Julie Burchill

Saturday

30 Jul 2022

How Rebekah Vardy went from underdog to ‘Cry-Bully’

It was Depp vs Heard and Best Of Breed at Crufts rolled into one: yes, the Wagatha Christie gravy-train came to a screeching halt yesterday having taken three years and £3 million in lawyers’ fees to reach the terminus. And with it, Rebekah Vardy’s reputation as a Cool Girl hit the buffers. I was vaguely on Team Vardy to start with; childhood abuse, broken home, homeless at 15, teenage bride, three times married, mother of five, eventually finding fame, fortune and Fendi by marrying Jamie Vardy. Coleen, on the other hand, seemed the boring good girl who had been with Wayne since they were schoolmates – before he had money, even, thus confounding those who might ask ‘What attracted you to befuddled, brothel-creeping multi-millionaire Wayne Rooney?’ It was easy to see her as a doormat – even if it was a deluxe doormat who got taken to Barbados several times a year – for putting up with wayward Wayne’s habit of ‘playing away’.

Thursday

28 Jul 2022

The toxic cult of the superhero

‘We don’t need another hero,’ sang Tina Turner back in the sexy-greedy 1980s. How times have changed. These days we have Superheroes Are Everywhere, a children’s book written by the Vice-President of the USA, Kamala Harris. Puffs tell us that ‘the book teaches that superheroes can be found everywhere in real life, from family members, to friends, to teachers at school and college’ and that it is an ‘encouraging, uplifting book [which] inspires kids to recognise the super-heroes all around them and promise to be, like them, brave, kind, helpful, and more’. Those little darlings between two and five who have ADHD – as so many bourgeois children mysteriously appear to – can swerve the book and instead attend a ‘Superhero Training Course’ run by the Little Hero Company in a church in Dulwich for ‘an imaginative, energetic and action-packed 45-minute class, where your Little Heroes can indulge in whoever they want to be, from Spider-Man to Elsa from Frozen’.

Wednesday

27 Jul 2022

Is self-loathing the British disease?

Whatever one thinks of the government’s plans to send refugees to Rwanda, it was amusing to see this country’s left suddenly finding all sorts of reasons why only the UK – ‘a cake-filled, misery-laden, grey old island’ according to Emma Thompson, patron of the Refugee Council – would do as a final destination for these poor people. It was especially ironic that the place which the great and the good decreed unfit for humane habitation was a country of which liberals have historically approved: France. The phrase ‘French flu’ was coined in the 1950s to describe the cultural cringe of British progressives towards France as the source of all things civilised. They had Brigitte Bardot and Jean-Paul Sartre; we had Diana Dors and Malcolm Muggeridge.

Sunday

10 Jul 2022

Why does the police force attract so many sex abusers?

Growing up, I didn’t really think about the police until I got caught shoplifting at the age of 14. Separated from my comrades in the five-finger-discount crusade, I was stuck in a cell for half an hour but the earache only started when my furious parents came to collect me. I almost asked the kind policeman if I might stay overnight until they’d calmed down. I wouldn’t do that now. Though I know that the vast majority of police are decent people, they also seem to harbour an unusually high number of woman-haters. Why do so many perverts join the police? This week a serving Metropolitan Police officer appeared in court accused of raping a woman in the sea off Brighton beach, while on a stag do – he’s just the latest in a long line of brutes in blue.

Sunday

3 Jul 2022

Where have all the Bad Girls gone?

Where have all the Bad Girls gone? They used to rock up regularly at the Love Island villa – now in its eighth and rather underwhelming season – only to find themselves on the EasyJet back to Blighty after having full sex on prime time TV. (One of them, Zara Holland, being stripped of her Miss Great Britain title.) They brawled, boozed and bonked with gusto; now it’s two drinks a night and a cheeky snog on the terrace before an early – and chaste – bedtime. They used to be all over the soaps but now the women of EastEnders and Corrie suffer wall-to-wall ‘challenges’ like bulimia and infertility instead. There were songs about them (‘Bad Girl’ by Madonna, ‘Bad Girls’ by Donna Summer) films about them (from The Women to The Bitch) and books about them (Rebecca to Ambition).

