My favourite newspaper (du jour!), the Independent - whose owner is the handsomest of the newspaper proprietor breed (competition includes the lissom Barclays and sultry Rupert Murdoch) - kindly draws its intelligent readership's attention to a Madame Arcati story.
After praising the author of MA in terms I cannot repeat, but with which I concur, it recounts the conversation that took place between Paul Dacre and Allison Pearson prior to her scarpering off from the Mail to the Telegraph. However the Indy states that the reported exchange was imagined by me. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The words spoken were repeated to me from someone who has permanent hearing damage from Mr Dacre's dynamic office interventions.
When they do the autopsy on my source, imprints of "cunt" will be found on his or her ear wax.
I have already remarked on the allure of the Indy's deputy editor Adam Leigh (is that his name?); so my curiosity is whetted as to the proportions and pulchritude of the media sage who authored the eulogy to Madame Arcati. Cannot it be long before yet another fiance(e) is added to the list?
Showing posts with label Allison Pearson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Allison Pearson. Show all posts
Allison Pearson: The conversation before the defection
Saturday, May 1, 2010
I understand the conversation that prompted Allison Pearson's defection from the Mail to the Telegraph (because of "depression") went like this.
She is ushered into Paul Dacre's office...
Pearson: “The Telegraph want me and they are offering more money ” –
Dacre: “OK, then, you must go”...
Pearson “?!”
She is ushered into Paul Dacre's office...
Pearson: “The Telegraph want me and they are offering more money ” –
Dacre: “OK, then, you must go”...
Pearson “?!”
Allison Pearson: Why is the conformist queen so depressed?
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
She's left the Daily Mail, as expected. So I read her piece on her depression, an implied reason for her departure. As you'd expect she sexes up her condition by locating it on a fashion wave band: she's one of the Blues Sisters. She's Sandwich Woman. More labels that may yet hook a gullible editor into a zeitgeist tsunami of publishing cash.
Because Allison is a newspaper columnist she has nothing useful to say about either depression or her inner life. A Thurderbirds puppet lulled into a Derren Brown hypnotic trance would reveal something at least as against Allison's spirit void. Newspapers by their nature, run in the main by male neurotic sexists, whose evolutionary tendencies have been stalled by workaholism and booze (if not medication and arrogance), are forums for mere borrowed theatrical soliloquy. Columnists gaze at the spotlight and just speak the lines encoded in the editor's head. It's a form of professional telepathy enhanced by hot monthly direct debits and a weekly picture byline. Columnist focus is on editor reaction as mediator for those whatstheirnames, the readers.
I'm no therapist, thank God. But a theme of Allison's life (as I understand it from her columns and novel) is a demented desire to conform. From an early age she sought the Right Way. She sought to tick the right boxes. Later, she tried to please everyone - men, parents, publishers, editors, generations, her reflection. To tick their boxes as she lay swaddled in precocious resentment. She donned her tutu, did a twirl, and then wondered why she ended up with a bruised arse. Allison is a woman of responsibility. She wanted to do well. She wanted to be loved by all.
Instead she became a Daily Mail columnist.
Her tragedy - if indeed she's not snickering in some post-modernist asylum as I write - is this demented idea that she must do anything or be anything. I see now why she hates someone like Fiona MacKeown, the hippy whose daughter was murdered in Goa and whom she abused in the Mail. MacKeown at least tried to make a life outside of mainstream expectation: she dared to advance herself on an adventure not supervised by accountants or style prefects. It ended badly. But she dared to try. Is Allison in a better place by her own account?
Darling Allison Pearson, Telegraph-bound I'm sure. More social tribes to make up there. More generational neuroses to mull over, like her spiritual sister Liz Jones. Readers will lap it up and recycle Allison's crafted lines as their excuses. That's their funeral.
Because Allison is a newspaper columnist she has nothing useful to say about either depression or her inner life. A Thurderbirds puppet lulled into a Derren Brown hypnotic trance would reveal something at least as against Allison's spirit void. Newspapers by their nature, run in the main by male neurotic sexists, whose evolutionary tendencies have been stalled by workaholism and booze (if not medication and arrogance), are forums for mere borrowed theatrical soliloquy. Columnists gaze at the spotlight and just speak the lines encoded in the editor's head. It's a form of professional telepathy enhanced by hot monthly direct debits and a weekly picture byline. Columnist focus is on editor reaction as mediator for those whatstheirnames, the readers.
I'm no therapist, thank God. But a theme of Allison's life (as I understand it from her columns and novel) is a demented desire to conform. From an early age she sought the Right Way. She sought to tick the right boxes. Later, she tried to please everyone - men, parents, publishers, editors, generations, her reflection. To tick their boxes as she lay swaddled in precocious resentment. She donned her tutu, did a twirl, and then wondered why she ended up with a bruised arse. Allison is a woman of responsibility. She wanted to do well. She wanted to be loved by all.
