Editor of Glamour criticises Mail's Liz Jones

Jo Elvin, the editor of Glamour, took to Twitter on 9 May 2012 to dispute a claim made by Liz Jones in a Mail article several days before:

(via Media Monkey)

Liz and Kate

Today, the Mail's Liz Jones asks:

Yes, why does the fashion world 'hate' Kate Middleton?

Perhaps some previous columns written by former Marie Clare editor Jones can help explain?

On 17 November 2010, for example, Jones admitted Kate's style 'showed promise' but:

Kate will have to ditch, overnight, much that she loves: the long, scuffed boots and woolly or fishnet tights. The sequins. The awful, ubiquitous baseball cap. The skinny jeans and wedge shoes. Wearing a Topshop dress on her birthday. The wraparound shades — we need to see her eyes.

She will have to do more with her hair other than simply dousing it in what looks like Pantene Pro-V. Kate shouldn’t lose too much length, but a Scarlett Johansson-style chignon would be good for big occasions.

Most of all, she will have to stop not being too bothered and simply pulling on something nondescript in black from Next....

Kate will need to be prepared for near-constant critique.

Indeed she will.

On 11 February, Jones questioned whether Kate had 'the right look for lunch':

Kate does her own make-up, which is commendably frugal, not to mention brave, considering her status. But in my opinion, she is hiding behind a little too much slap on this occasion, which serves to make her look old beyond her years...

The dress is a lovely choice... although I’d rather Kate wore British...

I’m afraid I don’t go for this jacket...Oh, and sorry to sound so picky, but a jacket done up over a dress is just wrong...

The thick black tight has become something of a Kate signature and one I wish she could be weaned off.

Two days later, she was doing it again, offering what she called 'constructive' criticism:

why the monochrome outfits and black accessories?...And why the dreary shapes?...

Kate is being badly let down at the moment in the fashion stakes.

Just before the wedding, Jones had more:

I want Kate to make a splash. To make us gasp at every turn. Yes, in order to do this she is bound to make mistakes along the way...But at least she won’t be boring...

My main problem with Kate’s shopping spree last week is not her choice of labels, so much as that she shouldn’t be picking up clothes piecemeal, on a whim or, worse, in a last-minute panic. It is all so casual...staggeringly, mind-bogglingly cheap and disappointingly pedestrian.

When the Obamas visited Britain in May, Jones thought Kate 'blew Michelle out of the water' but:

My only gripe with Kate is her hair, which is now a little too long, and too flicked at the ends.

Then today, Jones talked of those who are critical of Kate's style:

they were queuing up not to praise her but to slate her...‘She’s a very ordinary girl’ one fashion editor told me dismissively; ‘she needs better make-up’, added another.

Wherever I turned, the sentiment was the same. Why such enmity?

Why indeed.

She does at least admit:

I, too, have criticised Kate’s fashion sense in the past (she wears navy court shoes and American tan tights, after all.)

But she also adds a thought that reveals more than perhaps she intended:

for all their sneering at Kate, style-setters tend to have gaping holes in their personalities.

• Angry Mob has posted on Liz Jones' recent column about clothes and the riots. 

(UPDATE: Shouting at Cows has also blogged on Liz Jones' views on Kate.)

Liz Jones and an 'emergency'

Last Sunday, the Mail's Liz Jones announced she was off to cover the famine in East Africa.

For someone who has spent £26,000 on a bat sanctuary, £9 on tubes of toothpaste and had a homeopathic vet for her chickens, and then complained she was in debt, it seems an odd assignment.

But as ever with Jones, it wasn't about the people suffering in Africa. It was about her suffering:

on Friday morning, I found I needed the NHS for the first time in about 20 years, and it let me down. Very badly.

Jones was flying out on Monday. On Thursday, she went to her private GP in London to get some jabs she needed before she could get her visa. But he couldn't give her all of them in one day. So, back home in Somerset on Friday, she thought she would phone her local GP - one she has never used or even bothered to register with - and tell them she had an 'emergency':

'Hello!' I said cheerily. 'I am not registered with you, but I live two miles away. I wonder if you could possibly squeeze me in today to complete my jabs for travelling to Africa, and fill in my malaria prescription, as I need to start taking the tablets on Sunday.'

'You are not registered?!' the woman said, clearly appalled I had made her pick up the phone. 'We can't see you then. And we can't fill out a prescription that hasn't been written up by us.'

'But I will pay for the jabs, it only takes a couple of minutes.'

'But the nurse is fully booked. She can't do it. I don't even know if we have the drugs.'

'Can you find out?'

'Well, no. I'd have to ask her. And she can't fit you in.'

'But this is an emergency. I have never bothered you before in the three years I have lived here. Not with a snotty-nosed kid, not with depression, nothing. Never!'

'But we don't have your notes.'

