Bad Press Awards

Mic Wright

Recognising the Worst of the Worst of British Journalism

The Golden Bootlicker for Hack Hagiography Writing

For two weeks in July 1976, the NME carried an advert seeking “hip young gunslingers” to apply for a job at the music paper. It was desperate to find a new crop of writers that could help it move on from its hippy years and connect it to the emerging punk scene.

This summer marks the 50th anniversary of that event – and the two most notorious recruits from that time, Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, are still churning out opinions to order all these years later.

The pair’s marriage made in hell dissolved in the mid-80s, and they went on to prosecute a vicious war of words for years after. That’s why I suspect they’d not be too happy to share an awards nomination or to discover that they essentially wrote the same column at almost the same time.

Nonetheless, Parsons and Burchill are joint nominees for this month’s Golden Bootlicker for Hack Hagiography Writing Award after they outed themselves as members of the Kemi Badenoch Appreciation Society – a small and decidedly un-illustrious organisation to which a seemingly ever-shrinking number of Conservative MPs belong.