Johann Hari

This is part of an on-going series exposing the errors, distortions and lies contained in the ‘writings’ of Richard ‘Thickie’ Littlejohn.

Littlejohn declares in today’s excretions in the Sun that “it’s a dull Monday in November and there’s nothing much else about” to cover except Boris Johnson’s extra-marital affair with Petronella Wyatt. Errr, except the assault on Fallujah, the British government’s major new health initiatives, the UN meeting on Darfur… yes, clearly nothing going on in the world except one toff having consensual sex with another.

Having identified the key issue for his readers to know about, Thickie offers them a largely meaningless ramble. He declares that “I couldn’t care less who Boris is knocking off”. Memo to Thickie: don’t tell your readers that you don’t care about the subject you’ve chosen to write about – it’s not exactly gripping.

(Even if you did care about Boris - and I don't - there are far better reasons to condemn him than for shagging around. As editor of the Spectator, he has provided a prestigious platform and a fat salary for 'Taki', the neo-fascist columnist. This isn't hyperbole: he literally supports Jean Marie Le Pen, Jorg Haider and pines for the "heroic" days of Mussolini. He is explictly racist about black people. Littlejohn doesn't mention this; the Spectator is probably a bit too highbrow for him and, besides, his politics are pretty similar to Taki's).

The piece is, as ever, mostly free of facts to check and expose, since it is based on empty conjecture and prejudice. (“It takes two to tumble. Petronella is an intelligent woman blah blah…”) There is of course the usual jeer at poor people – he has a passing jab at “a 17 year-old scrubber from the wrong side of the tracks who thinks getting herself up the duff is the quickest way to jump the housing queue.”

A-ha! Could this be that most rare of Littlejohn sentences, a fact? He cannot name a single woman in this situation; no journalist (despite decades of scouring by right-wing papers) has ever found a woman following this script. I spend a lot of time with single mums and I have never met one – not one – who has done this. They all find the idea preposterous. Littlejohn – who writes most of his columns from a gated community in Florida – has not, I would wager, even visited a council estate in decades. He is – as ever – circulating an empty urban myth as truth. It is a myth that allows him, as a multi-millionaire, to espouse a fake populism that makes his readers feel they are being cheated out of their tax money not by billionaires but by people even poorer than them.

If his readers want an example of somebody who is genuinely cheating them out of their taxes – a real, flesh-and-blood person, rather than a figment of Littejohn’s imagination – they need look no further than Rupert Murdoch. Despite earnings exceeding $1bn in Britain, Murdoch has paid almost no taxation at all over the past decade. So why does Littlejohn not name the real scroungers, the corporate billionaires scamming hefty sums of money from the British exchequer? Could it be because they have made him a very rich man in exchange for shifting public anger onto the poor and the desperate with his lame gags and hate-filled rhetoric?

But skip his dishonest and meaningless passage about single mums – and the incoherent rantings about Boris - and – ta-da – we get to Littlejohn’s blatant lie of the week, his weekly distortion. While arguing that we should be as critical of Petronella as we are of Boris, he declares, “This is the twenty-first century. Women burned their bras and went on the pill over 30 years ago. We live in an age of equal pay and equal opportunity.”

Hello? Does he even know the most elementary figures or research on this? There is a consenus amongst everybody who studies this issue that equal pay has not been achieved in Britain. Even Ferdinand Mount – who was head of the Downing Street Policy Unit under the Tories – admit this is “obvious.”

As Polly Toynbee – a distinguished expert on this subject who actually talks about those old-fashioned things, facts – explains, “The most oft quoted fact about [gender] inequality and the pay gap is that, on average, women working full-time get 18% less than men. But that does not begin to reflect the true status of women. The most shocking fact is that 43% of all working women are earning less than £5 an hour. Half of all women in full-time jobs, and 80% of those in part-time work, are earning well below the Council of Europe's decency threshold of £6.31 an hour. For most of the women who have flooded back into the labour market in the past 30 years, work is not a sign of "liberation" - but of abject drudgery for sub-survivable wages… When the Equal Pay Act came in 30 years ago, the hope was that women would quickly move into higher paid men's work, but job segregation is as rigid as ever.”

You couldn’t make it up? Littlejohn does. Every week.