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Published and damned

In a rare interview, Britain’s most controversial newspaper columnist charts his remarkable career and defends himself against charges of right-wing bias, homophobia and supporting the return of capital punishment. "Calling me right wing is lazy," he protests. "I think labels are meaningless – as I’ve said before, it’s about right and wrong, not Right and Left. When people lose the argument or you expose their argument for the hollow, shallow bollocks that it is, they just lay it on you. I’m big enough and ugly enough to take all the shit, but it depresses me. As far as the Left in Britain is concerned, if you are not with them on every single dot, comma and iota of their agenda, you’re not wrong or misguided – you’re evil. If you don’t buy up the whole ticket, then there’s something wrong with you." And he says he doubts his columns, in The Sun and now in the Daily Mail, have made much of a difference politically or socially over the close to 20 years he was been writing them, but insists, "That’s not a columnist’s job. Bron [the late Auberon] Waugh always used to say, ‘The job of a columnist is to chivvy things up a bit’. We can say things others can’t, or won’t."

British Journalism Review, Vol. 18, No. 2, 13-20 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0956474807080927


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