Allison Pearson and the curse of the columnista cluster trolls

Allison Pearson

It's ages since I last thought of Allison Pearson, once of the Daily Mail parish, now ventriloquising for the middle-class mutes of the Daily Telegraph. She re-entered my head with the horrible news that she had fallen victim to the troll virus. Some dreadful person-reader had unleashed the fruitcakes of Twitter upon her good name and exposed her to words yet to be recognised by Wikipedia. One of them, with a 'gynaecological' connotation! Allison opined eloquently against trolls - read her piece here.

The business of trolling - ie conducting a targeted and persistent campaign of threatening abuse - reminded me of a piece Allison wrote in her Mail column in March 2008 about Fiona MacKeown. You may recall that Fiona's daughter, British schoolgirl Scarlett Keeling, was raped and murdered in Goa - it was largely thanks to Fiona's tenacity the case ever got to trial. Allison, among others, though I am sure privately empathetic, publicly used this tragic event to reproach Fiona for being a selfish hippy. Fiona had not bought into Allison's addiction to workaholic conformist angst otherwise known as bourgeois life - and so was now deserving of the kicking Allison happily gave her as editor Paul Dacre pulled yet another one of his theatrical faces.

Was this piece the work of a troll? Not in the current sense. We tend to think of trolls as sad singletons holed up in a state subsidised garret in the grip of a hateful obsession. We don't imagine that a troll can be a highly paid newspaper columnista because an economic value has been placed on her work - and she doesn't 'obsess'.

But trolling may also be unwittingly precipitated by the Allisons - I call it cluster trolling, where a hateful piece incites reader persecution of the topic-target.

I don't know what effect Allison's piece had on Fiona's life but most probably it prompted a number of morons to send her abusive letters, or abusive contributions to online message boards, or to think abusive thoughts about Fiona and her 'feckless' life. It is most unlikely that among the millions who read Allison's imbecilic words there weren't just a few hard-working, neighbourly individuals ready with the condemnatory (green) vitriol.

It's tempting to think that the highly paid cluster trolls draw to themselves the same kind of energy they put out. Alas, life is not so simple. Some unsteady trolls are on a unilateral mission. In Allison's case, she could atone for her irresponsibility by first apologising to Fiona MacKeown. Her excuse could be that she then worked for the Daily Mail.

BBC on Scarlett Keeling case

The Independent makes mad, passionate love to Madame Arcati

My favourite newspaper (du jour!), the Independent - whose owner is the handsomest of the newspaper proprietor breed (competition includes the lissom Barclays and sultry Rupert Murdoch) - kindly draws its intelligent readership's attention to a Madame Arcati story.

After praising the author of MA in terms I cannot repeat, but with which I concur, it recounts the conversation that took place between Paul Dacre and Allison Pearson prior to her scarpering off from the Mail to the Telegraph. However the Indy states that the reported exchange was imagined by me. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The words spoken were repeated to me from someone who has permanent hearing damage from Mr Dacre's dynamic office interventions.

When they do the autopsy on my source, imprints of "cunt" will be found on his or her ear wax.

I have already remarked on the allure of the Indy's deputy editor Adam Leigh (is that his name?); so my curiosity is whetted as to the proportions and pulchritude of the media sage who authored the eulogy to Madame Arcati. Cannot it be long before yet another fiance(e) is added to the list?

Allison Pearson: The conversation before the defection

I understand the conversation that prompted Allison Pearson's defection from the Mail to the Telegraph (because of  "depression") went like this.

She is ushered into Paul Dacre's office...

Pearson: “The Telegraph want me and they are offering more money ” –
Dacre: “OK, then, you must go”...
Pearson “?!”

Allison Pearson: Why is the conformist queen so depressed?

She's left the Daily Mail, as expected. So I read her piece on her depression, an implied reason for her departure. As you'd expect she sexes up her condition by locating it on a fashion wave band: she's one of the Blues Sisters. She's Sandwich Woman. More labels that may yet hook a gullible editor into a zeitgeist tsunami of publishing cash.

