Jan Moir
Daily Mail, MailPlus and MailOnline
And that is her strength in a nutshell: Jan speaks to her readers’ concerns, and does so in the most entertaining, clever and humorous way possible. Part of her genius as a columnist is that she can make you laugh out loud one moment and seethe with anger the next. It is this uniquely distinctive combination of razor-sharp wit and righteous indignation combined with her peerless abilities as a writer that makes her column so addictive. On the one hand she has the empathy, insight, and warmth to melt the hardest of hearts; on the other, the unerring ability to puncture the ego of the most puffed-up celebrity, politician, or royal. Every word is chosen with great deliberation, each sentence crafted to perfection. In the wake of the unfortunate encounter between Lady Susan Hussey and Ngozi Fulani, founder of Sistah Space, an organisation that offers support to African and Caribbean heritage who have been the victims of abuse, Moir concluded that the pair were ‘pawns in a much bigger grievance game’. As she wrote: ‘Their cocktail party chat is being freighted with a significance it does not deserve, seen as evidence of the systemic racism that the Duchess of Sussex has complained about – and even held up as another reason to abolish the monarchy. It’s another example of diversity industry hysteria.’ Meanwhile, Prince Harry got both barrels in the run-up to the publication of his memoir, Spare. The physical attack by his brother William during a row over Meghan’s rudeness to staff is dismissed as ‘less of a rumble in the jungle than a little light bitchin’ in the Nott Cott kitchen’. The wailing of the former Captain General of the Royal Marines over the injuries he sustained after falling on to a dog bowl elicited the observation that the Marines should change their motto to ‘By Sea, By Land, By Dog Bowl’. She concludes: ‘These are the petty tent pegs holding down Harry’s enormous marquee of misery, this is the ballast in his big balloon of sulky hot air.’ The then Prince Charles didn’t fare much better when Moir turned her attention to his upcoming coronation. The Queen was a class act but our Jan finds it hard to take her increasingly woke eldest son seriously. ‘The magic is ebbing away on an outgoing tide,’ she wrote. ‘Already the king has had to fold whipped modish concerns into his Coronation meringue. There will be a slimmed-down ceremony, easy on the diamonds, fingers crossed that the ermine is sustainably farmed and let’s hid Andrew behind a pillar.’ God help the King!