Sarah Vine Twitter Hypocrisy

If one can’t stand the heat, the saying goes, one should get out of the kitchen. It is an adage that Mail pundit of no fixed boredom threshold Sarah “Vain” Vine has decided to apply to the kitchen of Twitter, where she has celebrated the site’s tenth anniversary by flouncing out, while blaming everyone else for making her do it, which would be mildly interesting were it true. The deed has been entirely self-inflicted.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out

So how has the excuse note been worded? “This week, Twitter ‘celebrates’ ten years. I say ‘celebrate’ because really there is nothing to applaud. Not unless you enjoy having a giant open sewer flowing into your computer … But as the number of users grew, Twitter changed. It went from somewhere you could happily exchange civilised views to a place dominated by trolls and trollops intent only on unpleasantness or self-promotion”.

Do go on. “Twitter is the intellectual equivalent of fast food, devoid of nutrition and packed with poison, a dystopian vision of what happens to civilisation when you remove all social, cultural and legal barriers”. Someone here is protesting a little too much: Ms Vine might hate what she sees on Twitter, but she must know that much of it stems from her catty, dismissive, and downright nasty attacks on others in her Daily Mail column.

After Ms Vine used the safety of the Northcliffe House bunker to launch a particularly mean-spirited attack on food writer and campaigner Jack Monroe, they received rape and death threats. The saintly Sarah wasn’t too fussed about that, but hey, it was one of those rotten lefties, and she wasn’t about to bother herself reading up on Trans issues. People like that were not the Daily Mail’s kind of people, and so they didn’t matter.

It got worse: Ms Vine was more than happy to use Twitter to rant at the demotion of her husband Michael “Oiky” Gove. This took place late one evening, as did a particularly sour rant at Mil The Younger. These rambling late night excursions led to Private Eye describing her as “Absolutely pixellated”. And she had no compunction in using her Twitter experiences to generate more columns about how rotten it all was.

But it was the attacks on Miliband that showed Sarah Vine’s rank hypocrisy when it comes to playing the victim. After her gratuitously catty attack on Mil The Younger and wife Justine for being photographed in a kitchen which did not meet with her approval, she did not only have to deal with the enquiry of BBC This Week host Andrew Neil, but also Michael Portillo and Alan Johnson, who formed a cross-party consensus passing adverse comment on her Daily Mail article for its sniping, sneering tone.

Alan Johnson observed that Ms Vine, and Amanda Bloody Platell, “trade on this spiteful nastiness … You work for a newspaper that’s done more to pollute public discourse than anyone else in this country”. The Mail’s attacks on Miliband for not being married when he succeeded to the Labour leadership were also mentioned.

But all of that is fine, because, in the mind of Sarah Vine, it’s all Twitter’s fault. What a trouper. What an intolerant bigot. And what a Grade A steaming hypocrite.