Jan Moir: death by a thousand tweets

Only someone who has spent the past 30 years under a rock, or at least in a country where they do not sell the Daily Mail, will have been surprised by Mail columnist Jan Moir’s article on Stephen Gately. Far more shocking has been the uprising against it by what we might term the ‘offencearati’ of the blogosphere, those computer-bound twitterers who enjoy nothing more than being outraged, scandalised and allegedly harmed, and who refuse to tolerate anything so intolerant as a Daily Mail rant.

Moir argued, contrary to autopsy findings, that there was “nothing natural” about Gately’s death. She hinted that Gately and his civil partner’s drinking and smoking habits, and the fact that they brought home a fit young Bulgarian, probably contributed to the singer’s untimely demise. Well, sex with Bulgarians is a well-known cause of pulmonary oedema. She also said that Gately’s death “strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships”, using the tragic death of a 33-year-old homosexual as a bizarre argument against gay marriage.

It was a fairly nasty column, full of snide comments and innuendo. But that is what the Daily Mail does. Which is why people who like that kind of stuff buy the Daily Mail, and people who don’t like it don’t buy the Daily Mail. End of story. Well, not quite. To the categories of ‘Daily Mail readers’ and ‘non Daily Mail readers’ we must now add a third and speedily growing group of people: ‘Daily Mail readers who only read the Daily Mail in order to be scandalised by it and to give their inner liberal righteousness a shot of much-needed adrenalin’. It’s a mouthful, I know, but it’s really the only way to describe these people.

These ‘Daily Mail readers who only read the Daily Mail in order to etc etc’ came out in force against Moir’s column. No sooner had some Mail minion pressed “publish” on the online version of Moir’s article than the blogosphere, the twitterati and those online discussion thread junkies (the comment-writers who live like parasites on the colossal arse of the contemporary commentariat) were fisking it and feigning heartfelt outrage. It was ‘homophobic’, they yelled, evidence that the Daily Mail is ‘evil’; it was written, or rather ‘spewed forth’, by an ‘evil witch’, or perhaps a ‘vile bitch’, who should have her wrists slapped by the Press Complaints Commission. To that end, the PCC received a record number of complaints from these Daily Mail readers who hate the Daily Mail (more than a thousand so far), causing its website to crash.

Of course it’s entirely legitimate to hate the Daily Mail. What is peculiar about this case, though, is the seeming need of thousands of twits, bloggers and commentators to make a loud and proud and very public display of their hatred for the Daily Mail. They seemed to take a perverse pleasure in being outraged by Moir’s column. One blogger boasted about complaining to the PCC, saying he wanted to “register my sheer seething anger”. Charlie Brooker at the Guardian was so titillatingly horrified by Moir’s article that he wrote a whole comment piece about it, starting with the obligatory declaration of personal fury (“I’m still struggling to absorb the sheer scope of its hateful idiocy”) and ending with a censorious, headmaster-style invitation to fellow members of the offencearati to complain about Moir to the PCC. The brilliant thing about Brooker’s column, of course, is that it created yet another place in cyberspace for scandalised surfers to register their seething anger with/fury against/hatred of Ms Moir.

So a fairly snide column by a right-wing commentator gave rise to a far scarier liberal-led Two Minutes Hate (lasting for two days) against a “vile bitch” and an “evil newspaper”. This episode reveals what the Daily Mail has become for many liberal observers: an object of evil against which they might define themselves and their political outlook. This is a reactionary liberalism, which can only articulate its liberal values in reaction against the Daily Mail; a reactionary ‘Enlightenment’, which can only proffer its ‘Enlightened’ values in reaction against dark, dirty, dodgy Daily Mail columns. A few months ago the offencearati descended on the Daily Mail website to condemn its suggestion that foreign Roma should not be allowed to jump ahead of British-born Brits in NHS queues; others have accused the Daily Mail of spreading hatred towards all immigrants; now a shrill and implacably angry online mob bombards officialdom with complaints about the Mail’s alleged homophobia.

Unable to make a convincing, freedom-loving case for open borders, these reactionary liberals instead attack the Daily Mail for demonising immigrants; feeling that the public won’t listen to their arguments in favour of civil partnership and gay marriage, they instead slate the Daily Mail for publishing allegedly homophobic poison. Hating the Daily Mail becomes a substitute for explaining the content and meaning of liberal values and arguing for them publicly. The shallow values of contemporary liberals can only gain force and purchase, it seems, when they are juxtaposed to the “evil” that is the Daily Mail. (To their credit, some liberal observers are at least aware of their increasing reliance on the Daily Mail. “I hate letting the Daily Mail make me angry”, said a Guardian columnist a few months ago, but she simply couldn’t help herself: the Mail is the “root of my irascibility”.)

The reactionary element to these bouts of Mail-baiting, and the outburst of Moir-hating in particular, can be seen in the twitterati’s censoriousness. The anti-Moir brigade has heaped pressure on corporations to pull ads from the Daily Mail website; they want the PCC to censure and punish Moir and her editors. Indeed, the Liberal Democrat blog, Lib Dem Voice, says the Moir affair shows the need for a more powerful, teeth-baring PCC. Where the PCC “normally accepts complaints only from those who are directly affected by the matters about which they are complaining”, it should make an exception in relation to “abnormal” articles such as Moir’s: anyone should be able to complain, on the grounds that this article may have hurt and harmed people not directly related to Gately. In other words, the PCC should open itself to the moaning of everyone from Sensitive of Southend to Disgusted of Dagenham. The end result would be a super-censorious commission that would be encouraged and tempted to reprimand the media every time some Tom, Dick or Harry was outraged by some Polly, George or Jan.

The irony of the anti-Moir brigade is that it is witch-hunting Moir in the name of ‘tolerance’. She was intolerant, they say, and that is intolerable – therefore she can no longer be tolerated. The irony of expressing shrill intolerance of someone for being intolerant is lost on these illiberal liberals. In a sense, Moir hasn’t done anything particularly wrong; certainly she hasn’t done anything ‘evil’. Causing offence is a natural part of rowdy and testy public debate. No, the real problem arises when people politicise their feeling of having been offended, when they effectively argue that it is unacceptable for them to have felt offended and thus the offending party must be chastised. Offensiveness is a part of life; the politics of inoffensiveness is a threat to free speech and open debate.

Brendan O’Neill is a journalist in Britain. He is the editor of spiked and has contributed to the Guardian, the Irish Post, the Australian, BBC News, the New Statesman and other publications.