Sunday

26 Jun 2022

Glastonbury sums up everything there is to hate about rock music

‘Glasto’ – the diminutive makes me shiver with distaste; like ‘Peely’ – as his fans affectionately called the late DJ John Peel, schoolgirl-admirer and all-round creep – it sums up everything I don’t like about rock music. I’m reminded of my years as a teenage reporter at the New Musical Express, coming home from some rancid punk club having pretended to enjoy the Drones lurking or the Lurkers droning, and dancing around my room to the Isley Brothers until the sweet soul music chased the awful white racket away. When Lenny Henry pointed out how pale-faced Glasto is, I wrote that this was because black people are less inclined to blow hundreds of pounds for the pleasure of using fetid toilet facilities between bouts of glazed staring at a stage so far away that it might be Billie Eilish but could just as easily be Billy Bob Thornton.

Wednesday

15 Jun 2022

What Emma Thompson needs to understand about celebrity nudity

Another day, another diva disrobes. If it’s not Madonna (63) being ‘outraged’ after being banned from Instagram Live (after continually breaking the app’s rules with her nude posts) for ‘digital depictions of her vagina’ it’s Emma Thompson (also 63) getting her kit off for her new film, in which she plays a widow who hires a sex worker. And like a bleak backbeat, we have the sad spectre of Britney Spears, a young woman used as an ATM machine by her immediate family and as fantasy fodder by strangers since she was old enough to wear a school uniform ironically. Her social media since her recent emancipation shows her to be understandably confused about what she is valued for and she has shared a string of naked pics with her 41 million Instagram followers.

Sunday

12 Jun 2022

Kim Kardashian is a better role model than Marilyn Monroe

When Kim Kardashian wore Marilyn Monroe’s dress to the Met Gala recently – the shimmering, crystal-studded, second-skin gown in which MM sang her infamous rendition of ‘Happy Birthday, Mr President’ to JFK in 1962 – many people had a collective fit of the vapours. You’d have thought someone had wiped their nose – or worse – on the Stars and Stripes in front of the White House, that some act of sacrilege had been committed. Kardashian (with the good manners characteristic of her – there’s a scene in an early season of Keeping Up with the Kardashians where her monstrous sister Khloe mocks her for being courteous to a nobody who is late with her new car) anticipated this: ‘I’m extremely respectful to the dress and what it means to American history.

Sunday

5 Jun 2022

The punk paradox of monarchism

It seems incredible that, 45 years ago, a pop group – the Sex Pistols – could release a record on a respectable label (A&M, founded by Herb Alpert, home of the Carpenters) in which they claimed, probably somewhat rashly, that our glorious monarch was not a human being. These days such sentiments are confined to the outer reaches of conspiracy theory nuttiness. I recall the politician William Hamilton, who nowadays would be very unlikely to be elected, forever popping up on prime time television calling the Queen ‘a clockwork doll’, Princess Margaret ‘a floozy’ and Prince Charles ‘a twerp’. Oddly, as society has become less deferential, it appears to have become more monarchist. Even those half-witted backers of the runaway Sussexes didn’t want the monarchy to fall – instead they were irked that the couple were not afforded the full trappings of privilege, such as the title of prince for their first-born.

Friday

3 Jun 2022

The witch trial of Amber Heard

For the first few weeks of watching Johnny Depp and Amber Heard attempt to turn each other into twelve cans of cat food, it felt like some silly if savage sideshow. But as the defamation trial dragged on, it became obvious there was something unusually grotesque about this case; as with a boxing match, turning the spotlight on the audience revealed even more ugliness than that which was taking place in the arena. Samuel Butler wrote about his friend Thomas Carlyle: ‘It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.’ Both Heard and Depp would appear to be nightmares to be married to – but there was a very real imbalance in the abuse aimed at each of them.

Thursday

2 Jun 2022

Is Harry Styles really the new David Bowie?

There’s something ludicrous about old people trying to understand the pop music preferred by youth. Mind you, youth is relative and here I am at the age of 62, explaining Harry Styles. Styles isn’t just a pop star, he’s a phenomenon and therefore worthy of examination by ancient people like me. Last week, Radio 4’s flagship news programme Today featured him alongside Ukraine and 'partygate', asking: ‘Does Harry Styles ever put a foot wrong?’ Having just played his first London gig in four years, where nearly 5,000 teenage girls sang every word to his latest album, this month he will play Wembley Stadium, entertaining 140,000 people over two nights. The album in question, Harry’s House, became the most streamed album by a male artist on its first day of release ever.