Because Allison is a newspaper columnist she has nothing useful to say about either depression or her inner life. A Thurderbirds puppet lulled into a Derren Brown hypnotic trance would reveal something at least as against Allison's spirit void. Newspapers by their nature, run in the main by male neurotic sexists, whose evolutionary tendencies have been stalled by workaholism and booze (if not medication and arrogance), are forums for mere borrowed theatrical soliloquy. Columnists gaze at the spotlight and just speak the lines encoded in the editor's head. It's a form of professional telepathy enhanced by hot monthly direct debits and a weekly picture byline. Columnist focus is on editor reaction as mediator for those whatstheirnames, the readers.

I'm no therapist, thank God. But a theme of Allison's life (as I understand it from her columns and novel) is a demented desire to conform. From an early age she sought the Right Way. She sought to tick the right boxes. Later, she tried to please everyone - men, parents, publishers, editors, generations, her reflection. To tick their boxes as she lay swaddled in precocious resentment. She donned her tutu, did a twirl, and then wondered why she ended up with a bruised arse. Allison is a woman of responsibility. She wanted to do well. She wanted to be loved by all.

Instead she became a Daily Mail columnist.

Her tragedy - if indeed she's not snickering in some post-modernist asylum as I write - is this demented idea that she must do anything or be anything. I see now why she hates someone like Fiona MacKeown, the hippy whose daughter was murdered in Goa and whom she abused in the Mail. MacKeown at least tried to make a life outside of mainstream expectation: she dared to advance herself on an adventure not supervised by accountants or style prefects. It ended badly. But she dared to try. Is Allison in a better place by her own account?

Darling Allison Pearson, Telegraph-bound I'm sure. More social tribes to make up there. More generational neuroses to mull over, like her spiritual sister Liz Jones. Readers will lap it up and recycle Allison's crafted lines as their excuses. That's their funeral.

Scarlett Keeling: Her bereaved mother too hip for media slags

The trial of two men accused of killing the 15 year-old Devon girl Scarlett Keeling starts today. Her body was found on an Anjuna beach in Goa in February 2008.

That the matter has reached this point at all is down to Scarlett's tenacious mother Fiona MacKeown who battled with Goan authorities. Initially, local police said the girl had drowned. But later forensic evidence revealed she had been violently attacked and raped before death.

No doubt a larger corrupt story lies behind this attempted cover-up. Several years ago I toured India as a member of a press party. In Goa the guy from the Financial Times popped out for a ride on a motorbike and was stopped by local cops. They told him he would be arrested if he did not pay them a sum of money and keep quiet about it: he gave them cash. Neither in his travel piece nor mine was any mention made of the encounter, probably to save our generous Indian hosts embarrassment. But I vowed never to return to Goa. Something is plainly rotten in its police force.

How some British newspapers have treated Fiona is worth re-examination. Her hippy appearance and lifestyle offended a great many of the lower middleclass neurotics paid a great deal of money to parade their neuroses. The Daily Mail's Allison Pearson excelled herself in March 2008. "Fiona MacKeown... seems less like a grieving mother than an avenging tigress," she wrote, as if any normal mother would not want justice for her dead child. She then went on to claim that Fiona herself was responsible for her daughter's death for leaving her in the care of a local tour guide she hardly knew.

But what upset Allison more than anything else was the idea of a "free-living" woman taking her family on a dream trip to India - "an unrepentant member of the Me Generation" as she put it - as opposed to being an uptight, probably unhappy and certainly overworked hack who allows people to think she's married to her live-in partner to placate a seething hateful readership. Somehow, Fiona had brought this tragedy on herself, because she had rejected convention just as Allison embraces it like a moronic teen clubber seeking a meow meow high.

Sarah Sands, in the Independent, echoed the Pearson line, albeit in a gentler, more caring way. "She may have been a free spirit, but Scarlett was also a child. Fiona MacKeown put ideology before humanity," simpered Sarah, who herself gives a good impression of ylang ylang-scented New Age-lite enlightenment, but ultimately is just another careerist conformist peddling the standard (and Evening Standard) line on a whole array of topics.