'You don't need my notes. Lots of people go to walk-in centres. You could telephone my doctor if you're worried about anything.'

'I don't have time to do that. Why don't you go to A&E if it's an emergency?'

'I'm sure they wouldn't classify a routine jab as an emergency. I mean, it's a global crisis. Millions of people are dying and you won't put yourself out to allow me to be seen by a nurse, not even a doctor, for five minutes?'

'No.'

Outraged at not being able to jump to the front of the queue ahead of people who were actually registered and already had appointments, she then mentions abuse in a care home in Bristol as if that, and her treatment, were similar:

I always wonder why people who don't like people go into the caring professions. The problems in the health service and in privately-run homes are not always to do with money. Attitude is often the issue.

Turning back to the receptionist, she adds:

What would it have cost this woman on Friday morning to have said: 'Sod the protocol – everyone needs to know about this famine, Miss Jones, so I am going to speak to the GP and see what we can do.'

'Everyone needs to know about this famine' - in other words, until Liz Jones writes about it, no one will. This despite widespread coverage across all media, and television appeals by the Disasters Emergency Committee.

Somewhat inevitably, a spoof account was started on Twitter. @LizJonesSomalia is written by the person behind the (spoof, but at times it's hard to tell) Daily Mail Reporter account. But it hasn't just been set up for laughs:

I’m doing this for charity now. I want your money.

If you’ve enjoyed the feed so far, and have replied or RT’d then perhaps you’d consider a donation for the DEC East Africa Appeal?...Tell me that’s not the perfect harnessing of social media?

At time of writing, the total raised so far has been over £22,000. And this on the day that Richard Littlejohn has said Twitter 'mobs' are:

motivated by spite, envy and resentment

(See also: a line-by-line analysis of Jones' article by nurse Brian Kellet.)

Recommended reading on Liz Jones and Jo Yeates

From Jonathan at No Sleep 'Til Brooklands:

Of all the the journalists in Britain you would want to write about the Joanna Yeates murder, Liz Jones is probably nestling somewhere near the bottom of the list. You might think, after all, that Jones' penchant for consumerist superficiality and ill-directed moaning doesn't quite carry the gravitas required to really deal with such a case of genuine human tragedy and emotion. Well, you'd be right.

Jones' crass, can't-quite-believe-it's-for-real article, from yesterday's Mail on Sunday, includes such vacuous 'insights' as:

It's Friday night and I’m in the Ram bar on Park Street in Bristol.

This is where Joanna Yeates spent her last evening...

The bar is OK but ordinary. The wine list, chalked on a board, says ‘Lauren Perrier’.

I wish she had spent what were probably her last hours on earth somewhere lovelier.

And:

I find Tesco, and go in. I almost buy that upmarket pizza; the choice tells me Jo wanted a lovely life, something above the ordinary.

She goes on to cover antique street lights and trying to pay the Clifton Suspension Bridge toll with a designer button, which doesn't work. Could anyone, anyone, link that non-event with Yeates' murder? Jones can:

Isn’t it interesting that you can snatch a young woman’s life away from her in the most violent, painful, frightening way possible, take away her future children, her future Christmases, take away everything she loves, and yet there are elaborate systems in place to ensure you do not cross a bridge for only 30 pence?

Jonathan notes:

Well...no. No, that isn't interesting. It's irrelevant, facile and absurd. Bridge tolls are no more relevant to this murder than the tooth fairy is. There is no sad irony, no lingering meaning to be found here...[it's] possibly the weirdest paragraph I have ever read in a national newspaper column.

Other bloggers commenting on Jones' piece include Anton Vowl and Shouting At Cows.

Liz Jones thinks middle-aged white women are the most criticised people on the planet

It may be an understatement to say Sex and the City 2 has not received a particularly good reception from the critics.

Currently, it has a score of 17% on Rotten Tomatoes, with 137 bad reviews against 29 positive, the latter including one from the Mail's film reviewer, our old friend Chris Tookey.

But Mail columnist Liz Jones also spoke out. Not about the film per se ('it's not a masterpiece') but against all the reviewers who had slated it.

These included Hadley Freeman, who wrote a long article in the Guardian about the Sex and the City phenomenon, concluding:

The death of Sex and the City is not just a shame for fans, but for all women with higher expectations of movies about women than a compendium of cliches from the Daily Mail.

When the Mail re-published Freeman's article, it ended:

The death of Sex And The City is not just a shame for fans, but for all women with higher expectations of movies about women.

Wonder why they edited that sentence?

But to Jones, reviewers like Freeman disliked the film not because it was 'insulting', 'flimsy', 'virtually plotless' and a 'bloated juggernaut of pointlessness'.

Oh no:

You see, the only person in the world you are allowed to criticise these days is the middle-aged, affluent white woman.

Yes, really.

