Julie Burchill

The death of the gangster Dave Courtney – found in his bed with a gunshot wound at the age of 64 – has once more brought to the fore the odd fascination with ‘gangsters’ which certain strange sorts harbour. Call me dirty-minded, but as with the ever-growing fascination with ‘true crime’, I can’t help thinking it’s all about sex. Before we were modern, mean men with brawn rather than brain would have been the best ones to bag; now that bookish Musks and Zuckerbergs rule the world, the Neanderthal has found himself somewhat surplus to requirements. But he still rings a primeval bell with the dimmer members of society, who were never going to be leaving their brains to science anyway.

The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour ‘righteous indignation’ – this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats. Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow Anti-Semitism ­– the socialism of fools – is a shapeshifter supreme. The oldest hatred has taken many forms, and is enjoyed by Christians and Muslims, communists and fascists alike. Now it can add another string to its bow. Anti-Semitism has become deeply fashionable. You might say it’s all the rage.

Is nomenclature destiny? If Keir Starmer had not been named for Keir Hardie, the founding father of the Labour party, but rather had his middle name ‘Rodney’ as his first, would he have still gone for the job as Labour leader? Might he have continued rather in the highly remunerative law career which made him Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013? Instead he became an MP in 2015, leader of the Labour party in 2020 and – if he doesn’t start killing kittens while tittering on TikTok in the interim – next prime minister of the United Kingdom in 2024. But there’s just something which doesn’t yell ‘Venceremos!’ about the man otherwise known as Captain Hindsight, Sir Shifty and (Boris, on fine Beano form) ‘Captain Crasheroonie Snoozefest’.

When you’re short-sighted, everyone seems attractive; for this reason, I don’t often wear my glasses, as I think myopia has a felicitous effect on my attitude to life. However, after a whopping 28 years living in Brighton & Hove, it’s dawning on me that this has coloured my view of my adopted hometown too. I love living in Brighton and wouldn’t dream of moving anywhere else. But I am privileged to do a thing I love for a living, when and where I want; for people who need to get around it on a daily basis, Brighton is an increasingly unpleasant place to be.

When I was a girl in the 1970s, we didn’t have a car. We always took the train from our home in Bristol to the deep west of Devon and Cornwall. But when I got together with my third husband in 1995, I discovered the joy of driving — or rather, being driven, as I certainly wasn’t going to be the (sober) adult in the room if I could help it.  We acquired a black Mini (‘Geoff’) and most summers we’d motor all the way from Brighton to Portmeirion, in Wales. Not only was Geoff a Mini, but he even had black and white Union Jacks on the back of his mirrors; driving into the heartbreakingly beautiful Prisoner village in him felt very glamorous.

Wading into the Sadiq Khan #HaveAWord brouhaha, Laurence Fox had a pop at Khan’s ally Romesh Ranganathan thus: ‘You are not a “comedian” #Maaate’. The dig came after Ranganathan teamed up with the London mayor in his campaign urging men to challenge their mates on their behaviour towards women. Fox had a point; when is a droll not a droll, but principally a state-sanctioned lapdog with a few lame gags on the side? Far too often in recent times. One of the most striking things about our modern culture is the lack of creativity, even amongst those who work in the actual creative industries. Writers are now routinely sensitivity-read, censored and cancelled by the very people who should be encouraging them to be as bold as possible: their publishers.

When a public figure is in danger of annoying me so much that it risks impinging on my quality of life, there’s an easy trick I play on myself in order to put the irritant back into their box and into perspective. Rather than take them seriously, I simply reframe them as a comic creation in the style of David Brent of The Office fame. This strategy worked a treat with Meghan Markle when I had to watch the Netflix mockumentary for work. With the latest mis-step in Mayor Sadiq Khan’s anti-sexist #HaveAWord campaign, the time has come to view him too through the prism of Ricky Gervais’ supreme buffoon.