What astonishes me is the callous disregard for Fiona MacKeown and for her dead daughter: both are just cultural weapons to beat an offending lifestyle. I will be interested to see what these two media slags have to say about the Keeling case when all the facts emerge.

Allison Pearson - is Anthony Lane really her husband (now)?

"My husband would kill to defend our family... so why has Munir Hussain been jailed for protecting his?" screams the front page headline in today's Mail for a piece by the divine columnist Allison Pearson. Husband? It is certainly true that she lives with the New Yorker writer Anthony Lane, but are they now married? In the piece itself she refers to Anthony only as "Himself": plainly the editor is trying to sell us a line about Allison's moral authority.

Was it two years ago that Madame Arcati broke the story that she and Ant are not in fact bolted together in holy wedlock despite her then claims to the contrary? - click here. They may have married since of course in which case why was I not invited to the wedding? I have a splendid hat for such occasions - and a crystal ball. But for the sake of the headline writer, and the Mail's legendary integrity and moral uprightness, I hope that they are now a proper Mr and Mrs.

I understand that attempts by readers to remind the paper of Allison's marital status have gone ignored by the Mail's website. It must be due to the snow.

Is Suzanne Moore thinking of leaving the Mail on Sunday?

Only asking, in the light of her final words in her last column on Nazi-loving Nick Griffin and her homophobic Mail colleague Jan Moir - "In these culture wars we have to pick sides. Griffin and Moir each believe they are telling their own 'truth'. Neither are my truth nor much of the country's. The day they are, I will pack my bags."

The Screws' Carole Malone is a HELL of a girl

The News of the World's resident bitch Carole Malone must be paid by the number of hells she packs into her opinion pieces each tax year. Just a few samples ....

On Baby P's mother, Tracey Connelly, 16.08.2009
"Why the hell should I worry about Connelly's safety?"

On bumbling Bob Quick who inadvertently revealed an al-Qaeda plot to blow up Manchester's Trafford Centre, 12.04.2009
"Hell's teeth-we're fighting a global war on terror here!"
"Why the hell was he ever given the job in the first place?"

On Judge Ian Trigger's disciplinary for comments made while sentencing a Jamaican drug dealer, 09.08.2009
"And who the hell cares what they [illegal immigrants] feel?"

On Anne Robinson's face lifts, 30.08.2009
"What the hell's wrong with a woman trying to look the best she can?"

On the Hell's Kitchen Antichrist chef Gordon Ramsay swearing about someone, 13.06.2009
"[He] can dish it out, he sure as hell can't take it."

On a demo by "extremist" Muslims, 15.03.2009
"Those guys from the 2nd Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment sure as hell didn't deserve what they got on the streets of Luton."

Before the Screws, Carole had hell at the Sunday Mirror, too. A few samples ....

On Baby Spice of the Spice Girls, 07.11.1999
"Chris Evans rang HER nine times last week to ask her out. With friends like that, you sure as hell don't need enemies."

On the "murdering al-Qaeda bastards" who bombed London, 10.07.2005
"Where were you when you heard those murdering al-Qaeda bastards had bombed the hell out of London?"
"People lay trapped in smoking hell-holes underground, as bandaged, blood-soaked commuters ricocheted around trying to work out what the hell had happened that sunny summer's morning, the rest of us knew only too well. "

On Mary Wragg's "devastated mother" act in a mercy killing case, 18.12.2005
Headline: "CAROLE MALONE: Jacob's parents as guilty as Hell"

On Celebrity Big Brother's Chantelle, 15.07.2007
Headline: "IT'S HARDLY CHANT-HELL"

On two policewomen awarded £400k for horror witnessed at Dunblane, 21.03.1999
"If those officers didn't receive the counselling they thought they deserved why the hell didn't they fight for it in the same way they are now fighting for £400,000?"

On Sue Barker's wealth, 22.12.2002
"Just how the hell does Ms Barker afford a £110,000 Ferrari and a £2m mansion?"

My favourite piece of Carole's combines her hell-fire prose with her unerring inability to prophesy ...

