state. I can think of no journalist I enjoy reading more than Jon Ronson. He is, I think, unequivocally brilliant and my only complaint is that I do not get to read him in the papers more often. His books are very good, too. But this last weekend he turned his attention to Katie Hopkins, a fellow Sun columnist of mine, and he approached his subject as one might approach the inmate of a heavily-guarded lunatic asylum.
Some of the stuff in that ludicrous first four hundred words was designed to sell the piece to the (Grauniad) reader, I suppose. But still. I do not always agree with Hopkins – indeed of late have rarely done so. But when will liberals understand that people who do not agree with them are not necessarily insane, or damaged, or weird? Hopkins does not ‘run towards hatred’, as Jon suggests; my guess is that either the majority or a sizeable minority of the population hold precisely the same views about, for example, those asylum seekers floating about in the Med. She is sane, rational and expresses herself with some force and colour – as tabloid hacks are supposed to do.
It is only the liberals who react in this way, with this hyperbolic outrage and loathing. I know some of you lot got a bit snippy when I said in these pages that I would be voting Labour in the election. But there wasn’t the screeched venom and hatred I’d have got if I told Guardian readers I intended voting Ukip or Conservative. It would have been a continual fugue of abuse and that massed ovine bleat of raaaaaacisssst. And cissexissssssst. Et al, et al, et al.
Incidentally, I’ve never even met or spoken to Hopkins. This is not a defence of her, or The Sun, per se – neither need one, she’s a very successful columnist and it is a very successful newspaper. It’s just another observation of the hysterical, shrieking, liberal middle class at work. Isn’t it time we just ignored them?
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