Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Keeping up with Liz Jones

The confessional journalist who attracts more bile than any other

Liz Jones, the roving fashion editor of the Daily Mail, is a hate figure on Twitter and beyond. Recently, in one of her periodic confessional pieces, she wrote that she had stolen her boyfriend’s used condom and tried to impregnate herself with it. It was owed to her, she wrote, because she had bought him so many ready meals from Marks & Spencer but, as with many of Jones’s romantic misadventures, it failed — there will be no Baby Jones. Twitter, which has no sense of humour (mobs never do), read, retched, and excitably screamed for justice. The hypocrisy is enchanting. Twitter users may despise the Daily Mail but give them a really juicy article and they obediently become its most avid, if self-loathing, readers. ‘Read the Liz Jones article without sending the Daily Mail any traffic!’ was my favourite. I do not know what they actually wanted to do with Jones, if her real, surgically enhanced body could be tracked down, but I suspect it would be bad. It would be, in Jones’s mind, a cover story.

The disgust Jones engenders is interesting because it seems so complex, as if she is some kind of paradigm for our dissatisfaction and ennui. The reason Jones, whose greatest hits include My [ex-] Husband is a Fat Bastard and Welcome To My Facelift, writes so well about female misery is that she is, as a confessional journalist, both inside and outside the phenomenon of herself. The professional Liz Jones (The Shell) can structure a fascinating article about self-hatred with reference to most female preoccupations and file it on deadline, without mutilating her own body personally — that, she leaves to her surgeon. In fact, her professionalism is legendary —that she always gets the story inside her (rather too literally with the condom one) is one of the reasons she is so despised.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in