When I wrote about the Jason Arday case, the whole point of doing so was to question the pile-on and the high-handed outrage which I found appalling. I wanted to defend Arday by explaining that despite the allegations, I was rooting for him against the pompous voices of outraged academia.
Will Self may not strike you as the obvious moral arbiter of life on earth
As someone who did not succeed in getting into Oxbridge when I applied, I felt a certain admiration for Arday, who had come from a humble background and worked the system to his benefit. In my piece, I expressed the sentiment I felt at the time of reading the coverage about him, which was: ‘Go on my son!’
I wanted to come at the story from a different angle, because Arday was, in my view, an interesting character, and the more I read about him the more I liked him. But it seems that in doing this, I landed myself on a series of leftist hit lists, published after Arday’s tragic death.
One such is being put about by Will Self. In a pompous post issued on Substack, Self says that every journalist who wrote about this issue needs to be held accountable for Arday’s death. Even a journo who said ‘Go on my son!’ to Arday. Self suggests I’ve got to be reported to, er, the relevant authorities.
Now, Will Self may not strike you as the obvious moral arbiter of life on earth, but he has decided that he is. So let’s go with that, for now. If Will Self isn’t happy with what I wrote, or doesn’t understand it, then the Prime Minister needs to be made aware.
Self, you see, has written to Andy Burnham to tell tales on me and many others, in his position as leader of the morals of the (not so) free world.
The look and feel of Self’s ‘Situation Report’ reminds me of something in George Orwell’s 1984. It is in many ways ludicrous, but it is happening, nonetheless, and we cannot assume Burnham’s response will be to say ‘Eh?’ and move on.
Also, irrespective of what Self’s ludicrously overblown statement actually achieves – for overblown is what Self does for money, and he can make a buck on Substack, I get that – there are other such lists and other campaigns to hold writers accountable for Arday’s death.
Free speech has been on life support for a while, but this week they switched off the machine and it died with poor Jason Arday. I don’t know which I’m more upset about. Arday, definitely. Because free speech was absolutely on its last legs and no one, least of all me, expected it to live for much longer.
In fact, it was getting kind of agonising watching it thrashing about. It’s less painful and messy this way.
The situation is finally nice and clear. You’d have to be stupid to say what you think now that it has been established that if you write your thoughts on a particular row, or issue, and someone involved in that row subsequently dies, you’re somehow responsible.
I compared the Arday case to that of Frank Abagnale Jr., the cheque forger who was so brilliant he worked for the FBI; and to Simon Leviev, called the Tindler Swindler, because he claimed to be a millionaire when dating women who then gave him money.
Neither of these men will go down in history as swindlers, actually, to my mind, but as something more interesting and important, and that was my thesis. This was too subtle a point for Self, and he missed it spectacularly.
Let’s try again: These men were so clever that they transcended the labels put on them. They were also people with interesting pasts, and several factors pointed to them being lost and wanting affirmation. That was my point. But Will Self missed it. He’s not so clever, is he?
Self seems not to realise what the choice of comparators meant. I can’t help him. If he can’t see that I was approaching the Arday case from the point of view of examining an interesting human character at the centre of a storm, and that my only comment on Arday’s colour was to explicitly state that I was appalled at the racism he had suffered in what I called a ‘horrendous’ media pile-on, then I have to assume Self cannot, or will not, read articles properly, and this is the greater issue.
I bloody hate journalism, is what I really want to say. I bloody hate journalism because no matter what you say, and how carefully you say it, if you are anywhere near right of centre there is always one big loud leftist bloke, and sometimes quite a few, who will deliberately misconstrue what you say for their own purposes, hop on the back of it, and trash the hell out of your carefully crafted words, summarising them to buggery and back, riding you like a donkey to make their own point and their own money. I realise that’s quite a few metaphors but I no longer care.
There is always one big loud leftist bloke, and sometimes quite a few, who will deliberately misconstrue what you say for their own purposes
That article was one of a very few I write nowadays for what journos call ‘the front of the book’.
I only normally write my column Real Life, in the back of the book, because I have been giving up on news comment articles as the climate becomes more and more impossible.
On this occasion, I felt so sorry for Arday I had a rush of blood to the head. I looked for a way of contacting him to ask him for an interview, couldn’t find a way to reach him, and then thought: maybe I should put my head above the parapet and try to challenge the prevailing narrative a bit.
I tried to explain in terms not obvious enough for Self that I was rooting for Arday. I thought it was obvious, but it wasn’t obvious enough.
