Age Appropriate

An email from an old friend who turns out to be a regular reader, pointing out that the Page 3 models who have turned out to be so articulate in the last few days are no younger than many writers on things like The Huffington Post, but unlike them have ever done a day's work in their lives.

That makes them no younger than Johann Hari, who is now being welcomed back as if nothing had happened, and Douglas Murray, who has never gone away despite a dozen years of spectacular wrongness about absolutely anything, were when their generationally downright freakish foreign policy views saw them elevated to the position of The World's Greatest Experts On Everything.

It makes them the same age as many a young man was when he somehow managed to wangle a Telegraph Blog. Again, with little or no previous sign of ever having needed to earn a crust.

Being old enough to appear on Page 3 at all makes them older than Carola Binney was when both the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator took her on.

A topless photograph of Miss Binney would at that point have constituted a child abuse image. Yet her opinion was sought and, no doubt, bought. She had not left school, and we may safely say that she had never been a shelf-stacker on Saturdays. Still, good luck to her.

Yes, very young people have written for The Lanchester Review. I have no problem with that. I am also aware that they have been fairly or very middle-class, and that up to now they have been male.

But it is hardly as if I have the resources available to me that Fleet Street has.

If it can find very young working-class women with strong views and the ability to express them, but find them in order, bluntly, to get their tits out, then it can also find very young working-class women with strong views and the ability to express them, in order to give a platform to those views.