Camilla Long
The Sunday Times
Her vivid, signature prose and killer observations delight and engage readers - yet also draw them into the more serious implications of each story.
On 25 August, she reported from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, in a column headlined “96 hours at the Kamala Harris show: schmaltzy soundbites and spray on chinos”. There, she watched agog as 5,000 delegates and TikTokers worshipped “the President of Joy”, while ruthlessly erasing Joe Biden from their collective memories. It was a fiery, technicolour piece that presciently captured the yawning emptiness at the heart of Harris’s cult of personality. It was also picked up in the States, with The New York Post syndicating it to run the following day.
On home soil she was equally forensic during the British election, noting on June 15 the “snapping ferocity of Nigel Farage’s campaign”.
Travelling to Clacton, where Farage – the “Chernobyl” of politics, as she unforgettably put it - was standing for MP, she spoke to scores of voters and found, unlike previous elections, most were determined to vote for the Reform leader. “After years and years of hysteria, declining standards, chaos, contradictions - this is a brutalised population. They are at such a point of desperation, boredom and annoyance… here, in the home of the Smile Factory, they just want someone who will make them smile”.
Finally, in the same week that Huw Edwards was sentenced and Dominique Pelicot admitted all charges against his wife in a French court, Long produced a devastating column that skewered misogyny and sexual predators who hide behind victimhood. “Men who abuse don’t suddenly stop abusing. They simply shift focus: now they’re grooming the judge, the public,” she wrote with chilling clarity.
What sets Long apart is not only her own personal style but her desire to speak to real people, to find out what’s going on beyond the echo chamber. She has a unique connection with people on the street, and, by extension, her readers - often surprising them, sometimes outraging them, but always provoking thought and debate.