Julie Burchill

When I heard that Robbie Williams had written a song called ‘Morrissey', I didn’t know whether to be delighted or irate. It’s no secret that I idolise Moz, and the idea of a somewhat seedy showman attempting glory by association made my hackles rise somewhat.  But on the other hand, Williams has co-written several songs which have caused my toes to tap over the years and has a history of acting gay when it suits him. (Indeed, Take That’s appeal might be crudely summed up as four lads who looked like rent boys and their concerned social worker, Gary Barlow.) Then there was the ‘Shame’ video of 2010 by Robbie and Gary, in which the two principals start by exchanging copious meaningful glances in a shopping mall.

I’ve been fat and I’ve been thin; I’ve been pretty and I’ve been plain – ugly, even. Throughout this, my self-esteem has stayed generally constant, as if you’re going to base it on something as ephemeral as physical beauty, you’re going to run out of road very quickly indeed. This objective attitude to my own appearance reminds me of a funny story from the infant days of the internet. Imagine my surprise one morning to receive a message from an unknown recipient informing me that they had film of me masturbating to online pornography which they would make available to a wider audience should I fail to pay a ransom. (Don’t judge – I was young-ish and frisky and it was all so new – I soon grew out of it.

My late mother was a kind woman – who I treated badly in adolescence, as teenage girls are often inclined to do – so the few times she said nasty things to me stick in my mind. In fact, I can only think of one: when I was 11, she told me that I had ‘no personality’. I remember sitting in my bedroom, staring at a poster of David Bowie, my eyes practically crossed in crossness. What did she mean, ‘no personality’? I was a right weirdo, already well under way with the process of changing myself from a wholesome working-class Bristolian schoolgirl into a total freak, thanks to growing immersion in the works of the Velvet Underground and Oscar Wilde.

The past few weeks has seen the pleasing spectacle of beautiful female film stars (Sydney Sweeney, Keira Knightley – even the previous Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Jennifer Lawrence, who once said that an orange victory would be ‘the end of the world’) refusing to toe the accepted Hollywood line on politics, be it by not kowtowing to trans activists or not accepting that everything is racist. Lawrence actually said: ‘Election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for’ – or as I wrote here in the spring: ‘How dim would a political party need to be to understand that not only do celeb endorsements not work, but have an actual repelling effect?

There was a time when, whenever the gossip mags wrote about Jennifer Aniston, they’d always preface her name with ‘Sad’. Sad Jen Aniston – it became one of those three-part names, like Sarah Jessica Parker or Sarah Michelle Gellar, only condescending rather than smug. For someone who was allegedly one of the most desirable women on earth, this must have been extremely annoying, recalling the line purred by the courtesan played by Marlene Dietrich in the 1932 film Shanghai Express: ‘It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.’ It took more than one man to change Aniston’s moniker to Sad Jen: Brad Pitt, John Mayer and Justin Theroux, for starters.

I thought that maybe being in a wheelchair would stop my louche lunching ways, but somewhat to my own surprise (though not that of my mates, I’d wager), this isn’t the case. ‘You push – I’ll pay!’ has become my battle cry. But as I am wheeled about at this time of year, a pucker of irritation repeatedly flickers across my features. Pumpkin this, pumpkin that – all leading inevitably to the monstrosity that is pumpkin spiced latte. The final straw in my deciding that pumpkin spiced lattes are utterly, well, deplorable was when the ghastly Hillary Clinton described herself as a fan – ‘until I saw how many calories there are in them’. Soz, Hills, but it’ll take more than losing a bit of weight to keep a dog like yours on the porch.

Reading about the break-up of the 19-year marriage of Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, I was interested in some comments from our old mate ‘A. Source’ about the possible cause. According to the Sun: ‘Keith put a brave face on Nicole’s raunchy screen roles and all the comments she’d make about her sexuality. But he didn’t react well when people teased him about Nicole getting it on with hunky younger guys, albeit only on camera, and it was a sensitive topic that became a real issue as time wore on.

I’m of the opinion that an overriding interest in ‘porn’ of any kind (I love the way we use the affectionate diminutive about something which ruins so many lives – like calling him ‘Fred’ West) isn’t especially good for the long-term happiness of people. But of course some sorts are worse than others. At the top, you’d have child pornography; at the bottom, property porn. The two find an odd union in the life of India Knight, the un-cancellable Sunday Times nepo-baby hack (her stepfather was editor of the Economist) who has been delighting us for decades, though not perhaps in the way she believes.

‘I was born to play Lady Bracknell,’ Stephen Fry swanked recently, in an interview to mark a new production of The Importance of Being Earnest, running until January. I can’t be the only one to greet the idea of another round of Fry interviews with a desire to go to bed and not come out till it’s all over. But that would be a long hibernation. For Stephen Fry pronouncements are like professional tennis; it’s always open season. You can’t get away from the clown, particularly when he’s lecturing women on how they should feel about having great hairy men in mascara sharing their private spaces. Magnificently, J.K.

There’s was so much to loathe and laugh at in Peter Mandelson’s contribution to Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘birthday book’ (which inadvertently has turned into more of a ‘burn book’). But the words ‘yum yum’ were, for me, in a league of their own. Whatever they were referring to – it could have been the peachy posterior of a pool-boy or a particularly perfect profiterole – they identified Mandelson as a practitioner of verbal infantilisation. For this alone, he deserved to be sent packing. I spent five months in hospital during last winter and spring, and though the nursing staff were generally excellent, we were oft spoken to like children in preschool.