She must be joking

Mary Wakefield has been getting to grips with the terrifying but comic world of the Daily Mail’s Lynda Lee-Potter

Lynda Lee-Potter was grinning like a lizard in the top left-hand corner of her page in the Daily Mail last Wednesday. Below her photograph was the headline ‘Only one penalty for such evil’. The evil was paedophilia; the penalty was death. As I read on through ‘wickedness’ and ‘sick desires’ to ‘terror’ and ‘raw suffering’, I had the unnerving feeling that her smile was spreading across her face.

Paedophiles make regular appearances in Lee-Potter’s column, always surrounded by the same huddle of aging television-show hosts, young actresses, members of the royal family and pop-stars with knighthoods. Every week they all shuffle wearily on to the page, and every week Lee-Potter smacks each of them in turn upside the head with her frying pan, attacking different aspects of their personalities and appearances. In between mauling celebrities, she wrings her hands about the latest photogenic disaster story or offers homely little thoughts on modern life. If you haven’t already discovered Lee-Potter, you’re missing out on one of the great comic acts of our time.

She gets away with it by relying on the Daily Mail maxim: if you add to each page of malice a large dose of moral outrage and sentiment, readers will interpret your vitriol as plain-speaking and your prurience as sympathy. This formula won her ‘Columnist of the Year’ at the British Press Awards in 2001 and a nomination for the same prize this year. Three weeks ago, in a column about Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, she wrote, ‘There can scarcely be a household in the land who doesn’t feel anguish for their parents.’ Just in case there is, she draws it out.