Private Eye's fortnightly slant on What The 'Papers Say, should properly read Street Without Shame but with a part-time editor like littlefatman Hislop one can't expect too much; that he hasn't destroyed the Eye completely is probably due to the fact that it's actually run by real grown-ups
There isn't a Fleet Street, anyway. I don't know if there ever was; there will be a few bars, restaurants, bondage salons, glass-topped shitting tables and mainstream knocking shops which are patronised by both arms of MediaMinster and these brothels and piss corners probably form the fabric of what we still describe as Fleet Street; the hacks, though, can file their rants and dribblings and arselickings and plagiarisms from almost anywhere on the planet.
Their personal doings, though, are conventionally mundane, sordid and local. How many respected hacks were jumping on and into Blind Boy Blunkett's journalist bint,
Yes, I know she's married, but I'm Tony Blair's
home seckatery and I can do what I want.
Yes, I know she's married
but I'm a professional gossip and I can do what I want.
Yes, I know she's married,
she's married to me.
Kimberley Quinn, when he, and presumably her hubby, were not around. Simon Hoggart, the Guardian's wine and gossip writer eventually confessed to being a quarter of this o'er moist menage a quatre, at least quatre; poor woman, being gangbanged in instalments by such a crew of weird old men; she probably led them on, bitch.
And there's the spectacularly unprepossessing Andrew Marr and his adultery super injunction shenanigans,
typical of hacks, dish the dirt on anyone, bar themselves. Bo-Jo, part-time mayor, full time Filth-O-Grapher, scribbler and bloated, albino fuckbunny; gobby Gerry Clarkson, another Murdochee, strayed from his dwarf wife
and sought to keep it all under legal wraps. We could be here for days; what was HagFace Robinson's
Daily Mirror relationship with the bouncing Czech, publisher, MP and pensions grand larcenist, Bob Maxwell? Even before she had her face resculpted in plastic her wink was about as enticing and flirtatious as a leg ulcer, Jesus fucking wept.
Despite the absence of a trade locale, the absence of hot metal and despite the creeping, consumptive death of all newspapers - broad, tabloid and pornosheets - the hacks' trade has changed little; they remain grubby labourers in the field of engineered public stupidity, propagandists of a scarcely distinguishable set of self-appointed ruling mobsters, networks of organised crime, those who judge themselves the right sort to keep ordinary, stupid people in line, place'd go to fuck if ordinary people had any say in the matter and the journalists are an equally culpable, disgusting regiment of the Shit-In-Our-Faces brigade.
They, journalists, are without exception, undeclared spokespersons for an industry. Music journalists are spokespersons for the music industry; writers for Q magazine, for instance, don't work for the readership but for Pink Floyd and Bruce Springsteen - the ever breathless septuagenarian teenager, singing about his baby and his car, stupid cunt - Bob Dylan fuels an entire industry, from Rolling Stone magazine to hundreds if not thousands of fanzine-ers, Clinton Heylin can tell us who played what and when and how, in what time signature and in what key on every Bob Dylan recording, EVER - don't argue with me I have read all his mad, obsessive books - and what they all meant; Paul Morley, of the ghastly PBC2 Newsnigh review, famous for his Hundred-bests-of-this-and-that-show appearances can find deep cultural-sociological-comical-tragical-historical significance in the direst, most meaningless, trashiest, two-minute punk thrash; they all do this shit, not just for the money, not just for free music and free tickets to gigs but for Access, maybe not Access All Areas but a few minutes access to whichever grunting, cokehead, arrested-development delinquent it is - Paul Haircut'n'Jumper Weller, Badger Brian May. Lady Sir Elton John. These people - rock critics - are midnight shitpipe crawlers, pretending to be critics.
PBC diva, Paul Gambuccini,
a US import, is famed not just for how many gay pop icons came out to him first - or so he claims, hissily - but for his astonishingly crass confession that he knew all along what Sir Jimmy Childfucker was up to but didn't blow the whistle because it would have wrecked his career, his career of oozing his comforting tongue-borne saliva up the arses of overblown nobodies.
But if you think that's bad, just look at the shitmunchers who call themselves political journalists, theirs is the rankest of sewers. Many were shocked and disdainful when Paul Staines, Colonel von Fawkes of the PizzaHouseOfBlood,
Paul Staines in his playwear.
sub-titled his blog, gossip, rumour and insinuations - something like that, anyway, perhaps insinuation is too polysyllabic for Staines, whose idol, after all, is the racist, Nazi, sexist, moronic bullyboy fuckpig, Sir Kelvin McFilth
McFilth and Moron.
Britain's most successful journalists.
Why aren't they in jail?
