British Right-Wing Pundits

what people don't realise is that dacre is a saloon bar socialist and that the daily mail has been an extended satire ALL ALONG.
-- Marcello Carlin, Thursday, 17 May 2007 15:26 (1 hour ago)

I think you're confusing 2 people there, Geoffrey Robinson (ex Labour MP, very rich, owner of the NS) and Geffrey Robertson - leftish QC married (so help him) to Kathy Lette.
-- Ned Trifle II, Thursday, 17 May 2007 17:05 (5 minutes ago)

I understood Marcello's post easily enough, but if people are likely to be confused by it, why would only those two be confused (and how long have they been lurking on ilx)?

Geffrey Robertson - leftish QC married (so help him) to Kathy Lette

He is not! Is he really?

Yes really, although I had to go and check. 2 Australians far from home find solace in each others arms innit.

Meanwhile back to british right wing pundits here's a Jon Gaunt fansite!

http://www.gauntyfansite.co.uk/

Well that's unsurprisingly rubbish...

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I hope I'm rejected.

On fantasy island
Johann Hari

Published 21 May 2007

Print version Listen RSS Littlejohn's Britain
Richard Littlejohn Hutchinson, 320pp, £12.99
ISBN 0091795680


Let's be open-minded. Let's be ready to laugh. According to the press release accompanying this cut-and-pasting of Richard Littlejohn's recent rants in the Sun and Daily Mail, he is a descendant of James Gillray, Daniel Defoe and the great English satirists, "the real, talented deal".

People who have only ever heard him on the radio, where his satire consists of witticisms such as calling for gay rights activists to be killed with flame-throwers (which drew a rare reprimand from the Radio Authority, now part of Ofcom), may be perplexed by this description.

But I carefully sewed up my sides, opened the book, and found Littlejohn's first gag. He told a pre-power Tony Blair, when asked for political advice, that he should "take on Liverpool". He should "put tanks on the East Lancs Road, submarines in the River Mersey and then surround the place with barbed wire. Then you send in the bombers and turn the place into a car park. When the dust settles, you invite the Hong Kong Chinese to take over. Job done."

Cherie Blair - a Liverpudlian - found this tedious and walked off, thus giving birth to Littlejohn's barrage of "satire" against her. He dubbed her "the Wicked Witch" with "saddlebag hips", "legs like Popeye's trousers" and "fat ankles".

I tried. I tried really hard to find the satire. I pored over every page. There are, after all, far right-wingers who are capable of being funny: Ann Coulter; Kelvin MacKenzie; even Jean-Marie Le Pen can raise a chuckle as he calls for monstrosities. But as you browse through this random collection, the stale air is almost choking. Littlejohn is dependent on the same catchphrases he created 20 years ago ("You couldn't make it up!" "Mind how you go!").

Here's a typical example of his comedy. He imagines Kimberly Quinn - David Blunkett's former lover - singing: "I haven't slept all night/I haven't slept all night/I don't know what to do./ I know I'm looking rough,/That's cos I'm up the duff./The baby's father's you." His observations about politicians (for example, saying that Gordon Brown has a "kiddie-fiddler grin") aren't satire; they are primary school playground abuse.

There is, however, a core to Littlejohn's humour, to which he returns on almost every page: homosexuality. He obsessively talks about cottaging, lubricants, 69ers - every tiny detail of gay sex is smeared across the pages. He quotes long exchanges from Gaydar involving the MP Chris Bryant ("I could do with a good f***"), and says Peter Mandelson lives on "the Rue Des Jeunes Hommes" (because gays like young boys - geddit?). I think about gay sex much less than Richard Littlejohn - and I am gay.

Every problem circles back to sodomy in his mind, as he panics: "Soon we'll have gay men going door to door, like Jehovah's Witnesses, trying to convince us to convert." This isn't bigotry. It's a psychiatric disorder. Yet he claims that "the fascist left" are "smearing" him as a bigot. His technique is to make an unambiguously bigoted statement, and then say it has "nothing to do" with bigotry. For instance, he says that in Britain, under "the Blair Terror", "Entire neighbourhoods have been ethnically cleansed - and it's the English who are getting out of town." Then he says - without missing a beat - "But as I keep stressing, this is not about race." I see . . . it's "ethnic cleansing", but it's "not about race". Perhaps somebody should send Littlejohn a dictionary.

If Littlejohn's work has little value as satire, how does it stand up as political commentary? Its main flaw is that he has a worrying tendency to get his facts wrong. To give just one example (I could fill an entire issue of the NS with them), he declares that asylum-seekers get cash benefits "starting at £180 a week". In reality, when the article containing this claim was written, in 2000, asylum-seekers received cash benefits of nothing as they were all given in vouchers. Today they receive £43, less than a quarter of the sum Littlejohn invented.

