Craig Brown and AN Wilson lose to Jasper Gerard

I'm sorry to hear that Craig Brown and AN Wilson have been dropped by the Daily Telegraph. And just before Christmas. Well, I say sorry but really I only read the paper for Mandrake goss: Brown's parodies remain very funny in the Eye; Wilson I sometimes used to read when he had an eccentric column in the Evening Standard; otherwise his books and sensibility mean as much to me as Paul Gascoigne's ear wax.

The good news however is that Jasper Gerard continues to flog his prose tropes at the Telegraph. I understand he writes a sports column; not something I would read. His last restaurant review, of The Pass Restaurant in Horsham, West Sussex, cost the paper £96.93 for a four courser. I assume he paid at least a 10% tip on top: one can only suppose that an outlay of this sort, to patronise an honest business with a lot of homespun burble, must have been borne by the likes of Brown and Wilson.

I notice that Gerard "slurps" his soup, that he calls people "folk" and potatoes "spuds". The common touch, he's got it. I wonder how his terrorist comedy novel is coming along.

Jasper Gerard: A urinator of prose?!

Chris Klee writes of one of Arcati's favourites, The Jasper Gerard: "Gerard really can't even get elevated meanness, can he? As much as I suspect he lies awake at night hoping the prose fairy will have turned him into AA Gill in the morning, he structures even his reviews like a formulaic pseud. Apropos the restuarant review referred to below, there is, for example....

1. The opening sentence to establish intellectual superiority over "the masses" - ie a misappropriation of Kant

2. The matey simile/metaphor to introduce "the real world"

3. The ham-fisted pop-culture reference. 'Beth Ditto' - erk

4. Follows by another highbrow allusion: Mill, this time. Because although he understands, he's really not like the proles...

5. But, just so we don't lose readers entirely, why not pander to a few popular prejudices....

6. Review the food, in such a manner that the meal is evoked, but lacks all gout.

"Dungaree risotto"?! He's not even put enough work into his cliches. Has he never even heard of mung beans?

In fact, would it be entirely inelegant to point out the passing resemblance between our friend Jasper and Hector Bartlett, the "pisseur de copie" in Muriel Spark's peerless novel about London hackery, A Far Cry From Kensington?

Darling Chris
Don't be so mean about The Jasps. He's just a silly billy earning a crust to keep his wife busy with his accounts. I am impressed by his talking the Telegraph into making him its restaurant critic. As I've said before, editors respond well to sloppy seconds.
MA x

Telegraph: Celia's upgrade, Jasper's lesbian soup

A darling reader of Arcati draws my attention to career peregrinations at the Telegraph – and for a change I find myself awed by its commonsense.

First, my congratulations to Celia Walden who has been divested of her Spy editorship and promoted to Senior Features Writer – I had heard of this, but mention here brings closure to my heartless assessments of her goss gathering abilities (basically hopeless). Celia’s true talent lies in the smiley mano-a-mano of the in-person celeb interview wherein she can fillet out a news story. Her pieces in Glamour best exemplify this – she it was who got Simon Cowell to reveal his declined opportunity to become the face of Viagra – even if the magazine’s Q&A format makes no demand on literary or critical ability.

Ms Walden should be thankful to the litigious Nicole Kidman for her career uplift as well as to Arcati for her attentive rigour. It is only ever my intention to steer people to where I think they belong, natally.

The migration of her old Spy deputy Jonathan Isaby to become the Telegraph’s very own Guido Fawkes is also an inspired move. To be blunt, the poppet does not have quite the right type of gravitas for the flim-flam of A-list slebrity. Nature gives her physiognomic hints to mortals as to career destination, and Mr Isaby is well placed in the Gothic environs of Westminster Palace.

Mandrake will replace Spy as a seven-day operation, a forerunner of things to come at the company generally, I suspect. I totally approve of its editor Timothy Walker, an excellent gosser, and he was very sweet to my friend Nesta Wyn Ellis in her John Major period. Arcati’s memory is long as you all know.

My informant adds in his note: “So was Celia 'promoted' or moved out of harm's way? In either case it looks like the Telegraph's risible diary column is no more. First Jasper Gerard, now Celia. You're gaining quite a headcount. Can you please fix it for that odious snob Ben Brogan to be tipped into the hack dumper, please? For all his (alleged) faults as Speaker, Michael Martin's suffering at the hands of La Brogan for the crime of being working class and Scottish makes for an unpleasant read.”