- but actually, all he was doing was aping the outrageous British Lobby System, by which the likes of Nick Toenails, the PBC's political arselicker-in-chief,
Well, yes of course I know who said what to whom
but I couldn't possibly tell the viewers.
Toilets Maguire, the Daily Mirror's token poor-boy-done-good; the intolerably smug Andrew Read My Book, Servants Of The People Rawnsley
Andrew Knobcheese, knower of secrets.
of the disgraceful Sunday ArseBridger In fact almost everybody in mainstream political "reporting" trades in the knowing whispers and secret handshakes of "unattributable briefing." Slaphead Toenails smirking that "his sources are telling him.....this and that ...........close friends of the minister have told him.............. I have learned that......senior Tories are telling me...." Robinson and others gain acess to our lavishly paid employees, the filth in parliament, on the basis of no names, no pack drill and if they do reveal names they are fucked-off out of The Lobby. Cunts, all of them, conspiring to keep the stupid stupid and confound the intelligent.
And then there's Newsnight. Drunken Emily Thighs,
staggering across the studio in ten-inch heels and having a chat with some arsehole from one of the political parties, with whom she was probably dining the night before.
Stephanie Boots, banging-on about The Economy, Stupid, as if she had the first idea about what she spoke of and poor old Paul Mason
- you can see his mind whirring and clunking, For fucks sake,God, let me think of something knowledgeable to say about this whatever-it-is, because I haven't a fucking clue; how did I get this job? And best of all, glued to his job, million pounds a fucking year, the ridiculous Paxman,
with his faux cantankerousness, a gilded, luxuriant Cantabrian, pretending to roast his fellow Oxbridge boys-and-girls, but telling them, pre-interview, All the world's a stage, old darling, take no notice, there's no business like showbusiness, join me for a drink in my dressing room, afterwards, no hard feelings. Yes, of course it's all free.
I was in the doctor's waiting room. Considering they're all private businesses you'd think they would furnish their customers with some decent reading material whilst keeping them waiting for an hour or so. But no, tatty old National Geographics, Hello magazines and - last week - an issue of Classic Cars. Don't know if you've seen Classic Cars but it's full of features and adverts for clapped-out old bangers, ranging from Hillman Imps to Bentley Continentals. This is Motoring Journalism, just the same as all the other forms of journalism. You can learn, if you want to, how to rebuild
a thirty-year old Lancia which was good for fuck all when it was brand new and'll still be good for fuck all when you've spent tens of thousands of pounds on it, just like your local MP, good for fuck all, no matter what you do with them.
It's the same right across the board, the same wanky drooling over a rusty, old Triumph 2500 - you know, the one with carburettors that you need to adjust every fifteen miles - as over a gull-wing Mercedes 300 SL, which, even if you could get it to go, you'd be terrified of taking into a multi-storey car park. It all seemed to me like a petrolhead's fantasy world.
I love cars, mind you, There's only two of us but I have three: a one-litre, convertible Smart car, with automatic transmission and paddle-shift gear change on the steering wheel and it'd shit all over any of those dreadful British sportscars, MGs, Triumphs, Healeys, and it doesn't piss oil out all the time, and the roof is wind and watertight, and it always starts, we use it for local stuff, up to the town, and for fun, the 1000-cc version does go like stink, short wheelbase makes it stick to the road; I have an old, four-litre, auto Ford SUV, a big, lazy car, easy to drive, which I use for carrying or hauling stuff and then I have the hundred and fifty-five miles an hour Citroen C4 VTS, with swivelly headlights, dual aircon, bulletproof glass and fuck knows what else, which I am taking to Europe in the Autumn, just to see how it is, flat-out. I hope I don't die on the Autobahn. I use it for travelling up and down Scotland and England, it overtakes like a motorcycle, has rockhard suspension and is the sort of car which could easily get you banned. I like cars. I'd have more of them if I could afford it. But I would never have a Mark Two Jag, they were shit, the Hillman Imp was a joke and I get palpitations at the thought of a '70s Bentley Continental having to go into the garage, which it would, often. So, much as I like cars, I couldn't see the sense of this Classic Car stuff, until, that is, I read the front page.
Quentin Willson - an iffy name if ever I saw one - describes himself as the nine-year presenter of the PBC's Top Gear Show, and as a highly-respected motoring journalist and broadcaster. You've seen him on Channel Five. He's that smarmy git with the slicked-back few strands of hair.

