Blog
Eat the rich?
9th August 2008
I don’t know if you have managed to read the extracts from a new book by Polly Toynbee and David Walker serialised in the Guardian this week - it has been mentioned on another blog on this site this week. Times columnist Giles Coren delivers a hilaious riposte in today’s paper. Read it even if you haven’t seen the work of the Guardian’s dynamic duo
The Guardian is this blog writer’s newspaper of choice. The Times probably has the best news and comment as far as Politics is concerned, but I have a personal problem with giving Rupert Murdoch my money. The Independent used to be an attractive option, but for the same reason that the Times is good, the Indy has got a lot worse in recent years: money. Larger financial power gives the Murdoch paper the clout to put together a stronger team of journalists. I think I read somewhere that the Independent has only two full time UK news staff. You can’t churn out good journalism on such a shoestring operation. As for the Guardian I do sometimes tire of its sanctimonious, holier than thou tone, and its whiny comment on anything when the private and public realm come face to face. I also resent the implict distaste of wealth, but only if it is wealth that exceeds what those at the top end of the public sector can rake in (which is often far more than the private sector workers they apparently can’t stand), meanwhile the paper has no problem publishing pictures of ridiculously expensive cloting or furniture. And it attracts a lot of those kinds of readers - just have a look through the letters page. That is why we should be so thankful for the internet - so long as the paper remains free to read online.
Anyway, Coren takes a swipe at the Toynbee and Walker articles and manages to capture perfectly what is wrong with the Guardian and their loyal followers:
Coren writes
‘Leafing through The Guardian this week, I have been gripped by extracts from a new book by Polly Toynbee and David Walker, Unjust Rewards, in which the two Guardian stalwarts interview loads of rich people and discover that… they’re not very nice.
Who would have thought? It’s lucky we have The Guardian to get to the nub of things for us with its unique blend of snobbery, bitterness, jealousy and thwarted ambition, cobbled together with the tawdry and risible clichés its readers have thrilled to for years.
Dave and Polly begin with a trip to the 20th floor of Canary Wharf, only to find it “marbled”. Is it really, Dave? Is it, Polly? Or do you just need to write “marbled” to ram home your clunky, 1970s them-and-us dichotomy? Because two sentences later the same exact spot is suddenly “a gilded new town in the sky”. Ooh, gilded and marbled. How rich these people must be.
Polly and Dave chat for a while to some bankers and lawyers (hawk, spit) and discover that the fiends “utterly misjudged the magnitude of their privilege” and “put themselves inside a golden enclave”. Marbled, gilded, and golden. Dave and Polly are good. They should do bathrooms.’