Julie Burchill is a writer living in Brighton. Her Substack is julieburchill.substack.com.
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Like most people of my age – I’m 66 – I grew up in a time when politics was a tribal thing, like supporting a football team. My earliest political memory concerned a local election which took place in the 1960s in my working-class neighbourhood of Bristol South. At break time, there was a group
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What does a star need? A great lawyer, a good publicist, a silent plastic surgeon on speed dial – and fans, lots of them. Since the rise of OnlyFans, the word ‘fans’ has gained unpleasant associations but it was originally a 19th-century baseball term to describe the most ardent spectators – though its provenance was
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When I became wheelchair-bound at the end of 2024, the biggest change I had to deal with was not being able to walk any more on my lovely long legs. But, as I surveyed my poor ruined body in the cold light of 2025, I was dismayed to see that there were a multitude of
We’re not used to famous paedophiles having a great talent; perhaps because all of their drive goes into their secret obsession, they’re generally just operators with a lot of front. It’s been easy to slice the cultural contributions of a Huw Edwards, a Jimmy Savile or a Gary Glitter from one’s life and not feel
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There are times when it seems that violence against women and girls – forever these days being hand-wrung over by useless politicians as their alleged absolute priority – is like a game of Whack-A-Mole; no sooner is the state performatively tackling ‘the Manosphere’ in schools than a sinister new threat to the physical safety of females
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One of the funniest – and in my opinion, falsest – things women have long said is ‘I’m doing it for myself – not for men’ about improving the way they look. Men have rarely said the same about women, which reflects that men have never been principally valued for their looks, historically, as they generally earned far more money than
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It’s funny that the George Orwell statue outside the BBC’s Broadcasting House has a quote etched nearby from a proposed preface to Animal Farm: ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’. It’s almost ‘Orwellian’ in itself – an act of blackwhite Newspeak
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There are few things more savagely amusing than a disgraced member of the BBC becoming indignant. (‘Member’ seems the oddly appropriate word, considering how employees seem to conform on everything from loving transvestites to hating Israel.) It’s hardly surprising, though still rather shocking, that Huw Edwards, a keen viewer of indecent images of children, is getting
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Bottomless brunch: it sounds disreputable, to start with. There’s the suggestion of indecency; that lower garments are optional, perhaps on the part of the poor waiting staff, like those ‘Butlers in the Buff’. And ‘brunch’ is surely the louchest of meals, invented purely so that people could roll into a restaurant after a long lie-in
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There are a lot of things that Ozempic & Co. have killed business for. Weight Watchers. Diets from cabbage soup to the boiled egg. Fat-but-jolly female film stars. The latest victim is the Lycra Company, which has filed for bankruptcy after sinking into a whopping $1.2 billion (£897 billion) of debt. That’s a lot of
I almost spat out my toast (smothered with the As Ever, The Raspberry Spread Trio – ‘Made To Keep On Hand And Enjoy Often’ $42 – natch) in pure molten anticipation when I read that my role model in spreading jam to flour, sorry, speaking truth to power, will be hosting a women-only weekend ‘retreat’ in Sydney during her forthcoming
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What do you think of when you think of Jameela Jamil? (I realise that I may be talking to the wrong demographic here, but bear with me, and I promise I’ll broaden it out.) I think of hair – lots and lots of shiny, black, beautiful hair. Personally – and I thought this long before telogen effluvium, caused by the trauma of spinal surgery, made half of
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When the ghastly Lynda Snell of The Archers ‘did’ fasting last year at Ramadan to suck up to the new Muslim family in town, I thought this kind of thing had got about as silly as it was possible to be. But reading about what happened last week at London Fashion Week took the gluten-free cake. Non-Muslims either choosing or being compelled to
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They say you can never go home again, but if I think of my hometown of Bristol – and my adopted hometown of Brighton and Hove – the similarities are striking. The rise of the Green Party has much to do with this. When I was growing up in the beautiful, but quiet, West Country city
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Until around a decade back, most of us either watched the Eurovision Song Contest because it was extremely camp, or for what passed for the ‘politics’ – Greece and Turkey not voting for each other over Cyprus, and that exquisitely rebuking nul points the UK invariably got from Germany and France, for being an uppity little island nation
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Pick the prince who recently said this: ‘I take a long time trying to understand my emotions and why I feel like I do, and I feel like that’s a really important process to do every now and again, to check in with yourself and work out why you’re feeling like you do.’ Prince Harry,
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‘Enhanced’– it’s such a slinky word. A ‘boob job’ sounds like a gimmick on a stick and a ‘breast augmentation’ implies cantilevers and mathematics – but a ‘breast enhancement’ sounds like something highly agreeable that everyone is going to benefit from. It’s with this bias towards the word that I consider ‘The Enhanced Games.’ Let’s
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‘Daft’ is such a wonderful word. Not for the first time, I’ve wished I was from Yorkshire, so that I could say it with its full gumption and contempt. It’s not used as much as it should be, and the reason may be that practically everybody’s daft right now – metaphorically picking their nose and
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The pundits are convinced that Peter Mandelson’s friendship with paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein is the ‘biggest British political scandal since the Profumo affair’. The latest tranche of the Epstein files, released last week, revealed the extent of the pair’s sordid association. But what’s striking to me (and I could probably do the Profumo affair as
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Two years ago, I wrote an essay here called ‘In praise of Kemi Badenoch’. To say it was admiring is like saying that Abelard quite fancied Heloise. She sent me a nice message on X; I went mildly berserk one evening when drunk and sent her a poem I’d had ChatGPT write, basically saying that
