Daily Mail? Arse!

Carping about the Daily Mail is as easy and pointless as throwing confetti at a rhinoceros but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. And this time it’s (very tangentially) personal.

A few days ago, the Mail ran an article about Carole Middleton, the mother of the woman who is married to the Queen’s balder grandson. It’s a rather snotty, sneery piece, focusing on her “little social weaknesses” – which is odd because I would have thought Middleton’s story (one-time air hostess who made something of herself) matches the Mail’s default readership profile, or is at least the sort of narrative to which they aspire. But I don’t want to add to the reams that have already been written about the paper’s extraordinary ability to persuade women to read articles that tell them how vile they are.

No, the real problem comes a few paragraphs in, when the article’s author Paul Scott suddenly starts discussing one Tim Atkinson who apparently “writes a regular blog for the Party Times” (the website of the Middletons’ hugely successful business). In his blog, Tim occasionally pokes gentle fun at the royals and, on this occasion, mused about that batty Palace directive that Kate Middleton should curtsey to the offspring of Prince Andrew, her husband’s cousins, the gormless-looking ones with the bizarre headgear that looks like beige fallopian tubes. Scott quotes the post’s headline – “Sister of woman with nice arse officially inferior to Beatrice and Eugenie” – which began life as one of my tweets and which Tim A very politely asked if he could borrow, because he’s got good manners. See, I told you it was all a bit tangential. I thought the Mail asterisked words like “arse” though, preferring “derrière” or “posterior”. Apparently not.

Anyway, Tim Atkinson doesn’t write a regular blog for the Party Times. Whoever puts together the Party Times has chosen to link to Atkinson’s blog. Scott does actually mention that the offending screed “appears on the tackily titled ‘blogroll’ section”, but he doesn’t appear to understand what a blogroll is. Look, I’ve got a blogroll. It’s a roll of blogs, so that’s why it’s called a blogroll. It lists some blogs I quite like. But the people who write those blogs aren’t writing regular blogs for Cultural Snow. They’re doing it for themselves. And if Annie Bookcrossing suddenly declares that all Paraguayans should be drowned at birth, or Blackwatertown suggests that punching baby pandas in the face is fun, that’s not my problem, OK? Atkinson offers his view of the whole thing here.

OK, so Paul Scott is a silly old fart who doesn’t understand how social media works. Big deal. But the problem is, he’s writing for the Mail, which operates the most-visited news website in the world. Millions of people are (apparently) gulping down their tales of minor celebrities and their bikini malfunctions, and how Katie Holmes ate an ice cream so she’s probably OK now. Columnists such as Peter Hitchens, Melanie Phillips and Simon Heffer meanwhile bellow about the increasing banality and shallowness of modern culture, ignoring the fact that said banality is helping to pay their wages; the exquisite doublethink is neatly dissected here. But maybe they’re just like Scott, and still haven’t got to grips with how this big, strange interwebby thing really works. Maybe none of the Mail journalists really understand, and neither do the editors or the owners, and they’re all just helpless little hamsters in an Escher-like continuum of interconnected wheels that’s been thrown together for a giggle by some malevolent HAL 9000-type computer that turns out to be the cyborg love child of Mary Whitehouse and Paul Raymond. And as they die of exhaustion and embarrassment and self-loathing, the last thing they hear will be the voice of Carole Middleton explaining what a blogroll is.