Punk's Not Dead!

Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Though the usual geek chorus of bed-wetters, seat-sniffers and no-marks have been delighted by my swift exit from the Sunday Telegraph, I can’t say I’m all that fussed. For starters, I’m not exactly losing an audience of millions, as the august journal removed itself last year from the ABC newspaper circulation audit, saying it is no longer a ‘key metric’ for its subscriber-first strategy. Good luck with that if you will sack a brilliant columnist just because a mob of misery-buckets who would never read your paper in a million years decreed that she shouldn’t be allowed to mock royalty.

I’m not going to miss the money much, either - I understand that it’s not the 1980s anymore and that I can’t expect a fiver a word. (When I used to get a crazed letter from a detractor, I would sometimes write back ‘Eff off - now you owe me a tenner.’) But in 2018, Boris Johnson’s salary for his weekly Telegraph column was reported as being £275,000, working out at £22,916.66 per month or £2,291.66 an hour, as he works on it for ten hours a month. Suffice to say that my stipend probably wouldn’t keep Mr Johnson in Daylesford organic snacks. Apparently the Telegraph Media Group has a ‘mean gender pay gap’ of 35% - ‘bettered’ only by the Conde Nast Group. This made me wonder if my erstwhile stablemate the columnist Diana Thomas (formerly David) had basked in the sheer feminine glory of getting paid less than men before They quit Their ‘My Transgender Diary’ last year or whether They reserved Their male privilege in wage negotiations. It wasn’t exactly taking back deposit/return bottles in order to get the bus to the New Musical Express as I had to do as a teenager or being offered a new sofa by the Guardian in lieu of a raise, but neither was it recognisable as the sort of money a columnist on a national newspaper would have earned in the twentieth century either.

But I’m not going to lie - I loved my little billet at the ‘Graph. My sub-editors were writers editing other writers, and so I was dealing with people of the calibre of Madeline Grant and Tim Stanley. Only one thing rankled; practically every week I’d offer up a selection of piquant column ideas only to have them nixed and told to go after the EU yet again. I despise the EU as much as anyone - but not being allowed a free rein on important topics like the mental health madness or the colonising of female spaces by incels in frocks was getting my goat somewhat. Journalism is becoming a thing I don’t recognise. Well-connected people who would once have found their natural home in public relations are now hacks, whereas bright working-class kids, as I was in the 1970s, cannot afford to work as unpaid interns. Nepotism - which interesting often goes hand in hand with Wokery, probably because of the fear that hoi polloi are Deplorables who will sully one’s antimacassars given the chance - has fouled the nest. Women who are blessed with a savage wit, such as myself, are especially monitored and monstered - but it is a fact that when humour is *gentle* it’s generally rubbish. I do wonder how Dorothy Parker’s acid tongue would fare if she was starting out today. And as with much of Wokeness, there seems to be a sexist and misogynist streak, in this instance towards witty women who have a savage streak. It’s telling that Frankie Boyle can makes jokes about handicapped children and still be rewarded handsomely by the BBC whereas I mock two outrageously privileged people and get the chop from a Conservative newspaper.

The Telegraph saw profits almost halve in 2017, the year before I started my column, their new chief executive Nick Hugh pledging to invest £10m in the organisation to ‘re-emphasise quality journalism.’ I’m not conceited enough to believe that my sacking will break it - it’s packed with good writers - but I was amused that many of my Facebook friends who rang up to cancel on hearing of my sacking were asked to stay for a whopping 85% off. Whatever happens to me now, I will have had enough fun, love and money to last me nine lifetimes - unlike my detractors, who love to gloat over my every cancellation while achieving remarkably little in their own lives. So yes, reports of my death have been exaggerated - but reports of my life certainly weren’t. It’s been a blast! Join me here on the new frontier, where I can say what I want at long last.