I don’t like Julie Birchall. Not because she is lower class, but because she is far too right on and connected to all the wrong causes at the wrong time.  She is not as reliable a weathercock as some local idiots (John Minto and John Read in particular) who reliably and with great venom take the wrong side in all arguments.

But when she has an article pulled from the Observer, I get annoyed. When people say she should resign because she is offensive, I get ferally angry.

Julie Birchall annoys me, but I would much rather she annoyed me that

Anyway, in the hope that speech remains free, here is an excerpt from her argument, that Toby Young republished.

The brilliant writer Suzanne Moore and I go back a long way. I first met her when she was a young single mother living in a council flat; she took me out to interview me about my novel Ambition (re-published by Corvus Books this spring, since you ask) for dear dead City Limits magazine. “I’ve got an entertaining budget of £12.50!” she said proudly. “Sod that, we’re having lobster and champagne at Frederick’s, and I’m paying,” I told her. Half a bottle of Bolly later, she looked at me with faraway eyes: “Ooo, I could get to like this…’ And so she did.

I have observed her rise to the forefront of this country’s great polemicists with a whole lot of pride – and just a tiny bit of envy. I am godmother to her three brilliant, beautiful daughters. Though we differ on certain issues we will have each others backs till the sacred cows come home.

With this in mind, I was incredulous to read that my friend was being monstered on Twitter, to the extent that she had quit it, for supposedly picking on a minority – transsexuals. Though I imagine it to be something akin to being savaged by a dead sheep, as Denis Healey had it of Geoffrey Howe, I nevertheless felt indignant that a woman of such style and substance should be driven from her chosen mode of time-wasting by a bunch of dicks in chick’s clothing.

Oh, and if this offends any Fa’afine or Transsexual — go read the other things I write. Get offended. Julie is trying to hurt you because you tried to make her friend shut up.

You were being bullies. Only cowards pander to bullies. The correct response to a bully — regardless of who she or he is — is to tell them to piss off.

Categories: Daybook | Tags: John Minto, John Read, Julie Birchall, Political Correctiness, Toby Young | 1 Comment »