Finally banned outright from Telegraph Blogs.
I shall drink to Mabel Thompson tonight. Although nowhere near as much as she will.
The ban came within hours, possibly minutes, of its most-read contributor's having become my follower on Twitter.
Last night, I posted the following comment in reply to Thompson's lashings and lashings of Sour Old Fruit (or was it Bitter Lemon?) about Owen Jones:
"One from your own era:
Along the boulevards he'd cruise,
And all the old queens blew a fuse.
If Owen Jones ends up like Rod Stewart's Georgie, then we shall all know whom to blame."
Add in my pointing out of the fact that that very site, which makes no claim to be uniformly right-wing
(that would be a perfectly valid excuse), carries not one but two veteran
Trotskyists, one of them of staunchly neoconservative views and thus exposing
the true nature of neoconservatism, plus a bitter old Blairite who is only there
in order to annoy the New Statesman.
As I ought to have added, plenty of hope there for anyone preparing to join the ever-lengthening dole queues when the Socialist Worker goes to the wall. Watch that space.
Regularly pointing out that the site was illegal because it was fishing above the line for people to post racist material below, that cannot have helped.
ReplyDeleteCalling for Thompson to be prosecuted and asking who he had paid off to avoid being, that cannot have helped in the least.
Keep up the good work.
I don't think mentioning the Kit Cunningham business, how she employed a priest as a columnist specifically because he was a paedophile endeared you to her very much, either.
ReplyDeleteOr suggesting that the latest catamite to have been given a Telegraph Blog would end up bleeding to death and having to be dumped in the Thames under cover of darkness. Rivlin as Jason Swift to her Sidney Cooke. (My words, not yours.) Love it! Just love it!
What a legend you are on and around the Telegraph and the Catholic Herald. Everyone who has ever met her hates her. What, even the ones who have slept with her? Darling, especially the ones who have slept with her...
And those, dear readers, are the comment that I can put up.
ReplyDeleteThat second one is obviously from an insider. My word. Trouble in Paradise? Who'd have thought it?
Toby Young could pass for Robert Oliver. That only leaves Lennie Smith to identify.
ReplyDeleteAnd I thought that people disliked me!
ReplyDeleteI remember you being jeered off for being too young but you must be five years older than Tim Stanley (now on the FUCKING TELLY!!!), 10 years older than Will Heaven who was already a Telegraph Blogger then, and 15 years older than Jack Rivlin, you could almost be his father. We can all see how they have got where they did. What a cesspit!
ReplyDeletePlease do not swear on my blog.
ReplyDeleteAnd leave Tim Stanley alone. A biographer of Pat Buchanan is just what we need, if only he would make programmes about, or from the perspective of, paleoconservatism, rather than that thing about sitcoms. I mean, it was watchable and informative enough. But he could do so much better. He is no lightweight.
Neither are you. I don't care if you like Tim Stanley, he is still not as good as you and devotes far more time to frivolous subjects. Maybe overcompensating for his PhD, possibly why you have never started one but still become a legend, the ultimate unset, uncanonical, surreptitiously read scholar in several fields.
ReplyDeleteStanley as the Question Time fifth panellist on Twitter, someone like Douglas Murray, also younger than you and also not as good, on the panels of that and Any Questions. The list goes on. In the time since Thompson got rid of you, he has given spots to Louise Bagshawe, some wittering girl at Oxford who wrote about the drinking game of "Good Pants Bad Pants" and an actual schoolgirl, I am assuming that they were not all the same person.
I know Neil Clark is your mate and you genuinely respect his work but he is not as good as you. He has never written anything as important as your books, especially the second one where public policy matters are concerned. Even Rod Liddle never has. I would go as far as to say that not even Lord Glasman has and based on his words in it so would he.
Thompson's cancellation of your Telegraph blog and your local Labour party's failure to give you a CV capable of guaranteeing you a parliamentary seat, you are now older than more than one member of the Shadow Cabinet. Between them they have deprived the country of one of the most important voices of his generation. It is a kind of treason.
Your books would have had the biggest publishers going if you had still been on the Telegraph, the second one would have got you on Start the Week, people have had it for less. @22:23 is right, you are rapidly becoming the great lost talent of your (our) generation and we are all becoming the losers from that.
ReplyDeleteYou are not only a brilliant historian and political theoretician as set out in the second book, with a brilliant philosophical-theological and literary basis for it as set out in the first one, you are also a tactical genius based on your posts about how Labour or Labour's "critical friends and friendly critics" could win in the Tory and Liberal heartlands in 2015.
But the world is being denied your voice thanks to a vicious old queen in London who thinks that she is the Pope and a vicious young-ish queen in Lanchester whose conspiracy to murder you is the only original thought that she has ever had.
He is not in Lanchester anymore.
ReplyDeleteTen years on, and what does he have to show for it? When it was next up and he was not a District Council candidate on the same day, he came within an inch of losing the seat that he has since resigned on the Parish Council of which he had been made Chairman after all of five minutes, having toured both the vicinity and the Internet claiming that I was going to lose mine; in fact, I was very comfortably re-elected.
He used the latest in his succession of tea-making positions to issue a press release announcing himself as the candidate for North West Durham. An all-women shortlist (no obvious jokes, please) was imposed the next day. By the Labour Party. His employer. Which technically employs him as a "Press Officer", a position the holder of which might, you would have thought, have been relatively well-informed.
His sister once drunkenly screamed down the street at me that, "You've ruined his career!" What career?
Everything that you wrote on Telegraph Blogs about socially conservative foreign policy realists becoming Democrats under Obama and Obama welcoming them has come true in the Hagel nomination, to cite only the highest profile example. You are a genius.
ReplyDeleteThompson is nothing but a perpetual student (Sociology, he knows nothing about the Theology he constantly comments on) turned sugar daddy who dares to present himself as the arbiter of Catholic orthodoxy and who is disgracefully accepted as such by the molly house media.
I am intrigued by this. Who is Thompson?
ReplyDeleteI laughed out loud when I read that. Sorry.
ReplyDeleteDamian Thompson, Editor of Telegraph Blogs, and formerly also Editor-in-Chief of the Catholic Herald.
Oh. I had no idea he was at Telegraph blogs although knew he was no longer at the Herald. The only opinion I‘ve ever had about him was his theology was decidedly dodgy. How did you ruin his career?
ReplyDeleteDid I?
ReplyDeleteI am guessing not. But why does his sister think you did?
ReplyDeleteOh, no, that's not Thompson. That is a little local difficulty, a bit like my ulcerative colitis or my two arthritic knees, although far less significant.
ReplyDelete