A guilty pleasure that sometimes delivers the goods

In liberal circles (with a small ‘L’) and among those of us who regard it as no more than a right-wing/middle class version of the Red-top tabloid British rags, the Daily Mail had a reputation – to adapt Prince Philip’s famous dismissal of the Daily Express – as  ‘a bloody awful newspaper’.

My own views of it are not much different, but I do have to confess that I sometimes buy (and enjoy) it when I am travelling by train into central London purely because it takes approximately 40 minutes to skim through – coincidentally the average length of time of my inward journey – and can usually be relied upon to provide a mixture of the current affairs and gossipy headline stories of the day.

One credit I will give it, however, is that occasionally it delights in exposing the worst excesses and hypocrisies of our politicians, public services, PC-correct warriors and similar, written in an extreme “You just wouldn’t believe it, would you, but …” tone of indignation that adds a certain force to the sometimes genuinely-shocking examples of what it is describing.

Here’s a good example of what I’m referring to, a piece by Jonathan Gornall that appears upon its website today – see here – DAILY MAIL