He now writes – have a look yourself, but don’t feel you have to pay him when you click on the article and it asks you to send money – as follows:
‘It’s the summer of tittering, it would seem – and we know who ‘titterers’ are: people who take blood sports seriously, because they don’t take anyone’s life seriously enough. J’accuse Melissa Kite of turning Arday into a lovable conman, an entertainment through whom the supposed obsessions of contemporary education with minorities and disability could themselves be mocked. In her case I make the charge more narrowly: I have not found the same sustained quasi-ideological programme visible in (Allison) Pearson, (Madeline) Grant or (Dominic) Green, but rather a recurrent journalistic persona that converts public questions into farce and treats credulity itself as the joke. That is precisely why her ‘Go on my son!’ response to Arday matters: the human subject vanishes behind the entertainment value of the imposture, and disability and minority status become merely components in the elaborate scam she invites the reader to enjoy. I wonder if she also enjoys meeting her readers: getting together so they can all make each other laugh about ‘cripples’ and n—s: it doesn’t seem remotely implausible to me.’
Let’s take a run at that last bit again:
‘I wonder if she also enjoys meeting her readers: getting together so they can all make each other laugh about ‘cripples’ and n—s: it doesn’t seem remotely implausible to me.’
I wonder if Self has seen an advert for a Spectator reader event with Melissa Kite? Or has he had a Google through my articles to find I run a B&B where readers occasionally come? In any case, he has decided he is going to make a very specific allegation. So specific is this allegation, and so libellous, that again, I’m amazed at his stupidity.
I absolutely have never laughed about ‘cripples’ or ever used that word. So why is it in direct quotes? And I have never used the n word so why is he saying it is plausible I have?
A third big but more generalised lie is that I don’t care about human life, because I defend ‘blood sports’. This is a silly nonsense aimed by hard leftists at all hunters, shooters and fishers, but he’s singling me out for it again, to give some colour to the general picture he’s trying to paint of me being bloodthirsty.
These people aren’t clever. Not really. They think they are. But they haven’t the intelligence of ordinary people who aren’t as ‘educated’
Self, an Oxford graduate, thinks he is being clever. But as I said in my original article when discussing the elite of Oxbridge, these people aren’t clever. Not really. They think they are. But they haven’t the intelligence of ordinary people who aren’t as ‘educated’, and I inferred, or thought I did, that I thought Arday was someone who had a better kind of intelligence, and had been drawn to the world of pointless academic jargon.
I don’t think Self liked me making fun of Oxford, his alma mater. I don’t think he liked me saying that Oxbridge was a con.
And I don’t think he remembers me as the young reporter sitting next to him on the William Hague general election battle bus in 2001– the girl he laughed and joked with as he ate his complimentary Tory packed lunch. Poached salmon every day, I seem to remember. They handed it out in plastic containers to the media on that bus. It was delicious, if repetitive.
Interestingly, he did not then, while meeting me face to face and spending weeks with me, profess to have sussed me out as someone who allegedly said ‘cripple’ and the n word in private. Nor did he seem to think me bloodthirsty. Why would you eat your lunch with someone who was bloodthirsty? It would put you off, no?
No, his attitude to me then, it seemed to me, was that he quite liked me. Would he say to my face he thought I was the sort of person who would say cripple and n****r? He certainly did not then.
By the way, Self, it hasn’t escaped my notice, that most of the journalists on your hit list are women. But we’ll leave that for now.
Self once said:
‘What excites me is to disturb the reader’s fundamental assumptions. I want to make them feel that certain categories within which they are used to perceiving the world are unstable.’
But I did that with my article and he didn’t like it. So I guess what he’s saying is that he gets to disturb the reader’s assumptions, but I don’t.
He says he writes ‘to astonish people’. Let me try to astonish you, Mr Self
He says he writes ‘to astonish people’. Let me try to astonish you, Mr Self, with something I learned not at Oxford, but during an NCTJ journalist training course at the University of Central Lancashire. You cannot suggest in print – especially in quotes – that someone said something unless you have a basis for doing so.
You have written two very specific and deliberate lies about me. These lies are creative and colourful, and no doubt you meant them not only to incite hatred of me but to entertain the hard left, and for that you were prepared to trash my good name and my reputation.
It’s ‘the summer of tittering’, after all. You threw in that foxhunting reference quite deliberately, to get the lefties going.
But you have no basis for the allegation I said the word ‘cripple’ and the n word to readers at these get-togethers of which you speak. You may speculate in your head that I did, and talk yourself into it, but I know 100 per cent that it didn’t happen. So you’re in a pickle.
I could ask you to retract the accusations in as prominent a way as you published them, but I’ve always thought that a bit of a cop-out. Also, don’t bother editing your article now to take out the all-important quote marks from around the word cripple because I’ve photographed it.
Let’s do this properly.
J’accuse Will Self of making stuff up.
Comments