Screws: On Britain's Got Talent winner Susan Boyle [or Subo], 31.05.2009
"WON? Lost? It doesn't actually matter. What matters is that Susan Boyle is on the road to hell."

This kind of hell? Global fame, a star turn on America's Got Talent (16.09.2009), riches, etc?

Or if you prefer, SuBo remixed

Allison Pearson sued over '$700k Miramax deal'

Oh my God! A source points out to me that Miramax is suing the Mail's Glenda, Allison Pearson, for alleged breach of contract over an undelivered novel and it wants its $700,000 back. Leave my Allison alone. Whip round! Whip round! Click here

Allison Pearson - once wife of Simon? Ooh, spooky!

An Arcatiste writes of my current favourite Glenda Slagg - Allison Pearson - of the ever-readable Daily Mail, and claims that Allison was once indeed a wife.

Intrigued by the results of my séance with Vera, my anonymous contributor conducted his or her own investigation and discovered that one of the few Lobbetts to be married in the 80's/90's was a Judith A Lobbett in Lincoln in 1988. Allison went to school in Lincoln for a time.

Judith A Lobbett was born in 1960, birth registered in Carmarthen in Wales during May-July. Allison was born in that region at that time.

Judith A Lobbett married a Simon W Pearson in 1988. They divorced sometime before the mid-90s. He then married again in 1996. Are Allison Pearson/Judith Lobbett one and the same?

It's hard to know what to believe in these days of reinvention and media masks ...

Allison Pearson/Lobbett: Here comes the bride?

The new Private Eye applies its forensic mind to Allison Pearson's recent Mail response to Duchess Fergie's counter-attacks over the Princess Bea "fatso" saga. Mmm, interesting. No wonder the piece is titled "Porkies & Yorkies". Is there any particular point to the mag calling her "Allison Pearson (née Allison Lobbett)"? And a blog by Jonathan Calder (he also has a column in the New Statesman) recollects happy school days with one Allison Lobbett, her maiden name, click here. At a séance the other night I asked Vera - my guide in the next world: Will Allison ever marry (perhaps her partner Anthony Lane)? And Vera replied, cryptically: "But Allison knows already what it is to be married." What can she mean? Wikipedia, typically, fails to shed light on a Pearson "marriage". I can only assume that Vera is deluded. Or that "marriage" means something else in the spirit world. Truly Allison Pearson is the most intriguing of persons - Mata Hari-ish almost - which itself is unusual in a mere journalist.

'Allison Pearson makes the cynical best call'

Hugh Grant's unauthorised biographer Jody Tresidder writes in of my last Allison Pearson post ...

You write: "I think she has missed a great opportunity".

Possibly, but not without calculation? I've always thought that personal contact with an easy target of stinky ink is absolutely deadly for columnists like Pearson.

Fergie, I've noticed, can actually radiate charm one-on-one, and she's been surprisingly effective here in the US, and with isolated UK hacks as well (A A Gill, I recall). But who wants to read nuanced fluff?

Of course, Pearson's claim that she was really getting snippy about Fergie's witless exposure of her own daughter is self-serving bull. But I imagine Pearson rather coldly totted up which Fergie would prove most useful to her in the long run. I think she has weighed one chance (and it would only be one) of an intimate portrait ("Tears spilled from her enormous blue eyes as the Duchess fiddled with her fork and whispered: 'Allison, finally you understand..!'") against yards and yards of future gleeful bitching about a total stranger.

Cynically, I think Pearson has made the best call.

Allison Pearson replies to The Ferg

The Mail’s highly-paid Glenda, Allison Pearson, has finally responded to Fergiana in today's paper. Alas, the poppet’s heart’s not really in it. “Thank goodness we no longer live in a world where the likes of me [y’know, a right commoner] has to defer to the likes of her,” she writes of the Ferg’s luncheon invitation. The matter of her rudeness about Princess Bea’s Prince Andrew-like proportion is swept under the polypropylene. Instead, she gives the Ferg a kicking over her recent TV show in which she stayed with a Hull family of toothless chavs with weight issues – is it acceptable, she asks, “for a former royal to be given a family of poor people to use as props in the drama of her own re-invention? Me neither.” I said nothing, chuck.

