In the battle between Brighton’s snobs and plebs, I know what side I’m on

Many people have described what it’s like to find themselves the target of an internet lynch mob. Perhaps more unusually, the other week I woke up to find myself at the head of one.

It wasn’t my intention to bring the wrath of a whole city down upon Julian Caddy, the managing director of arts festival Brighton Fringe; I merely wanted to vent my own anger. In truth, he brought it on himself by authoring an odious and spectacularly ill-judged piece in the local paper, the Argus. Ostensibly, he was writing about Brighton & Hove’s Palace Pier. But his real subject was the people of Brighton.

The pier, he wrote, represented all that was ‘cheap’ and ‘tacky’ about Brighton, luring ‘people willing to spend their two pence on [arcade] machines, via Sports Direct and Primark on their way back to their coaches’. He contrasted this to the part of the town which is ‘vibrant’, ‘creative’, ‘modern’, ‘dynamic’ – and could extend itself by turning the pier and seafront into places more congenial to his own tastes.