Hanging up his swear-boots...

I’m actually quite upset by this.  The Devil’s Kitchen was one of the reasons I started blogging, and has been on the ‘must-read’ list ever since.  The style was never mine, but it was definitely his, and hearing that it has been brilloed from existence is a shock, and a shame.  Chris has always been a swearblogger.  There’s is an art in this – really good swearing requires a joy in language.  Most people don’t have this, and most swearing is a cheerless, tiresome repetition of fucks as a result.  Proper, inventive obscene invective is a rarity, and worthwhile in it’s own right – even if it involves stylised executions of leading politicians. 

But, and there is always a but round about here, it would be a hard style to pull off as leader of a political party.  David Cameron got in enough trouble for saying that too many tweets make a twat, even though he was obviously correct.  Christ, there was even a kerfuffle when he said ‘pissed’ in a party conference speech.  Equally, for all that we know that Gordon Brown is a persistent but tiresomely unimaginative swearer behind closed doors, eyebrows would be raised if his first answer at the debate tonight was to tell Cameron to fuck off, jumped-up little cock that he is.

After their exposes on celebrities’ affairs and on MPs’ expenses, there is surely no area more hypocritical for journalists to go on than other peoples’ bad language.  Newsrooms of the print and broadcast media are notorious for this – you wouldn’t hear such language from a docker (“Ah, you would Ted.  They use terrible language”).  But there we are, expecting honesty and integrity from journalists is a bit of a waste of time.  And it’s pretty obvious what Andrew Neil will have been told about Chris before the interview – LPUK is a new political party with very few members, and its leader writes a blog that calls people cunts.  That will probably have been the extent of the briefing, with a couple of print-outs of DK’s juicier postings thrown in for good measure.  No real surprise that the interview followed the course that it did.

No real surprise either that the DK has taken a new direction.  You can either be an anonymous swearblogger or a leader of political party, not both.  Either way, a little piece of my personal internet history just died.  But chin up, Chris and best of luck, though if you get interviewed by Neil again, the best thing to do would be to stand up and pull off his wig.