You have to be blessed with certain qualities to survive as a columnist on a national tabloid newspaper.
Holding passionate opinions, knowing how to string a sentence together and being unafraid to set fire to sacred cows are fine for starters. But what really sets you apart is a runaway ego, skin thicker than a pimp’s wallet and an ability to conjure up bulls**t at the drop of a hat.
Which is how I’ve survived for almost three decades. Until now, when I have serious competition on the thick-skinned/ego/bull-merchant front, as each Saturday I go up against someone the Daily Mail describes as “erudite”, “a star writer”, and “one of the wittiest in the business”. Not to mention “required reading” for “millions across the world”.
And that’s just his kids.
Can’t nail him? How about this take from one of his previous editors, Max Hastings, at the Daily Telegraph: “There is room for debate about whether he is a scoundrel or a mere rogue, but not much about his moral bankruptcy, rooted in a contempt for the truth. He cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification.”
Yes, that’s right, my new opponent writing every Saturday in the Daily Mail is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, who, true to form, broke parliamentary rules by informing the body that oversees the money-making moves of ex-ministers a mere half an hour before his new columnist job was announced.
He tears through rules like vultures do corpses.
I trust the Mail’s lawyers are looking forward to the bare-faced deceptions they will need to weed out, almost as much as the sub-editors are to the rushed copy that will arrive many hours after deadline, then having to patch up a torrential spillage of
verbal diarrhoea that would do United Utilities proud.
As you would expect, the serial failure will earn a mountain of cash, possibly a million quid a year, but then when he let it be known the £275k that Telegraph were paying him was “chicken feed” the Mail had to up the stakes for a man whose genius lies in the fact that the more lives he screws up, and the more cock-ups he makes, the more lavishly he is rewarded.
Nobody fails upwards quite like Johnson who, in the six months after he was kicked out of Downing Street, pocketed £5.6million from blathering baloney to fools with more money than perception. It’s all down to that Eton charm, which is so seductive that even a sworn enemy like myself feels that, in the spirit of fraternal solidarity, I should pass on these tips about tabloid newspaper column writing.
Your readers will want to understand you. So drop all the Greek and Latin phrases and concentrate on the language you talk most fluently: waffle.
Your readers will need to trust you. So unlike during the Brexit campaign when you wrote two Telegraph columns – one arguing why we should remain, the other why we should leave – then calculated which would best serve your leadership ambitions before sending the latter, try to be honest. The word is in the dictionary. Look it up. Also, your readers will want to believe you are credible, so try to use facts (again, check the dictionary).
After all, it wasn’t that long ago you published a viciously unfounded editorial in the Spectator magazine incorrectly claiming that the Hillsborough Disaster was caused by “drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground”. Then had to scuttle up to Liverpool to grovel.
Your readers will want to be entertained, so play for laughs. You pulled that off superbly as Prime Minister, managing almost single-handedly (well, with the help of some of your ministerial appointments) to make Britain a global laughing stock. Who can forget the keynote speech on climate change at the UN when you went off on a nonsensical tangent about Kermit the Frog and the world media labelled you a blond
Mr Bean.
Try not to use some of the lines from your broadsheet columns such as “tank-topped bum boys” to describe gays, “piccaninnies with watermelon smiles” to describe Africans, or likening Muslim women in burkas to bank robbers (although to be fair, that could be exactly the kind of anti-woke stuff your new employers are after, so feel free to ignore that advice).
You will probably meet other journalists. If one gives you their address, don’t store it then promise it to a convicted fraudster who wants to have them beaten up.
Try not to lie to your boss, as you did to the editor of the Times and the leader of the Conservatives.
I know that’s a problem which recurs whenever you open your mouth, but remember that’s how you lose jobs. The defence “I cannot be held responsible for what you thought I said” won’t wash.
You see, journalism is about delivering truths, not as you admitted to during your stint as the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, inventing malicious lies about the EU to “create a new reality”. If you spout lies it won’t be a “kangaroo court” you’ll end up in but a real one and, unlike when you were an MP, you won’t find the taxpayer footing your eye-watering legal bill.
When the editor asks you to file your column on time because failing to do so costs the business, don’t
say as you did to CEOs worried about the impact of a no-deal Brexit: “f*** business”.
Remember you’re paid by one newspaper so don’t go leaking juicy stories to other right-wing media to curry favour with them, as you did at the Telegraph.
Like you, I no longer have a pass to get into Parliament, but I’ve got mates down there who can always sign me in. That could be a struggle for you as only seven MPs voted to save your skin in this week’s debate about you lying to the Commons.
I’d steer clear of columns about Covid deaths, the need to attend COBRA meetings, husbands who have affairs while their wife undergoes cancer treatment, feckless males who spread their seed for fun, the causes of the current cost-of-living crisis, the lack of new hospitals and homes being built, taking back control of our borders, levelling-up the North, lazy workers, the nepotism that corrupts the Honours List, lying to a monarch, the abject failure of Brexit, drunken office parties or the dangers in
electing narcissistic con men like Donald Trump. They’re all a bit too close to home.
Remember, our job is to call out liars and hypocrites, not act like them. Remember, also, that our role is not to create permanent division, bitterness and hatred in a country we pretend
to love.
You’ve already done that job. In spades.
