Daily Mail: A National Disgrace

Sir Nicholas Hytner will soon finish his stint running the Royal National Theatre. One of his parting gifts to us is John, a dance-influenced production about unprotected sex in gay saunas.

How brave! How enlightened! Perhaps not. Perhaps this is just a seamy, sorry exercise, shorn of morals, commissioned in a moment of silliness by an artistic director who, for all the hyped indulgence and baubles he has received from the Establishment and the London Evening Standard, has had an erratic tenure...

It starts with clever depictions of the disruptive upbringing of a man called John and his sexually violent father. After about 15 minutes of this impressive if explicit material we switch to a gay sauna full of men showing us their whatnots, in at least one case semi-erect

For the next hour, sauna sex is everything. We are told of an orgy of 15 men. We see two blokes seemingly pleasuring themselves. There is a ballet of buggery, an offstage gay rape, endless talk about what complete strangers get up to in saunas. One charming scene is devoted to the amount of excrement left in saunas after a busy night. You taxpayers are helping to fund this...

Having written in support of gay rights since the late Nineties, I hope I can say without being accused of homophobia that John is, despite the artfulness of its performers, a disgrace.

Not that Sir Nicholas will mind. He will rub his little millionaire, State-enriched hands in glee at having created controversy. He has his knighthood already. There is even talk that he will soon be sent to the House of Lords, there to moralise and legislate over us.

This, folks, is the state of art and politics in 21st- century Britain.

Quentin Letts, Daily Mail.

Queeny Quentin's really got her knickers in a twist about this. 

Textbook stuff.

And how ironic that his 'review' will sell a shedload of tickets.

Richard Littlejohn: One Law For One Of Them...

On the day Deputy Speaker Nigel Evans was arrested mob-handed in the full glare of the TV cameras, I expressed some sympathy for him. Innocent until proven guilty and all that.
But I’m afraid that, like Quentin Letts, I found his self-pitying statement in the Commons both nauseating and an abuse of Parliamentary privilege. He should have stood down quietly to concentrate on his defence against gay rape charges, not turned the occasion into an undignified Oscars-style sobfest.
Dave Lee Travis wouldn’t have been given half an hour’s free airtime to plead his innocence and thank his friends for their support. So why should an MP in the same boat be any different?
And, as I also asked at the time, if Evans had been a heterosexual MP accused of rape and sexual assault against women, would he have received such an indulgent hearing?

Textbook nonsense from Richard Littlejohn in his Daily Mail column.

Here's Quentin Lett's piece - also from the Mail; He told of his hugs from MPs... you could almost hear the gypsy violin
One of 20 (negative) articles since Evans was first arrested in May.
Incidentally, when DLT asserted his innocence outside his house in November the Mail - somewhat indulgently - put up the video in full.

Lynne Featherstone: Crucified

As it's Easter, The Daily Mail decides to wibble on once more about "attempts to ban the wearing of crosses and crucifixes" at work.
Snore!
As it's Easter, the Mail also clears some space so Quentin Letts can try and crucify Lynne Featherstone, the Lib Dem Equalities Minister.
The whole thing hinges on "her handling of the gay weddings controversy", with a not so subtle subtext.
Never mind the policy, here's the sexism...

"Though aged 60 (and counting), she teeters up to the Despatch Box in high heels, grinning girlishly at the Opposition benches before hesitantly lisping a few opening apologies for losing her place or some such calamity. Think of Ulrika Jonsson corpsing during one of her weather forecasts in the Eighties.
"Quite often Mrs Featherstone giggles, says she did not quite catch the drift of the question or pushes her long fringe out of her smouldering eyes and gives a hapless shrug of her shoulders.
"She invariably pulls at the bottom of her skimpy designer top, the better to accentuate her slinky torso. Shades of a Wonderbra advert — from the Minister for Women!"

Wouldn't it be easier just to come out and call her a "silly old cow"?
Letts proclaims; "Mrs Featherstone is in an intellectual muddle, though she does not seem to know it. Well, there’s a surprise! On gay marriage, the divorced mother of two presents herself as the champion of tolerance. Yet on the wearing of crosses, she is completely the opposite — so intolerant that she is using Government lawyers to fight her corner."
"Even her colleagues in the Liberal Democrat party call her ‘Lynne Featherbrain’," Letts claims.
"She has another nickname, ‘Dorian’, because she is so similar to the ageing vamp of that name (played by Lesley Joseph) in the TV sitcom Birds Of A Feather."
"She has been a lifelong fighter of the flab... inveighed against Page 3 girls and all that sort of jazz... said she ‘wouldn’t really have a problem’ with women having cosmetic surgery to give their sagging breasts..."
Oh, and lest we forget, Letts reminds us that "Dorian" is "of Jewish stock."
"But with tame Christians being tormented by the Government machine, there surely comes a time when the Featherstone joke has gone far enough."
A shockingly shameful exercise in misogyny, even by the Mail's gutter-low standards.
Drop dead, Quentin.

Quentin Letts: Old Fruit?

Always hard to figure out if the Daily Mail's Quentin Letts is a sniggering public school homophobe or a closeted old fruit.

Equality Act: Under Threat?

"Is the Government considering scrapping all legal protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans people?", asks Manchester's LGF Foundation.
The Cabinet Office website Red Tape Challenge asks "Should the Equality Act 2010 be scrapped?" Scary stuff.
Public Sector Equality Duty only came into effect a week ago.
Fagburn has been boring you with this riff on the right-wing press's war against equality laws for some time - its main cheerleaders are The Daily Mail, The Daily Express and the Telegraph.
The Pink Paper is so brain dead it probably wants it to happen.

Update: Right on cue here's Quentin Letts on The EHRC in The Daily Mail; 'You're all invited to make a racket about equality'