Friday

13 May 2022

The grotesque spectacle of the Wagatha Christie court case

Few things are as much fun as a full-on court case between two rich show-offs. Watching Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney attempt to turn each other into 12 tins of cat food at the High Court of Justice this week, while trying to keep up with the ever more astonishingly antics of Depp vs Heard, I felt like a pervy front-row spectator at Wimbledon’s centre court. Who messed the bed? Whose manhood resembled a chipolata? At times it was hard to choose between this duet of danses macabres in which only the lawyers end up happier, healthier and wealthier than when they went in. #BeKind has taught us that it’s Not Nice to watch people with bad teeth and no money have a bash at each other; bye-bye Jeremy Kyle, see ya Jerry Springer! But no one ever said that this new clemency applies to those with more moolah than sense.

Thursday

21 Apr 2022

The cult of sensitivity

I was extra pleased to have swerved the modern curse that is Wordle when I read that ‘sensitive’ words have been removed from it. A spokesman proclaimed: ‘In an effort to make the puzzle more accessible, we are reviewing the solutions and removing obscure or potentially insensitive words over time. HARRY is an example of an obscure word.’ Other more obviously ‘insensitive’ words had already been removed, such as ‘sluts,’ ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’, and though I’m the most rad of femmes, I do wish they’d stayed. Removing ribaldry makes the language increasingly bland. ‘Sensitivity’ is one of those words that’s changed its meaning. It was once used mostly to refer to sore teeth and gums. But just as ‘community’ now means people complaining and ‘activist’ now means sitting at home swearing on the internet, to be sensitive simply signifies you’re politically progressive.

Sunday

27 Feb 2022

How the word ‘woman’ became taboo

When I was a little girl, my mum told me that I shouldn’t use the word ‘woman’ – but rather ‘lady.’ ‘Woman’ was just too visceral to her, whereas a ‘lady’ might well be a doll. But by adolescence my shoplifted copy of The Female Eunuch and Helen Reddy bawling ‘I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman!’ had reinforced by belief that my mother was wrong. I never dreamt that the w-word would be taboo again. How could the word woman become so contentious that the stating of the dictionary definition – ‘Adult Human Female’ – could become a matter for the police? It started with Posie Parker, a disillusioned member of the Labour party member: ‘I left in 2016 – I had been asking online Labour groups this question: “Does my 11-year-old daughter have the right to use a female-only changing room and not see an adult penis?” and was told I was raising a pervert who stared at genitals and a transphobe.

Thursday

27 Jan 2022

In praise of Katie Price

A friend told me awhile ago that whenever they saw my name they’d think ‘Oh no – what has she done to upset people now!’ I was mildly miffed at the time but, as a long-standing defender of Katie Price – the criminal formerly known as Jordan – this is invariably my reaction these days on seeing her name. Seeing her dressed up as a nun to launch her foray into OnlyFans, even I was moved to tut. As an admirer of KP’s sauciness and stoicism, I have watched her antics over the past few years with the feeling of growing dismay which I suspect many of my ex-friends feel viewing my own epic game of Snakes & Ladders with the English media. Though she started out as a glamour model, and was never what you’d call wholesome, it all seemed quite jolly and seaside-postcard Carry On-ish for a time when everything she touched turned to gold-plate.

The ceaseless self-pity of cyclists

Saturday

22 Jan 2022

The faux feminism of Lena Dunham

There’s a school of feminist thought which says that women in the public eye should never have scraps with each other. I disagree. I don’t recall anyone ever commenting that when young black male rappers have big public beef with each other they’re being disloyal to the civil rights movement by refusing to speak with one united voice. But this is the way of the Woke. All other oppressed groups – riot! Women – be good little trans-maids and don’t report rapists to the police. For me – a product of the flag-shagging, Brexit-bagging gammon-chav class – to ‘speak my truth’ in my own style, beholders will have to accept that it may be delivered in a loud, sweary voice regularly picking out female targets as well as male ones, as I take it for granted that women are entirely the equals of men and not shrinking violets who will clutch their pearls and expire onto the nearest fainting couch should a negative vibe come their way.

