Vanessa de Largie | The Spectator | Dec 1, 2019
Just when I think Clementine Ford couldn’t get any more hypocritical she has managed to outdo any previous effort.
At the end of last week, 10 Daily published a sickly-sweet column by Ford titled: What Clive James taught us about love.
When I clicked on the column, I expected a takedown of the brilliant man with the razor-sharp wit but instead I found a flowery embrace of a dead white male, a man born before World War II who even had the gall to contribute to the climate sceptic’s bible published by the sons of Satan at the Institute of Public Affairs, Climate Change: The Facts.
Ford and her virtue-signalling wokeness pushed this inconvenient truth to the side for the opportunity to jump on the Clive James bandwagon in a desperate bid for some clicks. But it wasn’t the only detail she ignored.
Like many creatives of his ilk, James was a hit amongst the ladies. Who could forget the insatiable wanking sessions of his youth which he graphically chronicled in Unreliable Memoirs – replaced later in life with a spread-eagled buffet of the real thing.
Nil nisi bonum and all that, but James was a self-confessed pants man, notorious in media London for his activity between the sheets, activity that when revealed in the media must have smarted like a dose of the crabs if his uncharacteristically mawkish jibe at Private Eye in one of his columns for The Observer is anything to go by — not to mention his grotesque gossip-columnist character (caricature?) Dick Toole in his viciously side-splitting debut novel, Brilliant Creatures.
In Ford’s column for 10 Daily, she appears ignorant of this history. But how on earth could she forget the widely publicised affair with Leanne Edelstein, the ex-wife of that Dr Geoffrey Edelstein? The affair that saw James finally booted out of the family home?
In the world according to the Cult of Clem shouldn’t that make Clive James a piece of shit in the eyes of feminists? Or is feminism Clem-style about being selective, turning it on and off depending on the person and the day and what’s likely to win hits?
Whatevs.
So let’s end with a big congrats to Ford for supporting an old white male with heterosexual urges — and flaws like the rest of us.
Perhaps she can show some love and compassion towards Andrew Bolt and James Chessell next?