Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

The persecution (and vindication) of Kevin Myers is a parable of our times

It seems seasonably suitable to celebrate good news. Unfortunately, as in most serviceable stories, for something good to happen, something bad had to happen first.

Though we’ve only been in sporadic touch since, I met Kevin Myers three decades ago at a boozy lunch in Dublin. He was already a journalistic institution. By his own estimation, he’s published roughly 7,000 columns, largely for the Irish Times and the Irish edition of the Sunday Times, totalling some five million words. He’s regularly stuck up for Israel, a state no more popular among Celtic worthies than among the Momentum sort. He also built his once-prodigious reputation by opposing the IRA, which at the time was not good for your health. He was twice assaulted by terrorists with AK-47s, one of which was shoved in his mouth. Yet 2017’s assault of a more metaphorical sort, he says, was actually more traumatic.

Two years ago, Myers wrote 17 words that outweighed the other 4,999,983. In a column about the BBC’s gender pay gap, he observed that two of the corporation’s best-paid female presenters were Jewish. ‘Good for them,’ he wrote, adding fatally, ‘Jews are not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price.’ The aside was meant as a compliment. It was not so perceived.

There proceeded one of the fastest and most furious pile-ons since the coinage of the expression. The column went online at midnight. By 9 a.m., Myers’s ‘anti-Semitism’ was leading the BBC news. Media consternation spread all the way to Malaysia, while Leo Varadkar, J.K. Rowling and Chelsea Clinton joined the fray. (In a sick sort of way, I’m almost jealous.) By noon, after no due process at the Sunday Times, Myers had been sacked.

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