Julie Burchill

Until around a decade back, most of us either watched the Eurovision Song Contest because it was extremely camp, or for what passed for the ‘politics’ – Greece and Turkey not voting for each other over Cyprus, and that exquisitely rebuking nul points the UK invariably got from Germany and France, for being an uppity little island nation which was still celebrating winning Second World War.   The campness is still there, but it now sits uncomfortably with real politics – that of the culture wars. 'Trans' and Israel are the flashpoints, with the supporters of the first and the opponents of the latter overlapping in a vicious Venn diagram. This was summed up in 2024’s Irish entrant, one Bambie Thug, who offered ‘I’m queer!

Pick the prince who recently said this: ‘I take a long time trying to understand my emotions and why I feel like I do, and I feel like that’s a really important process to do every now and again, to check in with yourself and work out why you’re feeling like you do.’  Prince Harry, right? The baffled bailer across the water with too much time on his hands, who in the past, while doped up, has confessed to having conversations with both a trash can and a toilet. O, that the alumni of the Algonquin could have been around to join in!  No, it was Prince William. I must admit that I felt a vague foreboding when I heard his comments on BBC Radio 1’s Life Hacks on Wednesday – the Mental Elf strikes again!

Two years ago, I wrote an essay here called ‘In praise of Kemi Badenoch’. To say it was admiring is like saying that Abelard quite fancied Heloise. She sent me a nice message on X; I went mildly berserk one evening when drunk and sent her a poem I’d had ChatGPT write, basically saying that she was going to save the world. Our communication understandably dwindled after that, as she probably came to believe I was a crazy person. To be fair, I also became increasingly taken with Reform; the re-nationalisation plan in particular grabbed me. I wrote about my turncoat ways in the i Paper: ‘When I and millions of other former Labour voters choose Reform at the next general election, it’s not because we’re rabid right-wingers.

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.