Instead she became a Daily Mail columnist.
Her tragedy - if indeed she's not snickering in some post-modernist asylum as I write - is this demented idea that she must do anything or be anything. I see now why she hates someone like Fiona MacKeown, the hippy whose daughter was murdered in Goa and whom she abused in the Mail. MacKeown at least tried to make a life outside of mainstream expectation: she dared to advance herself on an adventure not supervised by accountants or style prefects. It ended badly. But she dared to try. Is Allison in a better place by her own account?
Darling Allison Pearson, Telegraph-bound I'm sure. More social tribes to make up there. More generational neuroses to mull over, like her spiritual sister Liz Jones. Readers will lap it up and recycle Allison's crafted lines as their excuses. That's their funeral.
Scarlett Keeling: Her bereaved mother too hip for media slags
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
The trial of two men accused of killing the 15 year-old Devon girl Scarlett Keeling starts today. Her body was found on an Anjuna beach in Goa in February 2008.
That the matter has reached this point at all is down to Scarlett's tenacious mother Fiona MacKeown who battled with Goan authorities. Initially, local police said the girl had drowned. But later forensic evidence revealed she had been violently attacked and raped before death.
No doubt a larger corrupt story lies behind this attempted cover-up. Several years ago I toured India as a member of a press party. In Goa the guy from the Financial Times popped out for a ride on a motorbike and was stopped by local cops. They told him he would be arrested if he did not pay them a sum of money and keep quiet about it: he gave them cash. Neither in his travel piece nor mine was any mention made of the encounter, probably to save our generous Indian hosts embarrassment. But I vowed never to return to Goa. Something is plainly rotten in its police force.
How some British newspapers have treated Fiona is worth re-examination. Her hippy appearance and lifestyle offended a great many of the lower middleclass neurotics paid a great deal of money to parade their neuroses. The Daily Mail's Allison Pearson excelled herself in March 2008. "Fiona MacKeown... seems less like a grieving mother than an avenging tigress," she wrote, as if any normal mother would not want justice for her dead child. She then went on to claim that Fiona herself was responsible for her daughter's death for leaving her in the care of a local tour guide she hardly knew.
But what upset Allison more than anything else was the idea of a "free-living" woman taking her family on a dream trip to India - "an unrepentant member of the Me Generation" as she put it - as opposed to being an uptight, probably unhappy and certainly overworked hack who allows people to think she's married to her live-in partner to placate a seething hateful readership. Somehow, Fiona had brought this tragedy on herself, because she had rejected convention just as Allison embraces it like a moronic teen clubber seeking a meow meow high.
Sarah Sands, in the Independent, echoed the Pearson line, albeit in a gentler, more caring way. "She may have been a free spirit, but Scarlett was also a child. Fiona MacKeown put ideology before humanity," simpered Sarah, who herself gives a good impression of ylang ylang-scented New Age-lite enlightenment, but ultimately is just another careerist conformist peddling the standard (and Evening Standard) line on a whole array of topics.
What astonishes me is the callous disregard for Fiona MacKeown and for her dead daughter: both are just cultural weapons to beat an offending lifestyle. I will be interested to see what these two media slags have to say about the Keeling case when all the facts emerge.
That the matter has reached this point at all is down to Scarlett's tenacious mother Fiona MacKeown who battled with Goan authorities. Initially, local police said the girl had drowned. But later forensic evidence revealed she had been violently attacked and raped before death.
No doubt a larger corrupt story lies behind this attempted cover-up. Several years ago I toured India as a member of a press party. In Goa the guy from the Financial Times popped out for a ride on a motorbike and was stopped by local cops. They told him he would be arrested if he did not pay them a sum of money and keep quiet about it: he gave them cash. Neither in his travel piece nor mine was any mention made of the encounter, probably to save our generous Indian hosts embarrassment. But I vowed never to return to Goa. Something is plainly rotten in its police force.
How some British newspapers have treated Fiona is worth re-examination. Her hippy appearance and lifestyle offended a great many of the lower middleclass neurotics paid a great deal of money to parade their neuroses. The Daily Mail's Allison Pearson excelled herself in March 2008. "Fiona MacKeown... seems less like a grieving mother than an avenging tigress," she wrote, as if any normal mother would not want justice for her dead child. She then went on to claim that Fiona herself was responsible for her daughter's death for leaving her in the care of a local tour guide she hardly knew.
