Julie Burchill

I hope I’ll be forgiven for not dropping my dog-eared copy of The Female Eunuch in sheer molten awe upon reading in the Times that ‘Courses for teachers on how to tackle Andrew Tate’s views are selling out as schools try to persuade teenage boys to shun so-called toxic masculinity.’ One teacher said, ‘Andrew Tate is just a personification of this rampant masculinity that’s existed in schools and been tolerated for years – boys harass and abuse peers and teachers and male teachers haven’t done enough to combat this. Schools have racism and homophobia policies but hardly any have sexism policies; it’s become naturalised.

Just a quick plea to those who know me; if you’re going to burst upon me with a revelation, make it a juicy one, please – preferably sex-related. No gender reveals, no late-onset allergies – and please, most of all, no adult ADHD diagnoses.  Before you start up berating me as lacking in ‘compassion’ and ‘empathy’ (the twin calling cards of contemporary sad-sacks and milk-sops) let me say that I do believe that both allergies and ADHD exist – for a very small minority of unfortunate people. (I’m writing this in bold as I’ve noted from past experience that when people are keen to get their knickers in a twist, they often suffer a simultaneous temporary loss of reading abilities.

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 of ‘the most epic human being that has walked this earth.’ But the two women, Queen Elizabeth and Westwood, were as different as chalk and cheesecloth. The designer was a graceless, grasping woman, with an opinion – always wrong – about everything. No matter how much she complained and explained, she never convinced me that she was anything more than a hyped-up hustler.

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 ingested by noble noses, accusations of ginger bastardy, attempted derailing of putative wicked stepmothers and maternal approval from beyond the grave for the 16-toilets lifestyle ­– the burbling stream of confession never stops. Sometimes it feels as though Prince Harry is using the world’s media as his therapy couch – and sometimes it’s like having a drunk crying on your shoulder and telling you his life story in a bar.

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 countered by a nice chat with the Chief Rabbi; ignorance could be corrected. There was always the chance of moral and cerebral – I won’t say intellectual – progression. But now, with psycho-babble leaking from every orifice, there seems absolutely no way this apparently brain-washed Californian vessel will ever find its way back to anything resembling the path of common sense.

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 at the great unwoked. From the Sussexes’ private planes to Justin Trudeau’s blackface antics, the wokescreen is a fine example of modern Magical Thinking – if you identify as good, you can then be bad to your sanctimonious little heart’s content.

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 level – creating a character we love to hate on a level with an Alan Partridge or a David Brent – maybe we should just cave in and award her the applause she craves, because comedy gold such as this does not come knocking every day.’ Though ‘Volume One’ made many of us ooh and aah in scandalised disbelief, it did seem largely risible.

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 a few tiaras and some voice-over work. I had no idea that what this grim pair were actually seeking was the destruction of the House of Windsor, ostensibly on the grounds of racism, but actually because this was the one chance two mediocre people would get to feel mighty.

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 these are dropping off) in the headlines.   Ambiguous – to say the least – about the beauty of the female body, the mainly gay male world of high fashion has, after a brief period of pretending to embrace ‘diversity’ (anything above a size eight) returned to physiques in which any semblance of female sexual characteristics has been excised.

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 and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually, where no one has ever seen a machete and swearing is only ever done in a jolly way. When I asked on social media for suggestions as to what this world might be called, I was inundated with suggestions. Curtistan, Curtopia, Notting Shill, Notting Swill, Treacletown and Englandland were among the non-obscene ones; my husband then weighed in with Smarming, Tweeford and – my favourite – Smarming-on-Twee.

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 the money we raise goes to a good cause. Regular shops don’t have the same justification. Marks & Spencer, in particular, is one of the worst offenders when it comes to Christmas. The retail equivalent of the BBC, M&S is sanctimonious and overpriced. It's a shop that thinks nothing of having Halloween merch celebrating ghouls jostling with the Christmas junk celebrating the Prince of Peace.