Thursday

6 Jan 2022

Why I love to be hated

I’ve never been keen on the idea of popularity. Courting disapproval has been a large part of my career and I find it bracing, like an early dip in a cold sea. I remember back in 2003 feeling put out because the Most Hated People In Britain list featured me at a mere 85, sandwiched between Damien Hirst and Richard Branson. So imagine my excitement this week on reading that the alleged comedian Stewart Lee had dispatched me into his New Year Pedal Bin, a list of his least-favourite people, alongside such chucklesome types as Ricky Gervais, John Cleese, Graham Linehan, Maureen Lipman and Dave Chappelle. I’ve always fancied myself as a comic — being laughed with or at, I’m not fussy — and here I was, tucked up snug in this metaphorical bin with all these drolls.

Wednesday

29 Dec 2021

Most-read 2021: Meghan has been found out

We're closing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles in 2021. Here's number three: Julie Burchill writing in November about the Meghan Markle revelations at the Court of Appeal. ‘Speaking her truth’ has been one of Meghan Markle’s USPs – and what an absolute disaster it’s been, leading inevitably to the low point she has now reached this week, after she apologised to the Court of Appeal for ‘forgetting’ information about the Finding Freedom biography. For there are not different truths for different people; there is one true version of events. The Windsor’s motto ‘Never complain, never explain’ was thought to have been introduced by the Queen Mother in 1936. A few years before she said, when it was suggested that the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret should be evacuated to a safer place like many British children of the time, that ‘the children won't leave without me.

Saturday

18 Dec 2021

Billie Eilish is right about our porn-sick society

You could have knocked me down with a snowflake when Billie Eilish slammed pornography on the Howard Stern Show this week. It is a strange paradox of Generation Woke, to whom Eilish is an idol, that while everything from brunch (the actor Alan Cummings said it reminded him of ‘white privilege’) to Brum (the mischievous TV toy car ‘who may reflect the language and attitudes of the 1990s’ as the BBC warned us) is deemed offensive, truly offensive things such as under-privileged women earning a living by being used as sexual meat puppets for the entertainment of men is now being framed as a perfectly wholesome pursuit. (Unless it’s your own daughter or mother, of course – they’re Special.) But Eilish said: ‘As a woman, I think porn is a disgrace… I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much… the first few times I had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good.

Thursday

2 Dec 2021

Why I was labelled a bitch: Joan Collins remembers the old Hollywood days

Readers of this magazine will have enjoyed Joan Collins’s diaries, and her Past Imperfect was one of the funniest showbiz autobiographies ever. (One of her beauty tips: ‘Never eat rancid nuts.’) She started as a Rank teenage starlet who, after being beckoned to Hollywood, was given B-roles because ‘I wouldn’t be “nice” to studio heads and it gave me a reputation of being a bitch’. More accurately, her ex-fiancé Warren Beatty called her ‘Butterfly’ —always fluttering on to some new project, even now at the age of 88. I love gossip and was looking forward to a wagonload of it in these diaries, written between 1989 to 2006, ‘when I felt like it’. I wasn’t disappointed. Everyone gets served — even ‘The Master’ himself: ‘Very strange grammar… continual use of the word “nice”… Coward had quite a small vocabulary.

Thursday

25 Nov 2021

When did Christmas adverts become so unbearable?

When I was young, I dated a man who wasn’t in advertising, but had lots of friends who were. Because I am witty, at some point during dinner — usually when dessert was being laid out with a platinum credit card — one of them would say: ‘Have you ever thought of working in advertising?’ I remember feeling real indignation, like someone had spat in my spritzer. I don’t care that Salman ‘Naughty, but nice’ Rushdie and Fay ‘Go to work on an egg’ Weldon started out that way; I had no intention of ending up in such a venal profession. So intense were my feelings that when, as a Bright Young Thing in the 1980s, I was asked to be one of the fresh faces which re-launched Croft Original in the style mags, I wrote a really rude letter back.

Saturday

13 Nov 2021

Meghan has been found out

‘Speaking her truth’ has been one of Meghan Markle’s USPs – and what an absolute disaster it’s been, leading inevitably to the low point she has now reached this week, after she apologised to the Court of Appeal for ‘forgetting’ information about the Finding Freedom biography. For there are not different truths for different people; there is one true version of events. The Windsor’s motto ‘Never complain, never explain’ was thought to have been introduced by the Queen Mother in 1936. A few years before she said, when it was suggested that the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret should be evacuated to a safer place like many British children of the time, that ‘the children won't leave without me. I won't leave without the King – and the King will never leave.

