Profile: He is, according to the first reviews on Amazon, “clearly one
of the greatest authors of our, if not all, time”. The book is “a work of
true insight and genius” and “exactly what the country needs. Read it now”.
And: “To buy only one copy of this book would be a crime.”
Judging by the fact that Littlejohn’s Britain has just topped the Sunday Times
bestseller list, maybe they are right. It would be churlish to suggest that
the comments above were yet more evidence of the Amazon phenomenon of
writers reviewing themselves under aliases.
Could it be that Richard Littlejohn, fearless free thinker, who describes the
royal family as “tax-evading adulterers”, would think it a bit of a lark to
heap praise upon himself in the online guise of Rob the Rodent of Great
Windsor Park? Surely not.
No surprise that such praise is not echoed by the Guardian reviewer Charlie
Brooker, whose main complaint was that Littlejohn’s face “smells like
someone breaking wind in a pair of cheap nylon trousers while eating a
scotch egg”. Then he admitted that he was reviewing the cover – he hadn’t
read the book.
That’s what Littlejohn does: raises hackles on parts of our critical faculties
that we didn’t even know existed. For him Brooker is part of the
“self-regarding, self-appointed metropolitan elite” he referred to in a
famous BBC radio dust-up with Will Self, the self-appointed spokesperson of
the liberal left. That was back in 2001 just after the publication of his
last nonstocking filler book, a novel entitled To Hell in a Handcart,
praised by Freddie Forsyth, the right-wing veteran thriller writer, as “a
genuine fable of modern Britain”.
Times writer David Aaronovitch had labelled it a “400page recruiting pamphlet
for the BNP”, a charge Littlejohn dismissed as coming “from an overgrown
student union leader who used to be a member of the Communist party”.
When Self said that he agreed with Aaronovitch, Littlejohn asked, “You’re not
still on heroin, are you?” If Littlejohn doesn’t strike below the belt, it’s
only because he waits until his opponents drop their trousers.
The Essex boy with Essex attitudes, even though he grew up in Peterborough,
has turned his big mouth into big money, regularly earning in excess of
£750,000 a year for at least the past decade. The success of his new book, a
rehashed version of his journalistic scribblings over the past 10 years,
will bring him more.
Issued to coincide with the prime minister’s departure from office, the
publishers suggest Littlejohn’s Britain does for the Blair era what his 1995
book You Couldn’t Make It Up – a similar anthology – did for the Major
years. The vitriol is the same but the targets have moved, with healthy and
safety, luvviedom and political spin moving into his sights along with a
curiously familiar dose of sleaze.
If Jeremy Clarkson says Littlejohn’s book “makes you laugh out loud and drives
you incandescent with rage at what the Blair years have done to Britain”,
The Guardian’s “digested read, digested” calls him “the stupid person’s
Jeremy Clarkson”.
Littlejohn’s rants are real seat-of-the-pants stuff. He describes his job as
“sitting at the back throwing bottles” as if he were a football supporter
watching his team get relegated by an unjust decision.
Football is indeed one of Littlejohn’s loves, to the extent that aged 11 he
turned down a scholarship to a minor private school because it played rugby.
He became a grammar school boy instead, but left at 16 to train as a
journalist, working on small local papers before becoming industrial
correspondent of the Birmingham Evening Mail in 1977.
A job that today is almost extinct, “industrial correspondent” in the late
1970s was important on all newspapers, the frontline in a country where
trade union strife was the norm, a land of wildcat strikes, walkouts and
picket lines.
When he moved to the London Evening Standard in 1979 as industrial editor it
was a big job in a capital plagued by transport strikes in which it was easy
– and good for sales – for a reporter to take the side of the long-suffering
commuting public against a union leadership that often seemed greedy, blind
and unresponsive.
One colleague on the same beat at the time reckons it was a formative period
in the development of the Littlejohn confrontational style: “People were
always complaining about the buses, Tubes and trains not working. He would
tackle the ‘people who stop you getting to work’. He was very antiunion. You
could say trade union baiting was where he started off.”
With the advent of Margaret Thatcher – now labelled “Thatch” by Littlejohn and
dubbed a “necessary evil” – the industrial beat gradually became as moribund
as the trade unions that were its lifeblood, but the Standard rewarded
Littlejohn’s polemical style with a column of his own.
In 1989 The Sun snapped him up, offering more money, more exposure and fewer
restraints. Four years later the What the Papers Say television programme
created a special category for his award: Irritant of the Year.
Part of his success at The Sun was that despite the right-wing monster the
Guardianistas (a Littlejohn word) love to hate, he was – and remains –
proudly unashamed of his working-class origins. His dad was a British Rail
engineer. In the early 1980s Littlejohn had even been asked to stand as a
Labour party candidate. He declined.
The awkward fact is that many of the “right-wing” views that Littlejohn
expounds – on immigration, the European Union, homosexuality – would not
raise an eyebrow if spoken aloud in the bar of most working-class pubs in
solid Labour-voting areas. The phenomenon, although widely recognised, is
not widely debated, not least because the best description, “nationalist
socialism”, has unfortunate connotations.
That does not stop Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, claiming that Littlejohn
is his favourite journalist. The admiration is not mutual: Littlejohn has
called the BNP “knuckle-scraping scum”. He denied that his novel, based on
the case of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer jailed for killing a burglar,
was a BNP “recruiting pamphlet”. Martin had become a libertarian cause
celebre. Unfortunately, on his release from prison, Martin endorsed the BNP.
At his best Littlejohn can be a wry observer of shallow politicians while his
sharpest satire is genuinely witty, as in his Rum, Sodomy and the Lifejacket
skit. In it he attempts to imagine Nelson fighting the battle of Trafalgar
with “ ’elf and safety” regulations preventing tobacco and rum rations,
imposing a maximum speed of four knots and insisting on safety helmets to
climb the rigging.
The admiral, with one eye and one arm, owes his advancement to the Royal
Navy’s “underrepresentation in the areas of visual impairment and limb
deficiency”. Only his dying words, “Kiss me, Hardy”, get the PC stamp of
approval.
Over the past 15 years Littlejohn has switched his loyalties, for mounting
sums, between The Sun and the Daily Mail. Paul Dacre, the Mail’s editor,
welcomed him back to “his spiritual home” in 2005, a reflection of the fact
that the chief rival to a working-class boozer in appreciation of
Littlejohn’s opinions is a home counties golf club.
His one big success in broadcasting was in a field where moderation is
considered an aberration: hosting the BBC phone-in football programme 606,
which he did to acclaim for five years. Forays into other formats have not
had results. A London Weekend 1994 chat show was laughed off the air as
boorish and amateur, while similar attempts with Sky were pulled after poor
ratings.
Nor does he win unanimous praise from his colleagues at the Mail. “His column
should be written on a wall,” was the view of one who preferred to remain
anonymous. He rarely visits the office.
Of all Littlejohn’s pet hates – and there are not a few – it is his attitude
to homosexuals that has drawn most attention. The Guardian journalist Marina
Hyde calculated that over two years he made 186 references in 180 columns to
“poofery” or other variations. The Brixton-based webzine urban75 suggests he
has made “so many rants about homosexuals you wonder if he’s hiding
something” and suggested – almost Littlejohn style – “give him a good
old-fashioned slapping. You know he wants it”.
The Littlejohn phenomenon is based on his claim – which perhaps his book sales
substantiate – to be a real “voice of the people” that too often does not
dare to be heard. It can also be described as a loose set of commonplace
prejudices given the appearance of merit simply by opposing an ideology-led
establishment that has lost all contact with reality.
Or maybe that’s the same thing. What do you think, Richard?
