Petite Anglaise author quits blogging for fear of ending up like Liz Jones

Never let it be said that Liz Jones is a washed up old crone with no influence over anyone or anything outside of her Exmoor menagerie of broken animals.

The vapid ex-editor of Marie Claire is inspiring a new generation of authors to give up writing for fear of ending up like her, stuck in a bitter void of self-destructive narcissism with no-one but horses for friends.

Catherine Sanderson, author of the 'Petite Anglaise' blog which earned her a £450,000 contract with Penguin in 2008, has announced that she will no longer be blogging after recoiling in horror at the thought of becoming a tell-all confessional writer like the brain meltingly irritating Daily Mail columnist.

Catherine said in a farewell web-blog post:

I read an article a month or so ago about Liz Jones, a newspaper columnist who has made a living out of sharing every aspect of her personal life, showing little or no regard for the feelings or right to privacy of the partners/lovers/neighbours that she uses for material. It left a nasty taste in my mouth. Personal blogging was something I felt the need to do during a short, pivotal period of my life but, as I hope I demonstrated in my memoir, I realised, with hindsight, that particular path was strewn with landmines. I learnt some valuable lessons from the experience and will always be grateful for the doors which opened as a result.

But now I’ve moved on.

Mail hack Peter Allen, who was responsible for unmasking 'Petite Anglaise' and getting her fired from her job in 2006, rounded off his attemped hatchet job on Sanderson's career with a misquoted and factually inaccurate article describing her decision to quit blogging.

Allen, trying desperately to sound as though he knew what he was talking about, added sagely:

Despite their massive popularity, blogs are notoriously difficult to make any money out of, and consequently have an amateur image which some professional writers can feel uncomfortable with.

A blogger said: 'Shut up Peter Allen you absolute twunt.'

The Blaney Mail

The Quail prefers not to stray too often from the dead tree press; all the news one could ever need can be found in the print copies of The Mail, Express, Sun, Star and News of the World, all for low, low prices, and only a day or so behind confusing online news sources.

Besides, it is widely accepted that the "Internet" is nothing but lies and piffle, while the "Blog-o-sphere" is riddled with sleaze and petty bickering.

Occasionally, though, some shining example of internetular topical opinion particularly catches our eye and we feel dutiful to briefly relay our discoveries. Having eked every last drip of incisive current affairs coverage and fine idiotorial from Saturday's Mail and "logged on" to the internets in search of more, we were excited to happen across the splendid work of an author working under the pseudonym "Donal Blaney".

The issue of "racial profiling" has received much attention in the former British colony of Virginia recently, with pundits from both sides of the country's political spectrum conclusively declaring it A Bad Thing. Even the looniest of American right-wing WalMart nuts seem to agree that current police practice of arresting people simply on the grounds that their skin contains more melanin than most is, at best, a haphazard method of preventing crime.

Blaney, though, is a bold man. Recognising that the criticism of "racial profiling" stems only from that ubiquitous beast, political correctnessgonemad, the idealistic young lawyer [sic] busts the debate open like an angry Bruce Banner in an ill-fitting sweater, concluding that, actually, we should encourage greater reliance on the authoritarian profiling of people by race.

Using a gripping tale of waiting in a queue at a Washington airport to show how both British and American security measures are in fact an act of terrorism, Blaney ruminates:

It is an unpalatable fact but in the way that people are treated at airports, we are doing the terrorists' bidding for them.

Plaintively, he asks: 'Why must we be delayed and demeaned like this?'

Why indeed, Donal. What right thinking person would not tolerate a few more buildings crumbling after a targeted collision with a 747 or the odd exploding shoe, if it ensured smooth and speedy passage through Heathrow?

Not one to complain without positing a solution, however, Mr Blaney continues:

Just as when the police look for a knife or gun wielding maniac in South London they don't focus their enquiries on muslims, Jews or whites, and just as when they look for City fraudsters their suspicions focus rightly on white middle class yuppies rather than black women, shouldn't the fact that each and every one of the psychopaths who killed thousands on 9/11 (and, indeed, who killed dozens on 7/7) was a jihadist?

Behind the tortured grammar and absent syntax lies an undeniable truth: all terrorists look the same. The beards, the shoes, the turbans [do they wear turbans? Ah well, we all know what you mean -ed.], all tell-tale signs of the Islamist terror monger. And yes, the police officers of South London are entirely right to exclude suspects from investigations based only upon the colour of their skin, clothing, or ethnicity.

For the love of Yahweh, why won't those airport security jobsworths just stop and search brown people, and allow us whites to go about our business without fear of suspicion? Who ever heard of a caucasion terrorist for heaven's sake?

So what is this 'blogosphere' thing anyway? An analysis of blogging as seen by mainstream media

Readers from the real world may have been perplexed by the attention given to the so-called 'blogosphere' this past weekend, and left wondering why they should care about it.

The short answer is they shouldn't.