Well, Jasper has recovered from his Observer dumping and is now the Telegraph’s restaurant critic. I note he visited Brighton's veggie eaterie Terre à Terre a few days ago. In his review, he reminds himself of vegetarianism’s old associations, “with schoolboy jibes about lesbian soup and dungaree risotto.” Lesbian soup? Oh dear. I fear that war will have to be re-declared on Jasper. He’d better get his rollerskates on (again).

Jasper Gerard's (bad) back!

Regular Arcati readers will be familiar with my interest in the life and times of Jasper Gerard. While he toiled to be liberal and enlightened at the Observer under Reichsmarshal Roger Alton (“Leck mich am arsch!”), conqueror of Iraq, I was brutal. I mocked his heroic attempts at wit, I rolled about on the carpet – in the manner of the Pink Panther’s chief inspector Charles Dreyfus (played splendidly by Herbert Lom, btw) - at the news of his humorous terrorist novel (a work-in-progress “leaked” by himself to the superior Londoners’ Diary, if memory serves). I took no prisoners as I reminded the dead wood word-grazers that he had once pretended to interview the late Sir Peter Ustinov in a foreign place when in fact he was loafing about in Wapping interviewing Sir Peter Ustinov.

But that’s all behind me now. Jasper has made landfall at the Telegraph – and how that newspaper sets him off to best advantage! He has finally found his home, his very own Neverland, where his certainties about sex, race, pikeys, clitorades (the plural of clitoris?) etc may perhaps be better understood. And I was alarmed to learn within its pages that he has suffered from a bad back almost forever. He admits to his public: “I first injured my back 15 years ago while pushing my 1968 Jaguar ... When I got home I was in such agony, I was virtually on all fours, and only male pride stopped me crying.”

In my experience Jaguars are meant to be driven, not pushed – but hush, Arcati! Not for you to reason why. The Jaguar reference instantly places him demographically in Telegraph-land; he would never have got away with such an admission at the Observer where everyone drives a Citroën. I’m sure of it. The walking about on all fours is a touch of genius: don’t all Telegraph readers prefer their doggy-woggies and horsy-worsies (I’ve just read Russell Brand’s Booky Wooky)? The only slip up here is not crying. Just as pink is now the colour of dynamism, so boo-hooing is the true mark of a man (but softly, with silent shoulder shrugs, to suggest containment of strength - none of your I-Love-Lucy wailing, bitch).

Turns out that the poor poppet has a slipped disc and it’s awfully painful. He tried everything including painkillers, osteopathy – some success there - but gradually it got better by farting around, getting up in the morning, etc, and now he solicits massages from his sainted wife who I believe is also proficient in accountancy.

“With back pain, like alcoholism, it is rash to declare oneself cured,” he writes prior to sign-off. “But for now, it seems bad backs are behind me.” Mmm, I see he hasn’t lost that sense of humour. Pity.

Jasper Gerard booted out of The Observer

I hope it wasn't anything I said.

Roger Alton quits Observer editorship

Roger Alton has resigned the Observer editorship - click here for details. My thanks to contributors who brought this to my attention this morning.

No crocodile tears from me - regular Arcati readers will know I campaigned for his removal because of his support for the Iraq War: the Observer was not the right paper to be backing the government on this issue. We can now look forward to the dismissal of columnist Jasper Gerard and other right-wing cuckoos who can be gainfully employed elsewhere - perhaps the Sunday Express will help out. Left to me and I would call the Observer the Guardian on Sunday - that way, it might be freed from its curse of morally dubious editors and might develop a coherent politics true to its left-of-centre nature.

On the matter of Observer news editor Kamal Ahmed and his alleged role in sexing up the Iraq dossier with Alastair Campbell - I shall be reading Flat Earth News with great interest, particularly in the light of Roy Greenslade's ridiculous piece in the Standard yesterday in which he disingenuously claimed there was no feud between the Guardian and Observer and that the the allegation against Ahmed was just inaccurate spin from a single paragraph in the book. We shall see. But why does the Standard employ a mouthpiece for the Guardian in Greenslade? Put another way, how likely was it that Greenslade would admit there was a feud between the Scott Trust sister papers? Not likely.

