Julie Burchill is a writer living in Brighton. Her Substack is julieburchill.substack.com.
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Watching Jacinda Ardern’s departure speech, I reflected that even though I invented the word cry-bully – ‘a hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper, duplicit Pushmi-Pullyus of the personal and the political’ – in this very magazine way back in 2015, it’s never had so many adherents as in the past couple of
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Seeing the swathe of superlatives wheeled out about Vivienne Westwood after her death last year at the age of 81, it felt for a moment like Elizabeth the Great had died all over again. Acolytes from Victoria Beckham to Sadiq Khan delivered their fawning tributes – my favourite was from Bella Hadid, who lamented the loss
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‘Tears are not enough,’ ABC once sang defiantly – but these days, they’re more than enough for handsomely rewarded celebrities to assure us that they suffer like the rest of us, so please don’t hate them. Watching the BBC Breakfast presenter Sally Nugent – a 51-year-old woman – boo-hooing recently after watching a clip of
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And still it keeps on coming. We had barely absorbed the first wave of revelations – jewellery mashed, dog bowls smashed, a brother trashed – before the new tsunami of tattle related to Prince Harry’s imminent book Spare broke over our fevered faces. Dissing duchesses getting aerated over hormones, teenage deflowerings in desolate fields, cocaine
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The promotional clip trailing Prince Harry’s upcoming interview – which has kicked off the publicity trail for his forthcoming memoir Spare – made for sobering viewing. This is a man who actually seemed smarter as a young squaddie than he now does as an adult father of two. Back then, dressing up as a Nazi could be
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What’s your New Year’s resolution? Eat less, move more? Or perhaps you’re a contrary cuss aiming to eat more and move less? Ever perverse, I plan a little exercise which will leave me both more streamlined yet more replete; by culling what I can only call ‘swivel-eyed Remainers’ from my friendship group, both online and
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The word ‘wokescreen’ is (like its naughty older sibling, the carelessly carbon-producing smokescreen), an alibi which hides the truth about a nefarious action. But what marks it out from old-fashioned hypocrisy is that – rather than being a mere rogue – the wokescreener poses as a social justice hero, looking down from a great height
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Imagine you’ve paid good money to see a French farce – and halfway through, it turns into a Greek tragedy. Do you ask for your money back, or think ‘Well, it’s not what I expected, but I’ll give it a go anyway’? I previously wrote of Meghan Markle’s Netflix outing ‘If she can provide “content” on this
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There are a few pop stars whose work I can’t help liking in spite of myself – their song-writing, that is. I’d be happy never to see the faces or hear the voices of Mick Hucknall or Chris Martin again, but the moment ‘Stars’ or ‘Trouble’ starts, I’m mesmerised – only to wonder crossly the
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When I coined the phrase ‘The Grabdication’ in The Spectator two years ago, I had no concept of exactly how grasping the Duke and Duchess of Sussex would turn out to be. Having found Frogmore Cottage insufficiently close to California even after £2million of public money (since paid back) was spent on renovations, I still imagined that Meghan would eventually settle for
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Though I love words, I don’t generally get on other people’s cases about them as I don’t expect everyone to have my almost parasexual attachment to the English language. I’ve suffered silently through the flagrant misuse of ‘epic’ and ‘awesome‘ and numerous moronic reference to food as ‘orgasmic’ and ‘artisanal’ featuring ‘curated table-scapes’. If you’re
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For a long time now, high fashion – with the alibi of being ‘art’ – has tried on rape, self-harm, heroin-chic and of course the simple, timeless classics of anorexia/bulimia as titillating ‘looks’. Anything to keep an enervated haute couture industry (for many years selling mainly in Russia, China and the Middle East, though post-pandemic even
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One of the pleasures of fiction, be it book or film, is that it can take us to actual places beyond our own national boundaries – and into other worlds which don’t exist. Think of fictional states from Narnia to (Graham) Greeneland – and Richard Curtis’ London, that parallel version of our capital seen in Four Weddings
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Working in a charity shop, where the Christmas cards go out in July, means I’m more aware than most how early the festive season begins these days. The postal service can be a bit erratic but surely it won’t take five months for a greeting card to reach its final destination? Our excuse is that
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When the Queen’s granddaughter Zara Phillips married the rugby player Mike Tindall in 2011, the shallower among us wondered what she saw in him. We’re not wondering now. Watching the monstrous regiment of muppets and divas competing in the latest series of ITV’s I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! and seeing Tindall’s equable nature –
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As a child in the 1960s, all I wanted to do was get to London: to be rich and famous, yes, but also to go on demos. As I watched the attractive young adults having seven bells knocked out of them by the boys in blue for protesting outside the American embassy against the Vietnam
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As ocean-going metaphors go, the news that a £1 billion cruise liner (usually charging £2,434.80 – love that 80! – for a nine-night jaunt, complete with a shopping mall, 14 jacuzzis, six swimming pools and the longest ‘dry-slide’ at sea) will host England’s Wags during the World Cup in Qatar could not have been more splashy. This is a
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How can a man have such good and bad judgement? Matt Hancock’s wife is an absolute babe, but his career – and marriage – came to an abrupt end when he chose to snog his (admittedly gorgeous) aide during the strict social distancing of a pandemic lockdown. What a clown. Now Hancock is jungle-bound. By
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After last week’s revelation that James Corden was banned from a New York restaurant for being repeatedly horrible to staff, I’ve been considering the different way fat men and fat women are viewed. Fat men are invariably seen as jolly – who can imagine a thin Father Christmas? – despite the rollcall of porky evil,
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When Carrie Symonds first emerged as the paramour of Prime Minister Johnson, I liked what I saw. I admired her bravery in waiving her anonymity to reveal that, as a teenager, she had been targeted by the serial rapist John Worboys to campaign against his release from prison. And I appreciated her love of our
