Mail Vents Fury At The Mantel Piece

The obedient hackery of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre employs a number of specialist disciplines in order to whip up hate against anyone who is deemed not to be one of Their Kind Of People, and today has seen the deployment of a favourite, the mixture of slanted fact selection and quoting totally out of context. By these means, the target is duly demonised.

What's f***ing wrong with putting the boot in, c***?!?

And today’s target is double Booker Prize winning novelist Hilary Mantel, who has written an article musing on how the wider public see the Royal Family. The Queen features here, as does the late Diana, Princess of Wales. But what has triggered the faux outrage among the Dacre attack doggies is that Ms Mantel has had the audacity to also discuss the Duchess of Cambridge.

This has proved too much, and so the Mantel article – which was first published more than two weeks ago – has been reinvented not as how the author imagines the public may see Kate, but as the author’s own view. To this end, sentences and mere quotes have been hacked from the page and presented as assertions of fact by someone who is “clever”, and 60 years old to boot.

So we get the Mary Beard treatment over again: how dare she? This is our future Queen you’re talking about, dammit! It’s the liberal elite looking down on us again! You can’t call Catherine “thin”! And here, the bullshit detector went off. Somewhere in the memory bank, I recall someone in the online version of a newspaper discussing how thin the Duchess of Cambridge was.

Let’s have a rummage. Ah yes, here’s a piece from November 2011by Rebecca English where we learn that “Kate, 29, looked stunning – if a little slender”. That was after Ms English rabbited on about what looked like a scar near her left temple. More typical of the genre was a piece from the previous August telling how Kate had become a role model for pro-anorexia websites.

So there was more “how dare they”. You know the drill: someone else is saying it, we’re just reporting it, it’s not our opinion at all, honest. Like “Katie Couric slams Duchess Kate for ‘getting too thin’”. Yeah, gobby Yanks, eh? What do they know about Royalty? Then we get Tracy Anderson – plus photo – warning that Kate will need her help in slimming down after giving birth.

No prizes for guessing that all those articles were from the Daily Mail, which led the charge of faux righteousness against Hilary Mantel today, and which will no doubt go in with both feet in tomorrow’s print edition. Mentioning Kate’s weight is not to be done by others: that is the Mail’s business. Meanwhile, nobody stops to read what Hilary Mantel actually wrote (see HERE), which is diverting and thoughtful.

Which means she is not, by definition, the Daily Mail’s Kind Of Person.