An Arcati source hinted at Alton's likely demise a little while ago - click here.

The Observer's woes - Arcati was right

An Arcati source recently gave very accurate information about the various problems at the rightward-drifting Observer, one or two relating to its troubled news editor Kamal Ahmed. Press Gazette now reports that he "has left the paper to work for the Equality and Human Rights Commission." Foul-mouthed editor Roger Alton put out a bye bye email in which he wrote - "A sad moment for me personally, and I am sure for everyone." Er, no. Not at all, you arrogant, deluded sod. You'll be out soon yourself with your other pet, the awful Jasper Gerard who's better suited to the Sunday Express. To read the full report, click here. My thanks to to the correspondent who drew my attention to this.

To read the original Arcati report, click here

Jasper Gerard - is anyone out there?

How odd that of the 11 opinion columns listed on today's Observer website, only Jasper Gerard's has no reader comment facility. Could it be that he elicits a response that is neither stimulatingly hostile nor reassuringly supportive - but simply damagingly incredulous? So, silence is the default option for the paper's resident cuckoo's egg.

Jasper Gerard prepares to strike terror

Laugh of the day is the news that the Observer’s court fool, Jasper Gerard, is writing his first novel. Apparently it’s a comic tale about terrorism, an unpromising incongruity that may be described as Gerard-esque; or simply as typical. But as he tells the London Evening Standard's media gossip: “A bit of English lampooning is the best way we have of undermining the terrorists.” I like the "bit of" bit.

While it is entirely possible that Gerard’s book will strike terror in your average Al-Qaeda operative, perhaps seeking a little light relief between internet bomb-making courses, I predict that, if published, it will more likely undermine any decent reader’s will to live, mine especially. It’s not that one wishes Gerard to fail, you understand. It’s that one knows he cannot do comedy, as his execrable and ham-fisted Observer column demonstrates each week. An ape in a Murano glass shop might exhibit greater finesse.

I tend to think of lampoonery as light-hearted satire or caricature, as in National Lampoon. It will be interesting to see how Gerard renders absurdity absurd ... in a giggly way. TerrorLit tends to the heavy: Conrad’s The Secret Agent – I think the first novel about modern suicide bombers, published in 1907 – reflected on terrorism but actually satirised England; Dostoevsky in The Possessed nailed bourgeois resentment as embryo of “terrorism”; Don DeLillo in Mao II demonstrates how the terrorist now has the power to sculpt the “inner life of the culture”, whatever that is.

Conrad, Dostoevsky, DeLillo ... Gerard. No, doesn't quite work, does it? Wrong literary genome. But at least the Observer will review him (if he's still in their employ at the time of publication).

Jasper Gerard: Simply and utterly useless

So embarrassing is The Observer's Jasper Gerard - lame doesn't even begin to describe his weekly column - that the paper appears to have removed the reader comment facility. Perhaps it's a technical fault or wishful thinking on my part, let me know: but I see fellow columnists Mary Riddell and Andrew Rawnsley have provoked published intelligent responses this wet, windy morning.

It's one thing to be witty but foolish (eg the late Auberon Waugh), or eloquently provocative but wrong-headed (eg Christopher Hitchens). One can write like an angel and yet be fundamentally clownish (eg AA Gill, et many al). But it's entirely another matter when a writer is incapable not only of forming intelligible ideas but also of finding the appropriate tone and correct arrangement of words through which to express his mental slurry. Jasper simply has nothing to say and can't even find the words to say he has nothing to say.

Today he confects an anti-monarchist burble out of Helen Mirren's whimsical and graceful Oscar thankyou speech in which she jokily suggested that the Academy's judges had voted for "Brenda" rather than the Dame. Why shouldn't the British people have a similar vote to decide the monarchy's future? he asks, seriously. This could work as absurdist humour if he struck the right satirical note: but satire is quite beyond the skills of Jasper's sausage-fingers. He employs words such as "paradox", "oleaginous" and "resonates" to hit his target audience self-estimation, but forgets to employ an argument that is not essentially non sequiturial. It's as if Gerard thinks he can turn crinoline into silk by sewing word pearls into the fabric.

