Olivia Utley - Pampered, Preening, Pointless

For those still unsure as to the casual evil that is the right-leaning part of the Fourth Estate, it is sometimes difficult to encapsulate this in an easy to understand way. Fortunately, as with so much else concerning our free and fearless press, the opposition often rides to your rescue. The Murdoch Sun has come galloping this morning.

Olivia Utley

This most timely assistance has been provided by one Olivia Utley, who has been introduced to readers as a “Guest Columnist”, which is routinely dishonest. Ms Utley is the paper’s “Deputy leader writer and head of PR”, which means she is paid an obscene amount of money to talk well, but lie badly. Her column attacks non-existent people.

“It’ll do our spoiled young Remainers good to remain in Britain for the hols” she tells, going on to say “a summer spent in Britain will do our spoiled metropolitan millennials a world of good”. Spoiled? Metropolitan? Ms Utley did her “A” levels at a school in Holland Park, where if you need to ask how much houses cost, you can’t afford to live there.

After inventing a variety of acquaintances who go on gap years, don’t know their geography, but all voted Remain, which of course, she didn’t, comes the dead giveaway: “Thanks to Covid-19, the nation’s young people won’t have the option of scurrying to Heathrow the second their Uni exams are over”. Heathrow? Ri-i-i-ight.

Ms Utley reveals that if anyone is spoiled, it is her. Most students, if they get to jet off anywhere, given the debt so many of them have to take on during their studies, have to travel from Stansted or Gatwick. As Nick Tolhurst has pointed out, she is attacking those like her (she attended the University of York) just to stir up hate among Sun readers.

But she gets paid well for it. As to those high principles that come with this easy assumption of that casual evil, let’s see where Ms Utley holidays. Er, not in the UK: “Really enjoyed my BBC Papers debut with [Dawn Foster] last night. Now off to France for a week”. As to how she managed to land the Sun gig, that surname may give a clue.

Her Uncle Tom is a Daily Mail columnist: Tom Utley is a self-confessed homophobe. “My uncle is a journalist at The Mail. He has 4 kids of his own and has never given me any career help” she has protested. But having a bigoted relative in the industry can’t have been detrimental when it comes to the paper formerly edited by Kelvin McFilth.

Who are her pals? Well, what a coincidence: “Buzzing to work alongside the brilliant [Harry Cole]! Top journalist [!] (and [Boisdale] drinking buddy)”. Meaning what? “London's original live music restaurants and cocktail bars located in Belgravia, Mayfair, Bishopsgate & Canary Wharf”. She’d go drinking at places like that, with the odious flanneled fool Master Harry Cole. Proper ordinary people. Do as they say, not as they do.

And cocooned inside the media bubble, she thinks nothing of stirring up hatred against many of the people with whom she studied. Many of them will be less affluent than her. But that’s not the point: by writing that column, she proves that she is willing to enter a deal with the devil, win her spurs, and leave any semblance of a conscience at the door.

Olivia Utley may well have been a real person once. Now she has entered a world where the inmates care only about one another, and stuff everyone else. And boy, does it show.

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