10/08/2010

Littlejohn and scrubbing your mind's eye

When I reviewed Richard Littlejohn's truly awful 'To Hell in a Handcart', I used the image on the left for giggles. Ha ha, Littlejohn has issues, you might want to get out the Brain Bleach! Little did I know just how much I'd be lamenting the fact that the only thing you can't wash out is your mind's eye. Seriously. Last night I got little sleep, my eyes the only thing visible in the darkness. Like in a cartoon. A disturbing one, written by Richard Matheson.

What happened is this. Before I went to bed, I read Smellyface's latest column. That's all I did.



'Juliet Bravo is taking the proverbial by splashing the cash on Shewees' opens with a great big attack on Julie Spence, Commissioner of Cambrigeshire Police. Littlejohn is stamping his feeties and spluttering his pancakes becasue of police work is like social work and she's planning to order hundreds of SheWees and speeding and otherwise law-abiding citizens and mindowyoogo yoocoodernmaykidapp!

So far so bleh. What's disturbing about that? This:
'OH MY GOD! PUSH! HARDER! FUCK YOU! FUCKING FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK JEEEEESUS! FAAAAAAAAAAARK!'

The handcuffs dug deep into Roberta's flesh. The police helmet she was wearing thudded into the bedhead and was forced down over her eyes as her body arched a full eighteen inches above the pillows supporting her arse and her lower back.
The villain of 'To Hell in a Handcart' is female Assistant Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Roberta Peel. We're clearly supposed to hate her for being a lefty Marxist plotter destroying the system from within. And for being a woman. Zero tolerance of driving offences is part of her Marxist plot, for some reason. Littlejohn demeans her by making her pathologically addicted to stuffing objects - phallic or not - up her vagina. That quote is an extract from a scene where she is pleasured by her fellow gay plotter, Justin Fromby, and her truncheon, Dixon.

In his disturbing new column, Littlejohn talks about his giggling over the idea of Julie Spence planning to order SheWees. I think we can all imagine what he was really thinking about her doing with them. You might want to pause now to have a bit of a gag.  I hope it doesn't keep you awake like it did me.

Of course, now I've had a very quick look into the whole Cambridgeshire Police SheWee controversy it turns out to be, well, a bit rubbish. Smellyface says they cost £7.50, but the quickest of quick Google searches shows them on sale for much less, and of course Cambridgeshire Police would almost definitely get them at cost price or less for buying such a large number and giving the SheWee company publicity.

Still, the Mail seems to have churned its version, prompting Littlejohn's indignant giggling, from 'Police force set to buy 'Shewees' for female officers' in the Telegraph, which renders all this moot in true 'quote near the end of the bottom' newspaper style:
Documents reveal that the force is ''still considering'' rolling out the Shewees to all WPCs.
Right. Haven't put an order in or announced plans. Still considering three years after the trial (and as the Telegraph points out, feedback indicated that there was "no great need" for them), and we only know because of an FoI request. So the likelihood of any Cambridgeshire WPC being issued one is pretty darn low.

Anyway, there's a reason why Julie Spence, the 'old dragon' as Littlejohn refers to her, is getting the Smellyface treatment and it isn't just because she's a woman (seriously, every woman in THiaH is either a repulsive caricature, has her appearance disparaged or makes a horrible mistake that would ruin the hero had he not been clever enough to not trust them, and rely on a man as back up instead).

Apparently:
She seems to have interpreted her appointment to the board of the Press Complaints Commission as an excuse to give as many media interviews as possible. Fenland’s answer to Juliet Bravo has been holding forth on everything from speeding to public spending cuts.
Of course, giving interviews isn't the problem. The problem, or at least one of them, is what she says in those interviews.

A couple of years ago, and Spence's fondness for giving interviews made her the belle of the Daily Mail. She said some negative things about immigration's impact on her force that were probably quite sensible, but incredibly easy for the Mail to cherrypick, exaggerate and carve into easy to blow dog-whistles like 'Mass immigration to blame for knife culture, chief constable warns' (she was only talking about the culture where carrying a pocketknife is commonplace). This led to the Mail breathlessly covering her possible application for Chief Constable at the Met in a barely disguised reverie in 'Woman police chief to apply for top Scotland Yard job'. Much like the current SheWee controversy revolves around a decision that hasn't even been made, that article was written even though Spence hadn't decided whether or not to apply.

Since it became clear that Spence wasn't whistling the same tune as the Mail and was only saying that crime rises as population does, and since she took up a post at the Press Complaints Commission, the Mail's view seems to have gone sour. Whether it's because of what she says in interviews or the decisions she's made at the PCC, it's negative story after negative story for Spence now. It was only a matter of time before our smelly faced chum from across the Atlantic, with his well known good regard for women with less than rabidly right wing views, stood up and took notice.

Still, did he have to do so with something so closely associated with vaginas?

I think he probably did.

6 comments:

Martin Runeckles said...

Does Littlejohn not see the irony in saying:

"Now, though, the applause appears to have gone to her head, as she revels in her reputation for being ‘outspoken’ and ‘controversial’."

Who does that remind you of?

Five Chinese Crackers said...

It reminds me of...an arsehole!

Sorry. The Mail loved her reputation for being outspoken when it could twist it into an immigrant crimewave.

Luke Temple said...

Don't know if you got all the way down to the bottom of the article, but Littejohn excelled himself as ever (I tend to skip the long bits at the front, he is a very boring writer).

Turns out Chinese workers suicides are well worth a laugh. It's funny how I like ironic humour, I like dark humour, and then there's Littlejohn, who somehow misses it all and just manages to be offensive.

Good blog by the way

Blackout said...

Dear oh dear, skimming through the frothings of his 'Shewee' column, the following bits stood out:

On speeding:
"simply to turn otherwise law-abiding taxpayers into criminals"
...so he's admitting that breaking the law does actually mean that you ARE a criminal, by its very definition? That's a step forward, I guess. I'll have to work on my "oh come on, officer! I'm was only stabbing him a LITTLE bit! Apart from that, I'm a law abiding taxpayer!" routine...

On Shewees:
"When my wife discovered what I was giggling at..."
This alone paints a horrifying mental image of the Littlejohn household.

On wheelie-bins:
"We pay them to take the rubbish away once a week. They make us work for them... The fabric of society is breaking down as a result"
Yes. Apparently Broken-Britain is down to wheelie-bins. He said this. Not people stabbing other people for cheap consumer electronics, in a bid to displace their desperation in life (that's by no means all of it, obviously, but I can't help feel it's more to do with society's problems than separating the plastic bottles from the "slops").

These chortles aside, he's a complete bell-end. But I'm not saying anything new or original there :p

Carry on the excellent work, 5CC :)

Anonymous said...

I felt distressed reading your extracts and comments on Littlejohn's novel. I can't imagine what it must have been to read the entire thing. I don't believe the study has yet been done on the physical effects of Littlejohn on the brain, but it might be as well to take care in future.

Antigone said...

Oh. I blogged on Shewees the other day. Now I feel positively sullied :(

In my defense, I was being puerile and childish without an agenda though.