Twitting the twits

Titania McGrath is the alter ego of the schoolteacher Andrew Doyle. A perpetually enraged ‘activist, healer and radical intersectional poet’, her job was to lampoon the imbecilities of the achingly ‘woke’ middle class left, and expose the manifest contradictions in what they were spouting. Her forum for this was, of course, that vast lagoon of hastily jabbered nonsense, Twitter — and it was very effective. So effective that for a while Twitter users could not be sure that it was a joke at all — an understandable confusion, given the real-life existence of people such as the journalists Laurie Penny and Suzanne Moore, for example, or the French academic Myriam François-Cerrah.

McGrath’s success was in posting tweets which just might have come from any one of these, or a thousand others: ‘Jesus Christ. My iPhone just autocorrected “womxn” to “woman”.@ AppleSupport please sort out this transphobic bullshit NOW.’ And this beauty: ‘When women are valued more than men, then and only then will we have achieved true equality.’ There was also the furious, awful, mystifying, poetry, of which ‘I Victim’ is my particular favourite: ‘My cadaver lies uneaten at the gates of your treachery./ Pandora’s box heaving over with poisoned bile./ You have dined upon my succulent gusset./ Like a ragewanking hobgoblin,belching power./ Or a Chinese assassin with fat hands.’

This hilarious stuff has been collated into a short book, in which Titania takes us through the various shibboleths of woke-dom, from feminism and transgenderism, cultural appropriation and fat shaming to racism. The best of her online poems are scattered in between. She’s at her sharpest when taking a quote from a real-life idiot of the left and just tweaking it a little. So, she lights upon a genuine website called ‘Decolonising yoga’ in which an Indian woman, resident in the USA, admits to ‘crying on her yoga mat’ because of the extent to which the discipline has been appropriated by imperialist whitey.