Julie Burchill

When I was a young punk, my favourite badge (we loved badges!) was a big white one which a reader sent me and which simply read I HATE STUDENTS YEAH! I wore it proudly pinned to the thigh of my skin-tight jeans for many a month, until I lost it in a 1977 scuffle with a police horse during an anti-fascist demonstration in Lewisham. (I trust that no wiseacre is going to ask which side I was on.) A lot of people simply shouldn’t be at university wasting their time and money on Mickey Mouse degrees But the sentiment has stayed with me throughout the decades and still remains strong; living in Brighton, with its manifold institutes of ‘higher’ and ‘further’ education, it’s very hard to avoid students.

We’re living in a golden age of parliamentary sketch writing; never have so many been made mincemeat of by so few. Our own Madeline Grant combines coruscating character assassination with a sense of humour so light and playful that she often appears like a kitten prancing on a keyboard, delighted by the sound she’s making. And of course there’s Quentin Letts, the doyen of sketch writers, formerly of the Times and Telegraph and most recently returned to his natural home at the Daily Mail. I reviewed a book of his some years back and found it elegant, muscular and witty. It’s always a joy to behold someone who excels at what they do – that is, if the beholder is also good at their job. If not, then excellence can appear somewhat… threatening.

Oh Thomas Tuchel, how I love you! Unlike the last boss of the England team, Saint Gareth of Southgate, there’s no smart suit and fashionable theories about sad young men for you. You won’t write a book called ‘Anything Is Possible: Be Brave, Be Kind & Follow Your Dreams’. No one will ever write a play about you, though you are beautifully portrayed in the current series of Radio 4’s Dead Ringers, repeatedly correcting Gary Lineker’s sloppy thinking and Harry’s Kane’s flights of fancy with a kindly but firm ‘No, Gary’ and ‘No, Harry’ before explaining to them exactly what’s what. There’s always a special affection about the way the studio audience laugh at your small speeches and cheer when the sketches conclude.

I knew that the endless hours I’d spent watching reality TV would one day stand me in good stead in my trade – and now it’s happened. For Andy Burnham’s journey to No. 10 is recognisable from a good many such shows.  It’s notable that his wife, Marie-France van Heel, was once a contestant on Blind Date. Andy himself would be a shoo-in for its sexy and souped-up heir, Love Island. There’s always an episode a few weeks in when the original contestants get a bit bored with each other – so enter the Bombshell. Bombshells can be of either sex, but they have to be more attractive than the majority of the boys or girls already in place; this is certainly true of Burnham.

I didn’t fully realise how much Brexit Derangement Syndrome – the reaction to being on the losing side in the 2016 referendum – had got hold of even people I loved until I complained to a friend that my 2018 play People Like Us (co-written with Jane Robins, who had been asked to leave her North London book group for liking a pro-Brexit Spectator column of mine on Facebook) would close in the small London theatre where it had played for six weeks. It wouldn’t transfer to a bigger London venue, it wouldn’t open in any provincial theatre and it wouldn’t tour – despite selling out before it opened.

Regarding the possible candidates for the Labour leadership, I’ve travelled so far down the nihilistic road to nowhere that I’m afraid I judge politicians these days mostly in terms of how much entertainment they’re likely to provide rather than having one iota of belief they’ll make anything better. Who’d be the most fun up against Kemi at PMQs? The obvious choice is Angela Rayner, but I fear that after her recent shenanigans and shamefacedness, as Glorious Leader she might be regrettably inclined to rein it in. Andy Burnham’s got that more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger look which may well indicate horrid notions about ‘healing’ our multi-fractured body politic. Ed Miliband couldn’t bitch his way out of a recyclable paper bag.

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 of rough boys swaggering around the playground, grabbing other boys and asking bluntly ‘Sam or Doctor?’ These were, respectively, the Labour and Conservative local election candidates; if you said ‘Sam’ you were released but if you said ‘Doctor’ you were shoved roughly between the boys and proffered a punch for your uppity ways.

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 the least absence. If the chattering classes are allowed to keep their Eric Gill, why can’t the dancing classes keep Michael Jackson? On the other hand, we’re inclined to give Caravaggio a pass, as he was such a great painter as well as a boy-abusing murderer – and it was such a long time ago, that the victims can't speak out. The same goes for the paedophile Paul Gauguin, who spent many years spreading syphilis among a proportion of the girl children of Tahiti.

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 pops up. Quelle surprise, this time it’s from the trans lobby, via a new organisation called ‘Bash Back’, with an unashamed level of misogynistic violence. The Times reports this week that the ‘militant transgender activist group’ has issued a ‘direct action guide’ to its members, telling them to tool up and carry out illegal attacks on MPs and organisations.