Lies, a liar and a parade of useless

Last night's episode of BBC1's Would I Lie To You? starred featured accommodated that Diumvirate of Dire, Janet Stree-Pawta and Davina McCall. So, where's an arsonist or a loony with an Uzi when you need one?

*****

Lord Bloody Mandelson is all over the airwaves again, making it very difficult for me to avoid him unless I actually have the TV remote in my hand. Mandy is one of those people (like Pawta and McCall - vide supra) who has a truly visceral effect on me - I simply cannot stomach the wee shite, either to look at or to listen to. Mind you, yesterday morning he was very satisfactorily squirming on the end of James Naughtie's fishing pole, with Nick Robinson administering the coup de grace. Sadly it won't stop the ennobled turd from springing up again, Phoenix-like, from the swamp (and don't get me started on Phoenix). I can only reiterate my bafflement at his continued position at High Table - he displays (publicly, at least) none of what one might think were the necessary attributes for high office - charm, intellect, wit or beauty, and yet when Gordon Brown's arse was truly in the sling who does he send for? Mandy must either know where some serious bodies are buried, or have pictures of someone doing something truly illegal to someone or something else. Do you see Mandy Antoinette as saviour of the New Labour experiment? Surely only if your idea of saving it is to kill it first and then save ( in the sense of 'preserve') it in formaldehyde. Pour encourager les autres?

*****

Forget everything I ever said about Julie Bloody Burchill or Zoe Bloody Williams - they have been roundly usurped by Tanya Bloody Gold. In today's The Guardian she lays into the Queen Mother - Gold is never one to pick a difficult target if she can find an easy one instead. Her spiteful and ignorant article was occasioned by the publication of a new biography of the Queen Mother - presumably Gold wanted to provide a counterblast to the fawning hagiography that she obviously hasn't read.

Gold's take on the QM? Well, she was rude about the servants, didn't like Wallis Simpson, may have ignored nieces with alleged learning difficulties and probably harboured quasi-racist thoughts. The whole tone of Gold's presumably paid-for article (a mixture of spite, anecdote, opinion and gossip) can be found in this paragraph:

There is a passage in Vickers's biography that actually manages to make me feel sorry for Princess Margaret. He relates how she wanted to marry the divorced courtier Peter Townsend, who had comforted her after her father's death. When Margaret realised she would have to give up her royal status to marry a divorcee, she backed out. But she spent one final weekend with Townsend. When Margaret returned to Clarence House, Vickers writes, "Queen Elizabeth was due to keep an evening engagement at the University of London. The Queen Mother set off for this, unaware or unconcerned that her daughter would be having dinner alone on a tray."

That is just child abuse, plain and simple. Isn't it? I mean leaving her daughter, a grown woman, to have dinner alone on a tray with only three hundred flunkeys in attendance, not to mention the entire Who's Who at the end of a telephone to keep her company. What a bitch. The QM wasn't very nice either.

Sadly Tanya Gold isn't the only running joke at The Guardian. Julie Bloody Burchill might have done the decent thing and buggered off, and Zoe Williams seems to be confining herself to commenting on the output of Radio 4 and can therefore safely be ignored. Julie Bindel is still around, still hating men but not really giving me sleepless nights. However, there's still Jess Cartner-Morley, the full ghastliness of whose moronic output can be safely inferred from her "ickle lickle me wiv pigeon-toes cos I is so cute" picture here. Her weekly column How To Wear Clothes really is an object lesson in why newspapers are totally doomed. There's the ineffably weedy and drivellous Tim Dowling. There's Hadley Freeman, who used to be just about bearable as a fashion Agony Aunt (Dear Hadley, Is it ever okay to wear pink leggings with a purple ra-ra skirt?) but who has been promoted way above her pay grade to be some sort of opinion-for-hire on all sorts of matters, some of which even matter. If it weren't for the wonderful Marina Hyde I'd completely give up logging onto The Guardian's free website.