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.