It's not difficult to see why Jones feels some affinity for middle-aged, white, materialistic women - she spends £9 on a tube of toothpaste, after all - and she's had her fair of criticism.

However, she neglects to mention the fact that Sex and the City 2 was written and directed by a man, which would slightly undercut her argument.

But do you know who she thinks has it easier than middle-aged, affluent white women?

The Muslims:

Serve up any old rubbish if you are Muslim and you’ll be lauded to the skies.

Umm...what? The use of 'Muslims' is telling. It's that typical Mail line - look what they can get away with that us white folk can't.

But when has she or the Mail ever lauded anything about Muslims, let alone their 'rubbish'? It would be great if she could provide just one example of this from her or her paper.

Categorically not proving her point, she adds, sniffily:

Take the item on Radio 4 on Saturday, when Fi Glover announced we’d be learning about a film on the success of Pop Idol...in Afghanistan.

A film, it's clear, Jones hasn't seen, but it's about Muslims and was 'lauded' on Radio 4 so it must be 'rubbish'.

She's referring to Afghan Star, which currently has a rating of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, with all of its 54 reviews being positive.

Oh, and the director of Afghan Star is a white woman who was born, and lives, in Britain, which she doesn't mention either.

It's a documentary about an interesting and original subject.

Sex and the City 2 is a two-and-a-half hour sequel to a two-and-a-half hour film, following 94 episodes on television.

But it's definitely not being criticised for flogging a dead horse. Oh no.

Then again, here's a quote from Jones' review of the first Sex and the City film:

I wanted to hate this film.

She didn't, but admitted:

I laughed very little during the screening (the writing is not as sharp as it was for TV, and the film, at nearly three hours long, feels far too baggy, a little like Samantha's 50-year-old paunch).

Hmm - well that comment isn't a pot-shot at a middle-aged women at all, is it?

So why is she allowed to criticise Sex and the City - and make specifically personal comments about middle-aged women - but no-one else is?

The hypocrite.

And criticising middle-aged women? The Mail would never do such a thing, would it? Surely it wasn't the Mail that was today calling the 43-year-old Sinead O'Connor 'frumpy', 'dowdy' and 'grumpy' for no other reason than she looks a bit older than she did 21 years ago?

But really, to try and pretend criticism of one (apparently quite bad) film is the result of some in-built bigotry is slightly paranoid and just plain silly.

And presumably this is all self-serving. In her mind, she isn't criticised because she whines about being poor after wasting money on such nonsense as a homeopathic vet for her chickens.

Nor is she criticised because she writes columns of jaw-dropping inanity for the Mail - her comparison of Emma Watson to the victim of a so-called 'honour-killing' being a particularly telling example.

No, she is criticised solely because she's a white, middle-aged woman.

Whereas if she was Muslim she'd never suffer such brickbats...

Although if she was Muslim, she probably wouldn't have such a high-profile position at the Mail.

Payouts latest

In early September, the Daily Mail published this apology to Kate Winslet:

An article on 30 January 2009 compared Miss Winslet’s appearance with comments she made about having “stopped exercising”. We accept that Miss Winslet was not being duplicitous in making her comments or seeking to deliberately mislead about her exercise regime. We apologise for any distress caused.

Now the paper has coughed up £25,000 in libel damages on top of that apology. The original article, entitled Should Kate Winslet win an Oscar for the world's most irritating actress?, and was written by Liz Jones.

Elsewhere, the Guardian has apologised and paid damages to Steve Bunce following claims from Marina Hyde that he had used a website to get his sports show back on air after the collapse of TV channel Setanta.

Mail columnist takes part in 'patronising stunt'

Remember how Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn dismissed three police women who dressed in burkhas for the day to see what it was like as 'dopey birds' engaging in a 'patroinising stunt'?

Well, never-known-to-be-interesting Mail columnist Liz Jones is revealing her experiences of spending a whole week dressed in a burkha.

Is this a 'patronising stunt' too, Richard?

As with the Star, it seems this is designed to be groundbreaking when the journos do it, but a disgrace when the police do it. Go figure.

Anyway, Jones has written a staggeringly shallow article on the subject, coming up with 'insights' that are familair to anyone who has followed the 'ban the burkha' argument.

Here's one of her pearls of wisdom:

An Arab man shouted abuse. I have no idea what he was saying

So how did you know it was abuse? But what she's really trying to say is:

the interesting point is that during my week in a burka, he was the only person who gave me any abuse whatsoever.

Of course that may be true (if he was insulting her at all) although as she spent her time going around the coffee shops in Primrose Hill, that may not be entirely surprising. Why not travel to an area where the BNP has some councillors and then see how many insults she gets?

Or indeed, to Birmingham, where another far-right protest against 'Islamic extremists' has descended into violence. Facts a bit thin on the ground as yet, but 33 people were arrested.