Charlotte Gill Crawling REWARDED

Those who look in regularly on Zelo Street may remember a vain and certainly not heroic attempt last September to burnish the reputation of alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson by occasional hack Charlotte Gill. This was a campaign that developed not necessarily to her advantage; Ms Gill pretending that Bozo The Clown was some kind of victim was widely ridiculed. But she has continued to stick to her task.

Charlotte Gill

And it took an industrial quantity of brass neck to claim that Bozo was being “hounded” while most of her pals in the right-leaning press were kicking seven shades of the proverbial out of Jeremy Corbyn. She even managed to throw in “People made fun of Ed Miliband eating the sandwich for purely aesthetic reasons. With BoJo anything he does - sneeze, eat, breathe - must be compared to fascism”. No further questions, m’Lud.

Best not dwell on that, though, as she has returned this month to defending the indefensible, starting with the general musing “Was thinking about Jordan Peterson a few months ago. And how does he do it? How does he cope with so much backlash? And the truth is, people don’t. That’s why we can’t just endlessly have one person fighting cancel culture - we all gotta say no. Luckily ppl are getting braver”.

He does it because he’s a creep who doesn’t give a crap about his targets, and who has proved himself incapable of defending his views when put under the interviewer’s cosh. But do go on. “The Andrew Sabisky debate is a test for the government. Listen to Twitter? Or trust your own hiring decisions. We cannot have Roger Scruton/ Toby Young-style sackings over and over again”. Twitter Done It! Er no, Sabisky was a wacko.

Then it was on to Caroline Flack, and the quite mild observation that “being a famous woman remains a health hazard”. She wasn’t having that. “Men are public punching bags too. Stop trying to make what happened into a gendered issue”. Somehow, she missed that particular viciousness that attaches to pursuit of women.

But back to the Sabisky row, and the attention switching to chief Downing Street polecat Dominic Cummings, who Ms Gill now felt duty bound to defend. “As far as I can see, he is not advocating designer babies. He is warning about the dystopian possibilities of DNA technology. It is getting more advanced and we have to discuss where the limits should be. Shutting down this debate is dangerous”. No, it’s calling out eugenicists.

Who else out there on the right would she care to unsuccessfully defend? “So let me get this right. Our Home Secretary is being attacked for being aspirational about getting people into work?” Priti Patel. Who wants to get eight million supposedly “economically inactive” people into work. Except they’re already occupied studying, caring for others, or being retired. Nothing like leaping in before doing your homework.

But there was a payoff for this endeavour: just to show some appreciation - and to tell the world how desperate it must be - Conservative Home has now made her its deputy editor. To which Ross McCafferty observed “it’s always hard to remember with Tory self-owners, what was Charlotte's big embarrassing online moment again? Something about genetics and intelligence? Or not being able to find a date because she was right-wing?”

Before remembering that it was both. Interesting to see another crawler being rewarded.

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