Jan Moir Tries (And Fails) to Defend the Indefensible

(For the benefit of any new readers, FJM is explained here. But to be honest, it’s not very complicated. You’ll probably get the idea pretty quickly.)

It’s been a good week, both for the liberal left and for Twitter. First there was the whole Trafigura thing, which finally came to a decisive end yesterday evening, when the injunction on the Minton Report into the toxic waste dumping was lifted. This followed the lifting earlier in the week of the injunction against reporting a Parliamentary question mentioning it, which was what sparked off the whole thing. But before that came to an end, a whole new storm of outrage was brewing over Jan Moir’s egregiously offensive piece in Friday’s Mail, which, thanks once again to a campaign on Twitter, attracted a huge number of complaints and not a few derisory reactions from the rest of Fleet Street and the blogosphere. So a few hours later she decided to try and explain herself, in a manner wholly deserving of being FJM’d:

Some people, particularly in the gay community, have been upset by my article about the sad death of Boyzone member Stephen Gately. This was never my intention. Stephen, as I pointed out in the article was a charming and sweet man who entertained millions.

Um, I really don’t think most people were upset because they thought you saw Gately as charmless or sour. But I suppose you can never be sure about these things.

However, the point of my column-which, I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read –

Hang on, you’re a columnist for the Daily Mail, and you’re claiming that the criticism you’re on the end of is nothing but an uninformed kneejerk reaction? This is truly special.

…was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, his death raises many unanswered questions. That was all. Yes, anyone can die at anytime of anything. However, it seems unlikely to me that what took place in the hours immediately preceding Gately’s death – out all evening at a nightclub, taking illegal substances, bringing a stranger back to the flat, getting intimate with that stranger – did not have a bearing on his death. At the very least, it could have exacerbated an underlying medical condition.

O…kay. First, you didn’t say that there were ‘unanswered questions’ about Gately’s death, you categorically stated that ‘Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one.’ So now you’re just lying, very clumsily. Second, you’ve already been taken apart by any number of people (see links above) for implying you magically know the circumstances of Gately’s death better than the qualified coroner who examined his body. Doing the same thing again really isn’t helping you.

The entire matter of his sudden death seemed to have been handled with undue haste when lessons could have been learned.

Ooh, what lessons might these be? Please enlighten us.

On this subject, one very important point.  When I wrote that ‘he would want to set an example to any impressionable young men who may want to emulate what they might see as his glamorous routine’, I was referring to the drugs and the casual invitation extended  to a stranger. Not to the fact of his homosexuality.

Got that, kids? Drugs and casual sex might not have had anything to do with Gately’s death, but they’re still bad, mmmkay? I hear he didn’t always get his five fruit and veg a day either. Maybe his death could teach us a lesson about the importance of eating our greens?

In writing that ‘it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships’ I was suggesting that civil partnerships – the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting – have proved just to be as problematic as marriages.

Fair point. Of course, it would help if you could cite a single case of someone arguing that civil partnerships wouldn’t have the same problems that marriages do, since without that all you’ve got there is a pathetic straw man argument, but I suppose I’m quibbling over details here.

In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.

So…your grand finale is to insinuate that the protests about this article are some kind of gigantic conspiracy rather than the result of people actually being genuinely offended? Sterling job there. If for some reason you find yourself looking for work in the near future, maybe Carter Ruck’s PR department could hire you?