Liz Jones – Pants On Fire

Not content just to shower Mail On Sunday readers with her diary entries detailing the past week’s highlights of Herself Personally Now, sad and embittered Glenda Liz Jones has decided to use the bully pulpit provided for her at Northcliffe House to do something that for many Mail hacks comes as second nature, and that is to kick the gays. Ms Jones uses her concern for animals to legitimise her assault.

What do you think of it so far?

The target for yet another unnecessary hatchet job is Ms Jack Monroe, who has had the effrontery to land a berth at the deeply subversive Guardian, where she publishes recipes that provide meals for a quid a portion, and often less. One might have thought that Ms Jones would cut the less well off a bit of slack at this time of the year, but that is not the way of the seasoned Glenda.

“The recession has brought about a kind of food fascism ... In the news last week was the ‘fact’ the poorest spend just over £2 a day on food, and so recipes and blogs have sprung up online”, she observes. “Take the recipe posted by food blogger Jack Monroe in The Guardian on Wednesday for a casserole that costs only 99p per portion. It contains chicken thighs. Oh, and streaky bacon”. It was free range, Liz.

This is a problem? “Ms Monroe became very angry not long ago at our sister paper, the Daily Mail, when it accused her of making a lifestyle choice to live on benefits. She crowed that the Mail’s writer had entirely missed the fact she is a lesbian”. Ah, the Littlejohn column which Ms Monroe filleted rather well – not that Liz wants readers to know that, nor that her target has not made that lifestyle choice.

But Ms Jones is off and running: “Now, forgive me if I’m wrong – and millions of people in India agree with me – but surely if you have no money, meat is the first thing to go”. Ms Monroe has never made a “lifestyle choice to live on benefits”, and it has clearly escaped Liz Jones that her target has returned to full-time employment. So she does have some money, but works to a budget. Or did Liz not look first?

That budget means most of the recipes Ms Monroe publishes are vegetarian, yet Liz Jones manages to miss all of those, plus the butter beans, onion and carrot in the recipe that has so annoyed her. The Mail On Sunday’s columnist would no doubt like to see the whole world eat as she does, but it does not, and that is not the fault of the Guardian or any of its writers.

Nor is it an excuse to double down on the dishonesty of Richard Littlejohn in order to kick those who are gay, have had because of personal circumstances to spend a few months claiming benefits, or do not readily recoil at standards of animal welfare in the way that Liz Jones demands that they should (the thought enters that Littlejohn couldn’t give a stuff how his next meat meal was treated when alive).

And nor can you sit in judgment with your trousers alight. No change there, then.