By God, The Guardian is a loathsome newspaper; a local north London morning daily for Stalinist metro libtards, perpetually arrogant, snobbish, self-righteous, humourless, dull, relentlessly middle class, cowardly and cheap. You will all have had your epiphanies long before me, I suspect, reading the smug drivel of la Toynbee and Gary Younge and Monbiot, or its pathetic attempts via The Guide to be down with the kids on the street (perhaps the worst written, most cringe-inducing, supplement in Fleet Street). The horrible irony is that it possesses great writers – Laura Barton, Alexis Petridis, Sam Woolaston, Vikram Dodd and the wonderful Marina Hyde, even Tim Dowling; yet they are largely hidden away in its little pockets and niches, and not allowed to alter the feel of the whole, which is the feel of a Boden catalogue boot stamping on a human face for five minutes or so, before marching off to consume a Yakult in a Crouch End cafeteria (to paraphrase, and then some, Orwell).
Check out John Crace’s “Digested Read” of Pauline Prescott’s autobiography here. Ok, she may not be your cup of tea and still less might be her husband, but this prolonged hoity toity bourgeois sneer at a northerner (remember those sort of people, Manchester Guardian?) who overcame privation (not an abstract construct, leader writers) and did ok for herself is what you might expect, these days, from Alan Rusbridger’s adopted bastard offspring. A bleat from the faux-left, which loathes the country and the people who inhabit it beyond the rim of the north circular.
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