Or put in stark terms, what exactly is the connection between a royalist jest in LA, an Academy vote for a movie performance and a non-issue in the UK about the future of the monarchy via a movie called The Queen? Only possible answer - personal. Rupert Murdoch, Jasper's last employer, is a republican: is Jasper's Observer column some sad extended job application to return to Wapping now that the current gig is such a transparent disaster?

Read him for yourself - click here.

Jasper Gerard & the gypsies

The Observer's Readers' Editor Stephen Pritchard has judged against his own editor, Roger "fucking" Alton, and his recent right-wing sign-up Jasper Gerard. Two weeks ago Gerard paraded his lazy racism on the subject of gypsies and where he thinks they like to live. I encouraged people to complain and I wasn't disappointed.

Pritchard reports in his paper: "Several readers were incensed. 'Why allow such lazy bigotry in a quality newspaper, particularly one which normally would be falling over itself to dispel such brainless caricaturing?' was a typical question. I put this to the editor, who replied that the piece was intended to be humorous. 'I think it is simply ludicrous that we cannot make jokes about a minority purely because it's a minority,' he said.

"The Race Relations Act (1976) defines gypsies as a separate ethnic group, while the Commission for Racial Equality describes travellers and gypsies as 'some of the most vulnerable and marginalised ethnic minority groups in Britain'.

"Last week, the Press Complaints Commission confirmed to me that it would treat gypsies as a separate race under the terms of Clause 12 of the Editors' Code of Practice, which states that 'the press must avoid prejudicial and pejorative reference to an individual's race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or any physical or mental illness or disability'.

"So it would appear that The Observer was in breach of the code....

"The PCC upholds the press's right to make robust comment, as long, as in this case, it is clearly labelled as opinion, but snide stereotyping can hardly be described as 'robust comment' and it's too easy for the PCC to refuse to entertain complaints from uninjured parties while defending freedom of expression. Knee-jerk attacks on minority groups do nothing for social cohesion and have precious little to do with hard-won rights and freedoms. The editor was wrong to allow them in the paper." [my bold italics]

Well said Pritchard. The only reason why Gerard was hired in the first place was because he worked at the Sunday Times: how national newspaper editors just love sloppy seconds. As for Alton, I fail to understand why the Scott Trust permits him to remain as editor when he backed the Iraq invasion, thinks Blair a great PM (they're mates) and - worse - is friends with Mariella Frostrup.

She phoned the balding swine during an interview with the Indy recently and he asked her what she thought of Gordon Brown as PM - which is a bit like putting Lulu on the spot about dialectical materialism. I don't recall her reply but he did go on to talk about Observer writer Henry Porter who gave Blair a hard time the other month on the erosion of civil liberties.

According to Alton, Blair now refers to the writer as "Fucking Henry Porter".

Jasper Gerard: brilliant con?

Jasper Gerard is the Observer’s “brilliant new columnist” – so brilliant in fact that he managed to lose the Sunday Times quite a pretty penny last year when he repeated some nonsense about Sir Elton John forbidding guests from approaching him at his Summer Ball.

However, let’s call libel an occupational hazard of writing a rightish-wing, celeb-rich weekly column that seems designed to make the lives of practising homosexuals as uncomfortable as possible.

Far more interesting to me is his new perch at the Observer. Was it only three years ago that Peter Preston, former editor of the Guardian, gave Gerard a bit of a kicking in the Observer for making up some colour about the late Sir Peter Ustinov? (The Observer is the sister/brother publication of the Guardian, btw).

Preston complained that readers of Gerard’s Ustinov interview in the Sunday Times (Feb 29 2003) might have been led to believe that the hack flew to Geneva and spoke to the ailing actor in his Swiss living room. Gerard claimed to be able to make out Mont Blanc from chez Ustinov while detecting a playful smile on the knight’s lips.

In fact the interview was done by phone – Preston was most exercised by this misrepresentation to the public. So was Ustinov.

On a final note, Jasper’s lead piece in the Observer yesterday read faintly anti-something the Iraq war (actually, it was hard to tell) – a stance that he didn't adopt three years ago when Ustinov condemned the planned invasion of Iraq during the interview. Gerard had in fact then “balked” (his word) at the actor’s political naivety on the topic. Now Iraq has all gone wrong.

Nice to see that Jasper is growing up (or is he?). Or has his opinion changed post-Murdoch employment?