His arguments crumble even before the sentences end. He claims that two million people leave Britain every year because they are appalled by "mass immigration". So people are so appalled at being forced to live among foreigners that they are . . . going to live among foreigners.

Littlejohn's Britain doesn't exist. Literally. He spends much of the year writing from a gated mansion in Florida, and admitted in a recent column that, when he is in Britain, he rarely leaves the house. He is describing a country he sees only through the pages of the right-wing press and his self-reinforcing mailbag. The cumulative effect of poring through more than 300 pages of this isn't to make the reader feel angry, or indignant, or offended. It is to feel pity for a sad, lonely little man, howling at a world that exists only in his own pornographic imagination. You couldn't make it up? Richard Littlejohn does - every time he writes.

Unfortunately, Johann Hari.

yeh i know that's what made me laugh. the article is funny cos y know littlejohn but also cos i find hari's tone unintentionally amusing. like last week he was attacking ziziek and declaring postmodernism useless and evil.

I think about gay sex much less than Richard Littlejohn - and I am gay.

This is a pretty great zing, Hari or no.

otm, i find him quite irritating (hari that is - i try not to think about littlejohn) but that made me chuckle.

That article was published in the future. Did it have the racing results as well?

i dunno you go take a look at the stuff kingfish posts and littlejohn seems kinda risible. there's a sort of lack of real conviction, the american right wing pundits have scary evangelical zeal whilst british ones just have ugly middle english resentment.

I always think the British stuff has a sort of pathetic street corner ranting crazy guy aspect to it, whereas the American stuff comes from more of a dominant position and is thus scarier/more depressing.

well thats kinda what i was trying to get at before, theres a feeling that the british ones dont really believe what they are writing, other than in a kind of "pfft" middle aged white man 'its not even music' type feeling of being pecked at

actually thats kind of it, all brit rightwing journos all seem kind of, well, HENPECKED.

and that they are really writing displaced barbs about their wives

wives who probably have a spanish lover

littlejohn is kinda like an uncle who thinks it's funny to declare whn you mention that yr going to brighton: "you better watch out going there it's full of gay"
the american pundits are more like a lynch mob.
though the right wing press were a lot scarier a few years back when asylum seekers and peediefiles where all over the shop. i mean they were stirring up actual, real mobs back then.

Did that thing with the lynch mob attacking the paediatrician's house actually, really happen? I mean, it was reported, but every now and then I remember it and think nah, that's an urban myth, or it's been heavily embellished, at least. Probably wishful thinking.

heavily embellished is correct: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4719364.stm

Ah yeah, just read that. Sad to see the citizens of the noted international centre of commerce Portsmouth being unfairly labeled as monobrowed doctor-bashers.

yeh i seem to remember seeing the pictures, they'd thrown paint at the gold plaque outside the surgery. i love the idea that peedumfilez would advertize themselves in such a manner. i remember looking at the NOTW that sunday they printed the name of EVERY PEED IN BRITIAN and just thinking; "this is a really, really bad thing to do".

i think it's a nice thing that the kaiser chiefs have come up with a stinging response 7 years later. maybe they'll tackle the miners strike on their next lp.

i remember looking at the NOTW that sunday they printed the name of EVERY PEED IN BRITIAN and just thinking; "this is a really, really bad thing to do".

I feel like you should say this on an I Love 2000 type program.

What was the Kaiser response called? I made passing reference to lynching a paediatrician in an aborted song once.

littlejohn likes the word "poovery", i recall. one article i read by him used it about three times.

their last album was called "Yours Truly Angry Mob". i have not heard it but a review i read indicated that it was very much about that period. i think some people have thrown the "hating on the working class" criticism at them.

talking I Love 2000, remember the FUEL CRISIS? them truckers blockading shit cos of tax or something. crazy times.

Was 'poovery' invented by Private Eye or does it predate that?

i think the hating working class accusation at KC is incorrect btw

i'm pretty sure ILM managed about 700 posts on that in 2005

not all working class people wear tracksuits and attack you as you get in a taxi etc.

for reference: http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=41&threadid=45386

Good blimey, is it time for the 2000 revival time already? Remember those lovable ruffians Daphne and Celeste? Lucy Porter COMEDIAN does!

I really wanna buy a Brideshead Revisted style blazer, but KCs have ruined that look for fat guys.

thing is they did I Love 1999 in 2001. wherein people talked in the past tense about such lost pleasures as buying a vodka red bull. i think that was on the weekend or so after 9/11.