A kind of harmonic convergence of complete tools
Opinion is divided on the future career trajectory of Nick Cohen round here. Some of us think he's on his way to the Daily Mail. Others think he's showing worrying signs of Furediism. Here's an article where the twain meet, showing that there is apparently a niche on the bookshelf just the size and shape of an impassioned and not terribly well-informed diatribe on how New Labour and the leftisses have ganged together to betray anyone on £100,000 a year. God help us all, but particularly the publishing industry.
posted by The Rioja Kid at 6/20/2007 03:01:00 PM
12 Comments:
I might as well admit it here, as there won't be many people to read it, but I bought James Delingpole's "How to be Right".
The Spiked review is very strange, as the one thing almost everyone agrees on is that "How to be Right" is not funny. I'm not just saying this because the political opinions in it are so tedious, though certainly they are that, but because it's genuinely not funny. This was the conclusion of the review in the Daily Mail, which just goes to show.
Incidentally Nick Cohen went to the launch party, which makes a lot of sense. Then again Rod Liddle has become a lefty in the piece, so it might not be wholly accurate.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/society/partyblog/march07/smoking.htm
Then again Rod Liddle has become a lefty in the piece, so it might not be wholly accurate.
I will defend the Torygraph here; both Liddle and Cohen are described as "erstwhile" lefties of a piece with one another, which I fear is about right these days.
Indeed. Nick C we know all about. Liddle is a former SWPer (Wikipedia) and he was famously sacked from Today (biased BBC etc etc) for writing in the Grauniad (lefties etc etc) against the hunting mob.
Either I'm confused or the Delingpole book's been out for ages. Isn't it the one whose first entry is on 'Aaronovitch, David'? (I can't remember what it said; it was see something, but I've forgotten the something.) I read lots of it in a bookshop once. My sides held.
Off the top of my head it says something like
"Why" - See Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
and then her entry says:
"Why oh Why" - see XYZ
and so on.
Oh WTF is this (from the Spiked piece)?
That might explain why Thatcher, hardly a lefty-liberal, so fervently instituted multicultural policies in the Eighties largely as a means of keeping troublesome blacks in their 'communities' where they belonged.
It would probably help if I knew what this 'mulitculturalism' of which Brendan O'Neill speaks actually was, but I don't think Thatcher did institute multicultural policies - surely that was the famous 'Looney Left' councils. If she did, where? Surely if Thatcher and Ken Livingstone are seen as guilty of the same thing (apart from being smug politicoes) it can't mean very much. (To be clear, I don't think 'multiculturalism means anything other than being a sort of password for latter day racists. And I'd probably call multicultural policies (whatever they are) good - an accolade I'm unlikely to bestow on Thatcher, apart from by comparison with Blair.)
Meanwhile in satire news
Thing is, Delingpole obviously wants to be PJ O'Rourke, which sits strangely with his desire to join the aristocracy. His problem is that PJ is often quite funny and insightful, which is where the American right score over their Brit oppo.
If anyone can track it down, Delingpole's rave review of What's Left? in the Hate Mail on Sunday provides a direct link to our boy.
For all his sins, I don't think Nick Cohen has turned into The Thinking Person's Mick Hume just yet...
reading extracts from Delingpole's book gives me a new appreciation of the genuine talents of Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Littlejohn, rather in the way that Andrew Anthony's brief spell on the Nick Cohen column made me revise my opinion of how difficult that was to produce.
And now there's tragic news from the world of journalism.
Where at the end it says
To contact the MediaGuardian newsdesk....
I thought for a moment it was like one of those numbers they give out at the end of traumatic documentaries so that people who've had similar experiences can receive counselling.
"Delingpole obviously wants to be PJ O'Rourke.."
That's what I thought. Twenty three odd years since Republican Party Reptile was published and people are still making thenmselves out to be bold, taboo-breaking young reactionaries by imitating him.
Despite having no attention of reading Delingpole's book I thought he hit o'neill on the head rather well with his "you lot (RCP, Living Marxism crowd) are right-wing" etc.
O'neill puts up a rather poor, yet telling, defence with his espousal of the enlightenment and 1789. What about the rest of the 200 years since, 1848, 1871, 1917 and so on.
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