Dan Wootton - Pants On Fire

The Sun’s singularly repellant “executive editor” Dan Wootton became infected with Covid-19 earlier this year. He was off work for two whole weeks. But after that, he was back at the Baby Shard Bunker. Because he’s not going to be intimidated by a mere virus. Not only that, he wants everyone else to know he got the virus and he’s now fighting fit. As a result, he has decided that everyone else should be back at work.

So it was that, without troubling himself with such details as fact checking, he decided with his latest Sun column to kill two birds with one stone. Now that Sky News is independent of the Murdoch mafiosi, its reporters have had no problem in challenging the Government and asking the difficult questions. So up steps Wootton to single out one of their number for a punishment beating on the subject of getting back to work.

Off he went: “IT was the moment I saw Sky News’ political editor Beth Rigby broadcasting live from a living room on Tuesday, the day Parliament resumed, when I finally lost it. ‘Get back to bloody work, Beth’, I screamed internally … You can’t hold the most powerful politicians in this country to account surrounded by Jo Malone candles while stroking the cat on a Zoom call from leafy North London suburbia”. Sexism and misogyny, much?

Beth Rigby

There followed a string of clumsily assembled insults, delivered as if from a quote generator: “woke bosses … the traditionally workshy French … a nation of hysterical hypochondriacs … idiotic virtue-signalling … proudly return to normal working life … grubby MPs … The public must stand up to politicians such as Nicola Sturgeon and Sadiq Khan, who are irresponsibly using fear to gain political capital”. Bullshit.

Peter Walker of the Guardian had seen enough. “This manages to be both the most sanctimonious and badly-written column I’ve read in some time. Quite an achievement. And it failed to even check the basic fact that the hugely hard-working Beth Rigby was working from home as she was quarantined”. Also, the vast majority of Sun readers will never be wealthy enough to be “strolling” distance from London Bridge.

Meanwhile, Wootton had gone off on another fact-free attack on someone he had decided was a supporter of the Duchess of Sussex. “No one is more corrosive to public discourse in this country than Meghan’s new BFF Jameela Jamil”. Er, WHAT? “This week the actress … seems to have been sent out by the Duchess to spread more bile on Twitter about ‘the true colonising spirit of Britain’s white, patriarchal media’”. Seems. He’s making it up.

But there is more. “She claims, without any evidence as usual, that journalists here ‘hate a disobedient WOC (Woman of Colour) in particular’. What absolute tripe”. Says Wootton, while hating on a Woman of Colour. Equating the Duchess with Prince Andrew doesn’t help his cause, either. But Dan wants us to know he hates blokes as well as women.

And to demonstrate this, he duly blocked the man from the Guardian, despite not having been tagged in Walker’s original Tweet. Not that Dan Wootton is about personal vanity, you understand. Or being a thin-skinned sanctimonious hypocrite.

But he is about smearing and lying for money. Fire extinguisher for Mr Wootton’s trousers!

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