But what upset Allison more than anything else was the idea of a "free-living" woman taking her family on a dream trip to India - "an unrepentant member of the Me Generation" as she put it - as opposed to being an uptight, probably unhappy and certainly overworked hack who allows people to think she's married to her live-in partner to placate a seething hateful readership. Somehow, Fiona had brought this tragedy on herself, because she had rejected convention just as Allison embraces it like a moronic teen clubber seeking a meow meow high.
Sarah Sands, in the Independent, echoed the Pearson line, albeit in a gentler, more caring way. "She may have been a free spirit, but Scarlett was also a child. Fiona MacKeown put ideology before humanity," simpered Sarah, who herself gives a good impression of ylang ylang-scented New Age-lite enlightenment, but ultimately is just another careerist conformist peddling the standard (and Evening Standard) line on a whole array of topics.
What astonishes me is the callous disregard for Fiona MacKeown and for her dead daughter: both are just cultural weapons to beat an offending lifestyle. I will be interested to see what these two media slags have to say about the Keeling case when all the facts emerge.
Allison Pearson - is Anthony Lane really her husband (now)?
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Was it two years ago that Madame Arcati broke the story that she and Ant are not in fact bolted together in holy wedlock despite her then claims to the contrary? - click here. They may have married since of course in which case why was I not invited to the wedding? I have a splendid hat for such occasions - and a crystal ball. But for the sake of the headline writer, and the Mail's legendary integrity and moral uprightness, I hope that they are now a proper Mr and Mrs.
I understand that attempts by readers to remind the paper of Allison's marital status have gone ignored by the Mail's website. It must be due to the snow.
Is Suzanne Moore thinking of leaving the Mail on Sunday?
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Only asking, in the light of her final words in her last column on Nazi-loving Nick Griffin and her homophobic Mail colleague Jan Moir - "In these culture wars we have to pick sides. Griffin and Moir each believe they are telling their own 'truth'. Neither are my truth nor much of the country's. The day they are, I will pack my bags."
The Screws' Carole Malone is a HELL of a girl
Thursday, September 17, 2009
The News of the World's resident bitch Carole Malone must be paid by the number of hells she packs into her opinion pieces each tax year. Just a few samples ....
On Baby P's mother, Tracey Connelly, 16.08.2009
"Why the hell should I worry about Connelly's safety?"
On bumbling Bob Quick who inadvertently revealed an al-Qaeda plot to blow up Manchester's Trafford Centre, 12.04.2009
"Hell's teeth-we're fighting a global war on terror here!"
"Why the hell was he ever given the job in the first place?"
On Judge Ian Trigger's disciplinary for comments made while sentencing a Jamaican drug dealer, 09.08.2009
"And who the hell cares what they [illegal immigrants] feel?"
On Anne Robinson's face lifts, 30.08.2009
"What the hell's wrong with a woman trying to look the best she can?"
On the Hell's Kitchen Antichrist chef Gordon Ramsay swearing about someone, 13.06.2009
"[He] can dish it out, he sure as hell can't take it."
On a demo by "extremist" Muslims, 15.03.2009
"Those guys from the 2nd Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment sure as hell didn't deserve what they got on the streets of Luton."
Before the Screws, Carole had hell at the Sunday Mirror, too. A few samples ....
On Baby Spice of the Spice Girls, 07.11.1999
"Chris Evans rang HER nine times last week to ask her out. With friends like that, you sure as hell don't need enemies."
On the "murdering al-Qaeda bastards" who bombed London, 10.07.2005
"Where were you when you heard those murdering al-Qaeda bastards had bombed the hell out of London?"
"People lay trapped in smoking hell-holes underground, as bandaged, blood-soaked commuters ricocheted around trying to work out what the hell had happened that sunny summer's morning, the rest of us knew only too well. "
On Mary Wragg's "devastated mother" act in a mercy killing case, 18.12.2005
Headline: "CAROLE MALONE: Jacob's parents as guilty as Hell"
On Celebrity Big Brother's Chantelle, 15.07.2007
Headline: "IT'S HARDLY CHANT-HELL"
On two policewomen awarded £400k for horror witnessed at Dunblane, 21.03.1999
"If those officers didn't receive the counselling they thought they deserved why the hell didn't they fight for it in the same way they are now fighting for £400,000?"
On Sue Barker's wealth, 22.12.2002
"Just how the hell does Ms Barker afford a £110,000 Ferrari and a £2m mansion?"
My favourite piece of Carole's combines her hell-fire prose with her unerring inability to prophesy ...
Screws: On Britain's Got Talent winner Susan Boyle [or Subo], 31.05.2009
"WON? Lost? It doesn't actually matter. What matters is that Susan Boyle is on the road to hell."
This kind of hell? Global fame, a star turn on America's Got Talent (16.09.2009), riches, etc?
Or if you prefer, SuBo remixed
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