What he actually does is front an advert for a car warranty scheme which he claims to have personally devised in the interests of motorists, a bit like Sir Michael Parkinson, funeral-frightening the old folk and tempting them with a free Parker Pen or that old, coffin-dodging queen, Nicholas Parsons, commending 2000 per cent APR loans for the poor. And Quentin voices-over, for British viewers, one of those fucking awful, US-made Lights! Action! Camera! Cops! Mortuary! shows. You know the thing, This stupid driver thought he could get away with this behaviour, speeding or being drunk or both, but he hadn't reckoned on the ShitCounty, Arkansas Highway Patrol and Patrolman Hiram T Cheesburger the Third. It's bits, often fragments of police-cruiser videotape from all over the States, Quentin I-Know-Besting over a selection of spectacularly trivial and uninteresting non-event horseshit. The show goes out in the middle of the night, so Quentin, the respected motoring journalist's home audience probably doesn't see it, but I, lonesome, obsessive insomniac, do. And he sounds just like what he is, a cheap, do-anything, fading luvvie.
He wrote the frontispiece, is that the word, for a magazine, in this isue of Classic Cars. He was pissing himself in glee. He'd been to an auction and bought - for just £24, 000 - an old Rolls Corniche convertible but being Quentin, he'd done his ree-surch, and learned that this particular old banger had been bought by some gangster, gun-runner, pimp, ponce and slag for his Mrs, some high-priced and age-discordant beauty or other; Khashoggi, was it, something like that. And QW was creaming himself at the though that, thanks to his ree-surching skills, he now owned a slice of motoring history. And that made the car - and Quentin - really special. In one of those chilly-sweaty waking nightmares, I could see him, Quentin, his shiny, slicked-back bonce, getting down and sniffing the seats, matched Navy Blue Connolly hide, of course. He'd had it trailered-home, by a friend, naturally, in the trade and had only driven it once round the block and there were only a few things wrong with it. It was, declared Quentin, a keeper. Just goes to show what you can do, the prat inferred, if you are as clever as me.
That was the point of it, God sent me that magazine just to remind me, that whatever the trade they are pimping - politics, music, motoring, whatever it is, - the writers are just filthy slags.
It was pathetic, really, a grown man behaving like that, cheaply. And I was glad when the doctor came and tapped me on the shoulder, breaking my reverie of homicidal disdain for writers in general and journalists in particular.
Even though, unlike the press, I don't use them, I don't think that there's anything particularly wrong with sex-workers - they could certainly have better working conditions and be afforded some respect; generally what they do is straightforward, honest and, I believe, socially helpful; unlike the press, they do not pretend to be serving a higher, truthful, critically important purpose.
The press, therefore, for me, and not the sex industry, is the oldest and most disreputable profession, part of the system which perpetuates the ruled and the rulers, the fucked, if you like, us, and the fuckers, them; the press, the govament, criminal big business, the royal ponces and the noncing monsignors, all in the same poxy knocking shop, all up each others' arses, all an offence to decent people.
And tonight the press is in a frenzy, a soldier is hacked to bits - as they all seem to love saying; Y'ever notice that, when someone is hacked to death they all keep saying it, even months, years after, decades after, they all keep saying that that London bobby, pc Keith Blakelock, for instance, was Hacked to Death, why can't they just say Killed, or Knifed? Don't they have any concern for the relatives of the Hackee, hearing that phrase, year after year? Fucking bastards - outside his barracks and his killers just hang around, waiting to be collared. What is all this about, they shriek, even consulting the moron, Lord John Reid. How can this shit happen? And what does it all mean?
If, however, they had ever reported Obama's murder-by-drone policy,
Collateralised for Freedom.
endorsed by no less a political heavyweight than the inbred mutant CallHimDave
I'm just so glad Obie, that you probly
won the Battle of Britain for us.
and by the rest of MediaMinster; if they had reported the century of Jewish-American-Zionist terror against the Arabs, maybe even if they had reported Uncle Sam's Netherlands Act - which empowers the President to use any force necessary to "rescue" any US war criminals brought before the International Court in the Hague - if they had reported that - no matter what drunken, depressive, bi-curious, MediaMinster hoodlum,
Alastair Campbell said - the invasion of Iraq was in direct contravention of the 1948 Nuremburg Tribunal's ruling on war crimes .......if, if, if, if the press had ever told the truth about recent history, instead of whoring for Power, then it would not, should not come as any surprise that angry young men commit atrocitymurder on the streets of London, and don't even seek escape.
STOP PRESS, THE FILTHYMAIL, THE FILTH-O-GRAPH, THE FILTHYPORN EXPRESS
COME ON CAMERON, MAKE NIGEL FARAGE CHAIR OF COBRA.
GIVE A REAL MAN A CHANCE.
IT'S WHAT THE TENS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WHO DIDN'T AND NEVER WOULD VOTE FOR THE NASTY FUCKER WANT.