Julie Burchill

It’s no secret that my career isn’t quite what it was (lucky I’m rich!) so imagine my feeling of glee when I opened up my email account last Wednesday to find messages galore from all over the mainstream media. TV news programmes, radio shows, newspapers - even the Guardian! - were keen to have my views on…the end of the print edition of the New Musical Express. What a cheek! I started work there in 1976 when I was 17; I left when I was 19 as, hilariously, I thought that people in their twenties who still wrote about music were ‘sad old men'. Since then I’ve had number one best-selling novels, won an Emmy and been condemned in the House of Commons for tranny-baiting.

You would have to be quite odd not to approve of the sudden surge of solidarity amongst Hollywood stars of the female persuasion. (Though I did wonder, when Frances McDormand called so movingly during her Oscar-winner speech ‘Meryl, if you do it everyone else will!’ whether she meant 'Suck up to Weinstein for years' or 'Give Polanski a standing ovation’ - because Streep certainly led the liberal sheep in those fields.) But still - Ancient Mariner on the oceans of objectionability that I am - I do miss the days when ‘actress’ was shorthand not for ‘whore’ but for ‘bitch.’ These days, female actors want to be seen to be building each other up rather than tearing each other down.

What do we talk about when we talk about Jordan? Not the country, or the river, or the cultural commentator Jordan Peterson but – as is my Philistine wont – the glamour model and businesswoman Katie ‘Jordan’ Price.  Last week, Katie Price addressed Parliament on the subject of social media trolling – which her 15-year-son is particularly affected by, due to his weight, ethnicity and handicaps. She is calling for online abuse to be made a criminal offence. Coming from the sticks-and-stones school of thought, I don’t agree.

For the past few years, another seasonal story has joined the traditional tales of woe about this mysterious, random thing called Winter causing chaos - always at the same time of year, it seems - on the railways of this fair land and of roadworks unexpectedly coinciding with the peak time for people taking long car journeys to visit loved ones (and even their families) thereby adding misery to the mistletoe on motorways across the country. This new glitch concerns a nation of Tiny Tims and Tiny Tears going without the Christmas gifts intended for them simply because the theoretical givers ordered them online rather than go to the bother of fetching them on their own two feet.

‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open,’ wrote the American poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser in 1968. It took just short of half a century, but 2017 was the year in which #MeToo made this prophecy a reality. The phrase was coined in 2006 by the black American activist Tarana Burke, who was inspired to use it after finding herself without words when a 13-year-old girl confided in her that she had been sexually assaulted, later wishing she had just said ‘Me too’.

Of all the interesting combinations which sexual geopolitics has come up with, that of the American girl and the English man is one of the most enduring, giving a saucy spin to the phrase ‘Special Relationship.’ It started with cold hard economics when the second half of the 19th century saw the creation of the American billionaire - Vanderbilt and his railways, Carnegie and his steel, Singer and his sewing machines. The daughters of such men became known as The Dollar Princesses; girls who came to cold old England bringing million-dollar dowries to reboot ruined stately homes in exchange for the one thing money couldn’t buy them in the brave New World - a title.

It has long been my belief that whereas the quality of gentiles drawn to Judaism is very high (Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, myself), the dregs are drawn to Islam. And leaving aside the dozy broads who gravitate to it for kinky reasons after watching one too many Turkish Delight ads (Vanessa Redgrave, Lauren Booth), there is something about this religion which attracts the very weakest of Western men. We think of those often half-witted types who learn to build a bomb online. Then there are the imam-huggers of the left who never met a wife-beating mad mullah they didn’t like. A lot of the reason left-wing men seem to have so much time for Islamism is to do with suppressed feelings of resentment towards the march of feminism, which they could never in a million years admit to.

It has long been my belief that whereas the quality of gentiles drawn to Judaism is very high (Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, myself), the dregs are drawn to Islam. And leaving aside the dozy broads who gravitate to it for kinky reasons after watching one too many Turkish Delight ads (Vanessa Redgrave, Lauren Booth), there is something about this religion which attracts the very weakest of Western men. We think of those often half-witted types who learn to build a bomb online. Then there are the imam-huggers of the left who never met a wife-beating mad mullah they didn’t like. A lot of the reason left-wing men seem to have so much time for Islamism is to do with suppressed feelings of resentment towards the march of feminism, which they could never in a million years admit to.

My sainted mum was of untarnished working-class blood — she worked, variously, as a cleaner, factory hand and shop assistant — and like most women of her kind who grew up before the 1960s, she never swore. Not a ‘bitch’, ‘slut’ or ‘slag’ ever passed her lips, though she certainly loathed a lot of women and always had at least two feuds on the go. In her eyes, using words like that would have made her just as bad as the targets of her disapproval. No, her ultimate diss for females she disliked was ‘Lady Muck’.

I am not a bad friend. I enjoy my mates, and I am generous, showering them with fun, money and sympathy. But I do not crave their company when I am without it, for whatever length of time, and should we lose touch, I do not miss them. In fact, I find there’s a profound pleasure in parting with a chum, whether by their hand or by yours. We should all have the courage to admit it when a friendship has become more work than play, more duty than beauty. Maybe my origins led me to feel this way. I was an only child who, at an early age, became extremely fond of my own company. Some of my earliest memories are of lurking in my bedroom and begging my mother to get rid of young schoolmates who had come calling for me to play.

As a tot growing up in a provincial proletarian Communist household in the 1960s, I’d been led to believe that socialism was colour-blind. But when I moved to That London in the 1970s, I quickly became aware that the non-working-class Left operated what was best described as Paint-Chart Politics – the further from white, the more likely you were to be right. This began in a small way, with reggae bands who believed stuff about women that would have had them condemned as fascist Neanderthals had they been white playing under the Rock Against Racism flag; in recent years, it has seen the Left support similar Islamist stone-agers just because they're the right (Left) side of beige.

Twenty years in August since Diana died. The anniversary is sad for me on many levels — she was definitely the final famous person I’ll have a pash on, and it reminds me that I haven’t yet earned back the whopping advance I was given for my book about her. To be fair, the book was an absolute stinker, written through a haze of gin, tears and avarice, containing such clodhopping clangers as ‘with blue skies in her eyes and the future in her smile’ and ‘affection swooshed out of her like a firework from a bottle’. Nurse, the screens! But there was good stuff in it, too. Namely, the way I served it to the Prince’s Party who continue to curdle Diana’s memory much as they tried to ruin her reputation during her lifetime.