Julie Burchill

As I watched the Duchess of Sussex give her extended acceptance speech for Best Performance As A Victim — played as a cross between Bambi and Beth from Little Women — my overwhelming feeling was of disappointment. Readers may recall that I once wrote long and loopy love letters to her in this very magazine, embarrassing in their unctuousness — ‘Meghan Markle has rescued her prince!’ — but I went off her when her bid for secular sainthood started. The allegations of tiara tantrums brought me fresh hope. Could it be that behind that innocent face, all damp eyes and trembling lips, lurked a superannuated Mean Girl? She’d have made such a good one. And we bitches could use the recruits.

As a proud resident of Sussex, I had to laugh when I heard that Facebook had threatened to ban references to Devil’s Dyke — the 100-metre-deep South Downs valley which has been a tourist attraction since Victorian times — for ‘violating community standards on hate speech’. The touchy bots even slapped a 48-hour ban on a man who posted a photo of a bus bearing the beauty spot’s name as a destination with the caption ‘Heading up to the Dyke’. It’s nutty, but it sparked a serious thought: where have all the lesbians gone? Just the other week the lesbian Joanna Cherry was sacked as the SNP’s Westminster spokesperson for not being ‘inclusive’ enough over the issue of gender recognition.

January is when the difference between the rich and the poor becomes most evident. Whereas many people face a month plagued by the three Ds — debt, divorce and doldrums — the famous tend to take off for more clement climes. Simon Cowell famously frolics at the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados at the start of each new year, and I myself have spent many January days at the Ritz-Carlton — but only the one in Tenerife, because I believe in keeping it real. This winter, subdued British airports have also seen a mass exodus of a particular youth tribe recognisable by their bright white teeth and deep mahogany tans — the hordes of youngsters who are reality TV stars and/or create content for Instagram. And most of them are going to Dubai.

‘Wild’ used to be one of my favourite words. It was in all the songs I loved best — ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, ‘Wild Thing’, ‘Born to Be Wild’. How times have changed. Wild — once meaning brave, bold, reckless — is now yet another sanctimonious nag. Everyone seems to want to get in touch with their wild side. Dark green is the new black. Even vulgar Channel 5 has given us Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild, in which he ‘travels to remote corners of the globe to experience extreme lifestyles with those who have left modern-day amenities behind’.

I have many fine qualities – but being a good judge of character is not one of them. Put me in a room with six saints and a psychopath and we all know who I’m going to be swearing blood-brotherhood with by the end of the evening. Interestingly, this hasn’t left me feeling like a victim; as I’m extremely tough, reckless and self-mocking, I bounce from one inappropriate friendship to the next with no loss of enthusiasm. But most of these relationships are by their nature not conducted in the public eye. When a journalist makes a fool of themselves drooling over a famous figure who later turns out to be an ocean-going rotter, it’s a different matter.

I am that rare thing, a vice-signaller; a breed defined by the fact that unlike our virtue-signalling opposites, we delight in presenting ourselves as somewhat worse than we are. Reasons vary; sometimes we were Bad People in the past and changed but (like teenage wallflowers who grew into table-dancing divas and still describe themselves as ‘shy’) we keep an image in our mind of the way we were. Sometimes we choose to present in this way because we are repelled by people who consider themselves good but behave in a manner which we see as substandard; for example, regard the hardcore hypocrisy of racist, misogynist Corbynites who believe that they can never do wrong because they have ticked the box marked Brotherhood Of Man.

There’s a line in Desperately Seeking Susan where Madonna (Susan) reads aloud the diary of Roberta, the bored housewife she has swapped places with: ‘Couldn’t sleep. Went into kitchen. Gary came in, turn off light. Gary left. Finished birthday cake.’ Then she exclaims: ‘Pages of it; it’s got to be a cover — nobody’s life could be this boring!’ A related naughty thought often comes to mind when I see my chums worrying on Facebook about The Man stealing photos of their cat wearing rabbit ears or their own preferences in caffeinated beverages. If there is a stealthy cabal of shadowy figures seeking to make puppets out of us — mere paper dolls capering powerlessly at the whim of our faceless masters!

I nearly choked on my Krispy Kreme when I read that the journalist Michael Buerk had announced that fat people (I’m not going to use his word, obese; fat is perfectly serviceable and doesn’t have the same judgemental, almost parasexual feel) should be allowed to drop dead and no longer trouble the NHS with their chubby troubles. All those years I listened to The Moral Maze thinking of him as a cross between Solomon The Wise and Mr Miyagi from The Karate Kid and he turns out to be some superannuated playground bully! It’s a bit rich that Buerk himself is a whopping 73 years old; there are a lot of nutters out there who think that everyone over the age of 60 is ready for the knacker’s yard.

After hearing about the massacre in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, I went to church, happily sang the word God and stuffed £20 in the collection plate. I’m a believer and am lucky to have a lovely church on the corner of the square where I live. I attend irregularly, but on my frequent walks to my volunteer job I always enjoy disapproving as I read the list of activities going on at the community centre which is in ‘the award-winning conversion’ (the sin of pride, for starters) of the nave of the church — bridge (gambling), astrology circle (false prophets), kung-fu (violence) and pilates (vanity), all in one week! Tutting happily, I go on my merry way.

Thumbing avidly through Heat magazine recently in a fevered search for the latest on the Cheryl/Liam/Naomi infernal triangle, I was startled to find a pull-out preview of a new true-crime magazine called Crime Monthly. It was aimed at an audience that is presumably satiated with seeing celebrities tormented and now wants to read about ordinary people being tortured. Heat magazine — once a bona fide pop-culture phenomenon — is often now found on free magazine stands, so the publishers, Bauer, are chasing the money. The self-important actress Kristen Stewart once compared being papped to being raped, but there’s obviously more profit now in flogging the real thing.

There’s quite a few writers who are sensitive souls, and the worst are those who like to dish it out but reach for the smelling salts and swoon when anyone so much as gives them a funny look. Luckily I was born with the Sensitivity Gene missing, especially when it comes to dissing, and I find that like with gifts, I’d just as soon receive than give. Say nasty things behind my back, to my face – or both ways in bed – and not only will I not get upset but I’ll derive a mild kick from it. Just a little one, mind you – I’m not kinky!