Her more interesting point is that until 11.26am yesterday she had not heard from Fergiana despite claims on TV and radio that Ferg’s PR had left a message on Allison’s answer service. However, she does reveal that last year the Duchess had summoned the hack to a meeting over something else – an invitation ignored. You have to be someone really hot (and useful?) to draw out grand Allison’s civility. Or perhaps her form of journalism is best practised entirely remotely.

I think she has missed a great opportunity. She could have recorded the encounter, employed her sharp observational skills to advantage – her big problem is that she’s too bright to be a Glenda, hence the mishaps of tone and taste - engaged in a blazing row over all the things she tries to warm up in her long-winded reply and written up a piece of Grand Guignol starring two rich power-persons neither of whom is very good at deferring to anyone but the personally useful.

Read Pearson

Fergiana - 'Allison Pearson's a coward!'

The Duchess Fergiana of the Kingdom of WeightWatcher has not once, not twice, but three times this morning savaged Allison Pearson over the Mail writer’s rude remarks about Princess Bea. “Does she want my daughter to be an anorexic?” asked the Ferg on GMTV.

Then on Lorraine Kelly’s show 10 minutes later she called Pearson a coward for failing to respond to her luncheon invitation (delivered via PR to phone message service). LK milked it well: “Maybe she’s feeling ashamed,” she ventured of Pearson, trying to be helpful. “Poor lady,” said Fergiana with sarcastic brevity.

On This Morning about half-an-hour later she attacked Pearson for “trying to sabotage a person’s confidence.” On this occasion Fern Britton put things in some context: “All newspapers employ female columnists to attack and ridicule people.” Female columnists like Lorraine Kelly on The Sun? Fern is quite formidable.

But anyway I’m surprised Pearson has not displayed savviness here – it’s not every day an ex-member of the royal family pleads to talk to a journo – think of the copy potential Allison! My own fantasy is The Ferg and Bea belly-flopping the hapless hackette in a public restaurant. My only fear is that the mother-daughter duo would bounce off Alison’s mattress-tum and out through a window pane, causing themselves and innocent bystanders damage. But it would make wonderful copy.

Allison Pearson: Please call Fergie now!

Allison Pearson! I'm talking to you! Last time you starred on this site it was over that non-marriage of yours - though perhaps you have tied the knot since. But you did then have the good grace to send me a note confirming your (non-) marital status - well, I assume it was you. Now you've called Princess Beatrice a fatso in your Mail column and incurred the flame-haired wrath of her mummy, Duchess Fergie, who says you haven't returned her phone messages and not even RSVP'd her yummy lunch invites to discuss your offence. This is graceless.

As I write, there are 102 pages-worth of comments on the Sky News site in response to this major developing story. Here's a sample:

"Anyone actually put the two pictures together? That of Allison Pearson and Princess Bea ? Whereas one is quite slim, sophisticated looking and attractive the other is not - easy choice but make your own mind up ... "

"Now I think of it, is the Daily Mail not the paper Keira Knightley sued because one of their editorials blamed her for being too thin and causing some teenager's anorexia?"

"Is it any wonder that so many girls battle eating disorders??? Beatrice is a beautiful NORMAL and HEALTHY girl and is put down for it, girls read that and think they have to look like Nicole Richie or the Olsen twins to be considered 'thin'. Those reporters should be ashamed of themselves."

Allison, stop hiding. See Fergie then write up the encounter as a play or something in the Mail. Oh, and here's your choochy face ...

Murdochs on Facebook - hardly gossip, darling

Another sweety-pops friend of the Cult of Arcati writes to point out a little tardiness in the Observer's gossip column apropos Facebook and the presence of a nest of MySpace-owning Murdochs thereon ...

Greetings, Madame!

I hope this finds you well.

