Dancing on graves is what journalists do

There’s no need for Jan Moir to apologise for speculating about the death of the boy-band singer Stephen Gately says Rod Liddle. Why have we become so censorious and hysterical?

I have to say that I don’t particularly like newspaper and magazine columnists, as people. Smug, not terribly bright, usually cowardly, lazy, always self-obsessed, self-important and narcissistic — forever brimming with themselves, a collection of mass-produced ornamental thimbles overflowing with foaming vomit. I don’t excuse myself from most of these character traits, by the way, so I suppose you can add self-loathing to the list as well. I don’t really have any friends who are columnists (except for James Delingpole, who I speak to on the phone sometimes, when he’s feeling enraged or suicidal) and the Fleet Street writers I particularly admire — Laura Barton, Alexis Petridis, Craig Brown and our own Jeremy Clarke — seem, from their writing, to be not quite part of that gibbering throng, although maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part.

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Ameer Kotecha

Lindt has cheapened itself

My argument isn’t that columnists aren’t good at what they do — some are very artful indeed, although it can be a thin and vapid art, not even a ‘half-art’, as Orwell rightly described photography. It’s just that personally I don’t like them very much; on the increasingly rare occasions when I am required to mix with people who do the same job as me, I experience the peculiar and frightening sensation that I am being eaten alive by mice. And I put down my drink and run and promise myself that I will be a better person henceforth and maybe try to get a job with the Forestry Commission, like I always wanted.

We have lots of columnists now because this is how things are; the good stuff about journalism — reportage — has been left behind, bullied out of existence by the internet (which, ironically, is actually useless for accurate, intelligent reportage, but that’s another story).