Julie Burchill has found a new way to provoke: she’s turned sincere

The greatest ever social media spat took place before the first tweet was sent, and was conducted via fax, which was like email but with the satisfyingly tangible tear of a fresh missive just arrived from across the planet. It was early 1993 and Julie Burchill, then of the Modern Review, was locked in a war with Camille Paglia, then of any US talk show you cared to tune into. The conflict began with a disobliging review Burchill filed of Paglia’s Sexual Personae, before shifting to the Xerox front, where Paglia made the mistake of questioning her interlocutor’s working-class credentials. Burchill brought hostilities to an abrupt close with her final communiqué, which read in toto: ‘Dear Professor Paglia, Fuck off, you crazy old dyke. Always, Julie Burchill.’

Since I was a teenager, I’ve been obsessed with that ‘always’. It just makes it, doesn’t it? Adolescence is the best time to be introduced to Burchill. Famously, Karen Grant, the teenage termagant of Brookside, idolised her, but, like the Merseyside soap, Burchill hit the buffers in the 1990s, that drearily good Blanche Hudson of a decade to the 1980s’ self-obsessed and deliciously evil Baby Jane. Since then she’s had perches on the Guardian (where I discovered her), the Times and most recently the Telegraph, from which she was dropped for tweeting her surprise that the Sussexes didn’t name their daughter ‘Georgina Floydina’. It wasn’t her best material.

The real indignity was that her heave-ho prompted one of those SEO-chasing online explainers that the Sun is now better known for than Page Three: ‘Who is Julie Burchill and why was she “sacked” from the Telegraph?’ Who is Julie Burchill? You mean the gobby provocateur once paid oodles of Fleet Street dosh to be Britain’s most reviled insult-chucker? The helium-voiced troll rated, hated and imitated for her dazzling verbal aggression and her facility for offending both suburban tastes and liberal pieties? How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a forgetful public.