AND ANOTHER THING
The world of women columnists: folies-bergere, ballerinas and cloggies
PAUL JOHNSON
There are too many columnists in English-language journalism, for the simple reason that columns cost less per inch than news. American editors, indeed, can buy them by the syndicated yard for practically nothing. Even here they come cheap. And women columnists come particularly cheap because (I am sorry to have to say) they can still be paid less than the men. So there are a lot of them. They cavort for our pleasure, with varying degrees of success.
I divide them into three main categories: folies-bergere, ballerinas and clog-dancers. The funny shepherdesses are ladies who write about their daily dramas and horrors, husbands, babies and homes, simply to make us laugh. Mary Killen, of course, is the leading practitioner in this field, and has even trained her husband, Giles, as a stand-in. Another star performer is or was the delicious Zoe Heller, who has perhaps wisely graduated from this riveting but ephemeral form of journalism, her place being taken by Kate Muir. The clever young matron in Paris is now my wife Marigold's favourite, and I have to listen to her being read aloud, in her entirety, at Sat- urday breakfast, keeping as stony a face as I can muster.
The ballerinas are, I am tempted to say, the heavyweights of women's journalism, but that is quite the wrong simile. They are the Fonteyns of the trade, sylphlike crea- tures, energised by cerebral power and rhetorical skills. They appeal to the intel- lect, and they deploy carefully garnered facts and instances, even an eloquent statis- tic or two, but, above all, sinewy arguments to make their case, and leave us not only wiser but better informed. They are not wholly without emotion, either, and at their best can produce moist eyes. But they are primarily bas-bleus, de Staels, Harriet Mar- tineaus, Virginia Woolfs, de Beauvoirs. The queen of this troupe is Melanie Phillips of the Observer, a writer who pos- sesses the true columnist's gift: she always tells me something I.did not know, yet need and want to know, and she makes me think. There are others in this category: Ger- maine Greer, who once adorned the Guardian, Minette Marrin and Barbara Arniel of the Telegraph group, and those skilful portraitists, Valerie Grove of the Times and Lynn Barber. All these formidable ladies make me sit forward, as it were, in anticipation when the curtain rises. Then there are the cloggies. What is clog- dancing? It is a plebeian, mill-girl's hoofing, a rhinocerine tap-dance. It accords perfect- ly with Dr Johnson's dismissal of female preaching: 'Sir, the thing is not done well. The wonder is, that it be done at all.' I come from the North and was subjected to this torture at an early age and disliked it even then. It is uncouth, unskilful, boorish, degrading alike to audience and performer, above all noisy. It arose because in those days there was nothing better to do or watch and it should have died with old Wigan. It survives in its transmogrified journalistic form because tabloid editors and, regrettably, some broadsheet ones also, are too supine to think up a better use for the talents of their coarser millies.
A clog-dancing column is written after flipping through the national papers and picking out 'human interest' items for instant comment. Cloggies seem to go nowhere, meet nobody and read nothing except newsprint. It is as much as they can do to stretch out a scrawny arm and make a phone call. I imagine them on their bony bottoms in a swivel chair with an empty computer screen glaring at them, in a cocoon of damp Kleenex, nail varnish, empty Diet-Coke tins, Marks & Spencer sandwich crusts and savagely bitten pencils, wondering how they can keep it up for another week. They specialise in crude, cruel comment on public personalities in trouble, or innocent nobodies who have suddenly been snatched into the news by accident and are therefore fair game for harpy clawing.
There are a lot of them and it may seem invidious to single out one or two. But, what the hell — these women have no pity or shame. A characteristic example in most ways is the brassy Allison Pearson of the Evening Standard. She does not seem to know anything but she is a true doggie in that she can make a big noise about noth- ing. Her speciality is impudent vulgarity. Thus, she was recently going on about Liz Hurley's knickers and what Pearson calls her `pube extensions'. I hold no particular brief for Ms Hurley: she is a girl one occa- sionally chats to at parties. She is pretty and so far as I can see perfectly harmless, and has done nothing to deserve an intimate clawing by Pearson. I though Lord Rother- mere wanted to keep the Standard respectable and serious and reasonably clean. Does he really like Pearson writing about people's pubic hair? Or their knick- ers?
Then there is Suzanne Moore of the Independent. She is not only a doggie but looks like one. I once observed her glower- ing at me across a dinner-table, a sort of wide dwarf whose odd taste in clothes pro- duces lateral extensions which emphasise the horizontal effect, any visible bits of her being plastered in make-up a la Rauschen- berg. However, the classic verdict on this noisy harridan has already been delivered by Germaine Greer, down to the expletive- deleted shoes, so I will say no more. What really upsets me, however, is not the Pear- sons and the Moores, or even the Julie Burchills, but the ballerinas who turn clog- gies. I fear this is happening to my old chum Polly Toynbee. She used to be a model ballerina: well-informed, thoughtful, original, provoking in just the right way. Then she was destabilised by the Daily Mail, who drew attention to her husband- pinching. This was aggravated by her return to the Guardian, and exposure to the cul- ture of ill-informed malice and verbal vio- lence which is such a characteristic of the Rusbridger regime there.
Last week Toynbee delivered herself of a doggie bashing of Peter Mandelson which was contemporary British journalism at its worst: abusive, ignorant, brutal, nasty but not, alas, short — indeed it seemed to go on forever, as all bad articles do. I suppose she did it to out-Burchill her colleague Julie, and to suck up to Rusbridger, but even he, who has a strong stomach for spite, must have felt queasy. It certainly did not enhance the Guardian's dwindling rep- utation for knowing what goes on in British politics. This is not the place to describe the real Mandelson — though I will do so one day. Enough to say that most comment about him is ill-informed even by the stan- dards of the British press. Toynbees effort, however, was clogging with a club foot. She should stick to knickers.
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