The British blogosphere is comprised entirely of frustrated writers bitter about their inability to land jobs at real newspapers, sitting in their mother's basement, stabbing endlessly away at their computer keyboards in the middle of the night writing cretinous, infantile forums of abuse dressed up as argument in the hope that people will read their inconsequential, misinformed diatribe.

Such hopes are miguided and futile. People don't care what these vicious, nihilistic bloggers have to say because all the news and comment worth reading is already published by the mainstream national press. Granted, print journalism is usually several days behind the blogs, and presents an often strangled version of reality, but, ultimately, it is written by real journalists unfettered by the mindless intricacies of the internet - a dying medium if ever there was one. These are the people to trust, not square-eyed internet zombies removed from reality by their 'modems' and 'processors'.

A recent example of this growing dichotomy of reportage between the real newspapers and the blogs is the fine work done by the Evening Standard - the Daily Mail's London edition - which exclusively broke the news that brave police officers tending Ian Tomlinson in the moments before his death had been bombarded with bricks by evil anti-capitalist demonstrators at the G20 protests. It is telling that not a single blog noted this critically important event - presumably because many of the bloggers themselves are evil anti-capitalists desperate to cover up the vile behaviour of their comrades.

Indeed, those who live online are destined to die online, and if you delve deep enough into the 'blogosphere' you find a world that’s very happy to be separated from the real one. So divorced is this new breed of citizen journalist from reality that they even consider Twitter - the boring website beloved of celebrities who want to tell the world what kind of muffin they're eating - to be a useful tool for reporting news and monitoring 'buzz' around particular current affairs. How absurd!

It is around this ridiculous, irrelevant mire of online tittle-tattle and rumour that the events of this Easter weekend spun.

Ironically, the now-defunct, directionless British blogosphere was invented by leading conservative pundit Iain Dale in 1984. His website, Iain Dale's Little Black Book of Westminster was an immediate success and continues to attract nearly 12 billion absolute unique visits every month. It has been hailed as 'compelling and entertaining' by Piers Morgan but it is noteworthy that Dale has attempted to distance himself from the murky waters of the blogosphere through frequent appearances in national newspapers and on television. It is precisely because of his detachment from the reality of blogging that he has been shortlisted for the prestigeous Orwell Prize for blogging.

But it is testament to how low the blogosphere has sunk that Dale was barely involved in the weekend's scandal, despite repeated shouts of 'I want to play!'. Instead, it was former Labour spin-doctor Derek 'Dolly' Draper whose blog, LabourList, caters for 60 million people, at the centre of attention for illiciting those fateful emails from his Number 10 pal, Damian McBride.



However, if it hadn't been for crusading, swivel eyed, right-wing, sleaze-wallowing blogger Guido Fawkes, Draper's foul attempts to smear the Tories would never have come to light and bored the British public to tears in the first place. Fawkes - real name Paul 'Pee' Stains - rose to prominance in 2004 after being declared bankrupt and deciding the best way to claw his way from financial hell was to start a blog. It is still a mystery how this questionable strategy succeeded.

This trinity of bloggers - it is illustrative to think of them in terms of the father, the illegitimate son and the greasy ghost - are followed by a bewildering multitude of smaller, less important internet scribblers who, collectively, form the wider blogosphere. Dale and Stains count amongst their brethren such wits as Donal Blaney, scourge of 20 something Labour candidates, such thinkers as Dizzy, a computer programmer with a taste for pornography, and Letters from a Tory, a man who supports capital punishment for those who smell of alcohol and look at policemen a bit funny.

On the left, the list is even more depressing. Behind the fecal point known chillingly as 'The Liberal Conspiracy', sit a gaggle of naysayers and angry old men determined to destroy the few remaining whisps of tradition and middle-class pride this country clings to. Tim Ireland of The Bloggerhead pursues a ceaseless, brutal agenda against The One True blogger in almost every issue of his online magazine and even dares question the veracity of the national press in using deluded fantasists as authoritive sources. Vicious nihilists such as the unpalatably named Chicken Yoghurt, meanwhile, appear to support no particular brand of British politics, instead criticising the actions of the Tory and Labour parties in a fence-sittingly un-partisan kind of way. Suspiciously foreign sounding bloggers like Hopi Sen peddle the type of meandering lefty drivel that attacks everything but never proposes any decisive, committed plan of action or solution to anything.

For more excrutiating examples from the left-wing piffle-osphere, see the links to the left.

It is plain to see that the interminable fountain of drivel pouring forth from these 'writers' only serves to create a chaotic, screeching, somewhat sticky sphere of blogs, hopelessly inadequate compared to the panoply of well written, increasingly successful national newspapers.

The events of the Easter weekend have led to some discussion of a rebirth of blogging amongst some left-wing commentators. Only in the self-aggrandising world of online punditry could such heretical Messiah-aping be tolerated. Surely it is time for the bloggers to scurry back underneath their moss covered rocks and give up; surely, if Derek Draper has taught anyone anything, it is that blogging is a silly, puerile nonsense to be ignored by anyone with a shred of common sense.