Julie and Jonathan Myerson personify the worst generation in history

This family’s very public angst is all about making cash, says Rod Liddle. And the parents were not showing ‘tough love’ when they kicked out their son, but washing their hands of a problem

Not my vegetarian dinner, not my lime juice minus gin,
Quite can drown a faint conviction that we may be born in Sin.

— John Betjeman, ‘Huxley Hall’

It’s the perpetual adolescent in me, I suppose, but I’ve always rather had a thing for public enemies — people whom the entire British public wish to see flayed alive, hanged or deported. I enjoyed a fairly lengthy correspondence with the pop singer and entrepreneur Jonathan King when he was banged up in Belmarsh for having buggered several children; he was a clever and entertaining communicant and even seemed to agree with my assessment that he should have been imprisoned for even longer for the crime of inflicting ‘Una Paloma Blanca’ on an unsuspecting public. I struck up a friendship with the whacko hook-handed Muslim cleric Sheikh Abu Hamza al Masri, too, and even wondered about maybe having him over for dinner. ‘You call it homosexuality, Rod, I call it digging filth out of young men’s bottoms,’ he once admonished me when I was whining at him in a very liberal manner about his somewhat right-of-centre stance on sexual preferences.

A dinner party with old Abu and Jonathan King, I contest, would have about it a certain élan. Which is not to say that the evening would be problem free. I once witnessed Abu Hamza attempting to urinate; he had this young, extravagantly bearded and devout chap with him whose job it was to part the robes of his master and then point his implacably righteous todger toward the urinal, thus sparing it from hook-related injury, inshallah.