Julie burchill

The pilot refuses to get going until everyone is seated and quiet. When we take off there are raucous cheers. I am on a midday budget-airline flight to Ibiza. Louder cheers welcome the drinks trolleys which are noisily ransacked. Along from my seat a gentleman is reading The Spectator. It transpires we are heading for the same occasion. The ceremony takes place on a raked clifftop amphitheatre on the beautiful and quiet north side of the island. Boiling sun, cliffs and glittering sea boast the backdrop. Assembled friends and family swelter in the full lamp glare of the sun. I keep my jacket on. Though this may sound like sunstroke,

It’s an odd thing. I had been a little nervous of writing (subscribe here) about the Suzanne Moore twitter business because, much though I like and respect Moore and Burchill and the excellent Julie Bindel, it seemed to me to be a Crouch End dispute of negligible wider importance. And here we were with Algeria on fire, our Prime Minister poised to make some historic fudge on the EU and northerners freezing their balls off in ten feet of snow, and benefits being cut a bit and horses being devoured by the untermensch and so on and so on. Hugely important stuff. And yet online at least, the Moore stuff provoked

Tell me if you have heard this already but it appears that Suzanne Moore has offended the trans-gender lobby. She did this by writing an essay about women’s anger for a Waterstone’s collection of essays, which was then republished by the New Statesman. The following sentence caused deep offence (is there any other kind?): ‘We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual.’ Faced by the not-inconsiderable wrath of the trans-gender community, Suzanne responded in characteristic fashion with a counterblast in the Guardian: ‘In Iceland, they put bankers in prison for fraud. Here,