Thursday

14 Oct 2021

The characteristic I most admire in politicians? Petulance

Many negative qualities are ascribed to politicians — name-calling, absenteeism, drunkenness — but you rarely hear of my favourite political emotion: petulance, which has caused us so much public entertainment in the political arena and promises to cause so much more. Think of Dominic Raab refusing to accept his demotion until he was made Deputy Prime Minister; the spat between Liz Truss and Dominic Raab over who gets to stay at Chevening; Angela Rayner’s scathing letter on Commons notepaper to a Brighton shoe shop after it failed to put a pair of £195 heels aside for her; the spectacular Starmer meltdown in February when Sir Keir went ‘puce’ and kept hissing at Boris Johnson ‘It’s not true, it’s not true!’ for all the world like a teenage girl denying rumours of sexual generosity.

Tuesday

12 Oct 2021

Sally Rooney’s novels don’t deserve to be translated into Hebrew

I recently had to read a book by Sally Rooney in a work capacity, and my goodness that was half an hour of my life I’ll never get back. Come on, how could I be expected to read the whole darn thing when I’d already had the pleasure of Conversations with Friends and come to the conclusion that once you’ve read one book about people getting naked and saying stuff about the pointlessness of life, you’ve read them all? Her writing is so blank that in parts it reads like a children’s starter book — Janet and John Get Naked and Say Stuff about the Pointlessness of Existence. Rooney describes herself as a Marxist and she doesn’t use speech marks. Is the concept of ‘a plot’ itself a bourgeois construct? Reading Rooney, you might think so.

Thursday

23 Sep 2021

Why do some women find killers irresistible?

Women who fall in love with killers have always fascinated and repulsed me. What drives them? Do they think they can ‘save’ these men? Are they secret sadists, acting by proxy? Are they masochists, getting a cheap thrill from communicating with someone who has tortured a fellow woman to death? Bonnie and Clyde syndrome, also known as hybristophilia, puts the case that, as an evolutionary reproductive trait, some women can be drawn to ‘bad boys’ who are prepared to break rules/laws and are therefore ‘stronger’. I was pleased to see that Denmark has now banned prisoners serving life sentences from starting romantic relationships while in jail. The ban was introduced after a 17-year-old fell in love with 50-year-old Peter Madsen, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2018 for killing, sexually assaulting and dismembering a young woman named Kim Wall.

Tuesday

14 Sep 2021

AOC, the Met Gala and the misery of fashion

You’ve probably already seen that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rocked up at the Met Gala – where individual tickets are $35,000 (£20,000) and tables start at $200,000 (£150,000) – wearing a white dress saying in big red letters TAX THE RICH. It’s what the Clash called ‘turning rebellion into money’. Not one dollar in tax from the rich is going to be gained from this gesture — fashion can absorb anything and turn it into a trivial trend. Garments with words on are always monstrous. I think of the immortal words of Fran Lebowitz: ‘If people don’t want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?’ Top of my hate list were those Katharine Hamnett monstrosities, with CHOOSE LIFE and 58% DON'T WANT PERSHING in letters a mile high.

Friday

30 Jul 2021

The X Factor made all the right people cross

On hearing that the X Factor is no more after our 17 years together, I reflected on what a journey it had been, how I’d given it 110 per cent and that I would never hear those four huge ‘yeses’ again. Bravely holding back the tears, I couldn’t help but agree with its founder Simon Cowell that the show had ‘become slightly stale’ – slightly! I’ve seen twice-used tea-bags with more sheer molten stage presence than some of the finalists who made it through in the latter seasons before it was taken off for a ‘rest’ in 2018. How different it was at the beginning! After a slow start attempting to make stars out of Steve Brookstein and Shayne Ward, I remember Leona Lewis’s breath-taking performances which won her the third series, followed by the formidable Alexandra Burke with season five and Little Mix in year eight.

Thursday

22 Jul 2021

The extraordinary beauty of Amy Winehouse

You could be forgiven for thinking that it was a much-beloved member of the royal family who died ten years ago today — Princess Diana, perhaps, whose posthumous 60th birthday we recently celebrated. (This one also has her very own statue, a bronze one in her stomping ground of Camden Town.) This Jewish princess had similar problems with bulimia, and with the paparazzi, but she was a pop star, only 27 when she died, on paper with not much mainstream appeal. Yet many of us were — and are — obsessed with Amy Winehouse. She released only two albums in the space of three years, but her ghost still bestrides pop music like a tiny, tattooed colossus. When we idolise an artist, it’s tempting to make their sorrows about us.