Just a small thing, but irritating... The Observer's Pendennis, Oliver Marre, is incredibly pleased with himself today, since he is 'able to reveal' that Rupert Murdoch's daughter, Elizabeth, 'is the latest member of the family to have signed up to the Facebook online networking website.' This comes on the back of his previous 'revelation', not long ago, that Lachlan and Sarah Murdoch had joined Facebook, despite Lachlan's pater having shelled out tens of millions to buy up Myspace.

Dear Oli really is slow off the mark. My own casual Facebook trawlings back in June - via the basic search function that absolutely anybody can use - showed that all three of the afore-mentioned Murdochs were active members back then; I was surprised that the amusing Facebook/Myspace conflict of familial interest hadn't already been picked up. Matthew Freud's full Facebook profile is publicly viewable, and his news feed shows that his lovely wife sent him a lipstick kiss on June 26, with the message 'From me to you. xxxx' So much for her having just joined, and so much for Marre's electrifying research skills.

Oh, and he doesn't even spell her name correctly. As Ms Minnelli might have put it: it's Elisabeth - with an 's', not a 'z'.

Very best

Sir ...[initial withheld]

PS: A noticeable lack of heartwarming family anecdotes, and mentions of 'the Husband' (previously a regular cast member), in Allison Pearson's columns of late. Absolutely zilch, actually. Wonder why?

Dear Sir ....

Thank you for these observations. Allison is a devoted reader of Arcati and has wisely adapted to public knowledge of her domestic arrangements. I am still awaiting an invitation to her wedding; a Christian one it is to be hoped ...

Best wishes MA x

Allison Pearson, Arcati and The New York Post

From The New York Post, today:

"HERE'S one for The New Yorker fact-checking department. Is the weekly's film critic, Anthony Lane, married to journalist/author Allison Pearson, mother of his two children? Although the British couple often refer to themselves as man and wife, caustic media blogger Madame Arcati claims they're not legally wed. "Allison speaks highly of marriage: for the purposes of her £350,000+ column in the Daily Mail," Arcati writes. "When we are given moral lectures by gurus . . . it's sooooo important to know the backstory to the guru." The blog also posts a comment from Pearson: "OK Mme, you win. Anthony and I are not officially 'married.'"

I should say that Pearson has not confirmed herself as the commenter.

Was that you, Allison Pearson?

I can't believe that you would admit to not being "officially" married. Surely you would have threatened me with a libel writ first a la Jon Snow and forced me to grovel in the dust ... prove that you are Allison Pearson, do something that establishes your unique (and attractive) existential reality on Arcati. Be a dear, now.

Is Allison Pearson married or not?

What's the answer? No one's rushing to say she is - least of all Allison herself. A simple yes or no will suffice.

Allison Pearson: Are you married to Anthony or not?

You see, if you place this incomplete sentence in the Google search box - "allison pearson married anthony lane in" - nothing comes up. Usually, at some point, a year is mentioned for a marriage. I notice that in Allison's CV from her agent, PFD, the following statement is made: "She lives in Cambridge with the New Yorker writer Anthony Lane and their two small children."

Now, don't get me wrong. I couldn't care tuppence if Allison and Anthony are married or not. It matters not at all to me. I mean, even the Mail's editor-in-chief Paul Dacre attends gay civil partnership weddings these days. So, it's not as if this is a moral inquiry. This is about being accurate.

Allison speaks highly of marriage: for the purposes of her £350k+ column in the Mail, marriage is the garlic against societal moral deterioration. The other day she wrote highly of Ian Duncan Smith's mooted tax breaks for married couples - this is code for the Mail's Middle England fetish for right behaviour. A number of profiles of Allison and Anthony describe them as married. Yet are they? I'm just asking for a yes or no.

Nothing will happen in consequence of an answer. If they are married, then isn't that wonderful? If they are living by some other arrangement that's OK too - I'm sure Mail readers will understand in these times of lifestyle diversity. I know that Allison is especially cognisant of PR, so maybe she'd like to drop me a line and just clarify the situation. PR is sooooo important.

When we are given moral lectures by gurus of the qualipop zeitgeist, it's sooooo important to know the backstory to the guru. So that we know where he or she is coming from.