Bad Press Awards

Mic Wright

Recognising the Worst of the Worst of British Journalism

The Inflatable Boxing Glove
for Performative Anger

If newspaper columnists got as intensely and frequently angry in their everyday lives as they pretend to in print, the prison cells of Britain would be stuffed with them.

The current backlog in courts would be even worse as a queue of querulous professional opinion-havers would wait to be sentenced for smashing up their local café after hearing someone mention pronouns or kicking in the windows of an electrical store after catching a glimpse of Greta Thunberg on a bank of display TVs.

Finding examples of columnists being performatively pissed off is easy – it happens every day of the week. Sometimes, though, the act is so fundamentally silly it deserves special attention and scorn.

William Sitwell is a Daily Telegraph columnist who had to resign as the editor of Waitrose Food magazine in 2018 after he responded to a pitch from a vegan freelancer with an email that read: “Thanks for this. How about a series on killing vegans, one by one? Ways to trap them? How to interrogate them properly? Expose their hypocrisy? Force-feed them meat?”