Not if you’re one of the many readers who have besieged the Daily Mail’s website after she averred that the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gateley in Palma was ’sleazy.’
The Mail has even gone as far as to pull online ads next to the column, presumably as advertisers have called up to say that they don’t want to be seen there, dead or alive.
Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre loves a columnist and he’s spent the past few years trying to find someone to take the place of the late harridan Lynda Lee-Potter. Former Independent writer Alison Pearson, who’s good although a touch unconvincing in the harridan stakes, now occupies Lee-Potter’s slot but Dacre has hedged his bets by signing up Jan Moir to produce another female rant.
Moir gets a whole two pages to blether on, even though her background as a restaurant writer on the Telegraph hardly seems to equip her to rant for Britain. But her columnn is flagged, ‘Are you thinking what she’s thinking?’ which suggests that the Mail thinks she’s some sort of moulder of opinion.
Actually, if you read her vapourings, you hardly ever find yourself thinking what she’s thinking. And in l’affaire Gateley nobody seems to be thinking what she’s thinking.
Mr Blatherskite can only tell you that the deceased and gay Gateley lived quietly in Palma, he and his civil partner being good chums with a couple of British Airways stewards who have an apartment there.
But columnists are supposed to rattle reader’s cages and, now and then, they get it wrong.
Wise old hands like the Mail’s Richard Littlejohn don’t do this any more. They pull their punches until they know they’re not going to be whacked back.
Ms Moir is clearly no Lynda Lee-Potter.
One Comment
Stephen Gately died of AIDS and fail - I have proof