It's three minutes after ten. You're listening to James O'Brien on LBC, and you have to talk about it.

There are moments when interventions in the public space are so vile and so grim and so gross

and potentially so indicative of much deeper and broader malaises that you have to talk about it.

Starving idiots of oxygen are denying attention-seeking superannuated toddlers that the

air of publicity is tempting. It is, of course, attractive. But if you do not call it out, ever,

if you do not dedicate proper attention to proper description, then it continues. I will be surprised if Jeremy Clarkson faces any meaningful

censure for what he did in the Sun newspaper on Saturday. I will be deeply surprised for a number

of reasons. And my, not negligible knowledge of how this industry works, maybe have helped

to people on the outside.

The main reason why I don't think you'll face censure is because it would involve admitting a

mistake and management's hate nothing more than admitting a mistake. If you drop an enormous

clangor, they're much happier to see your contract roll to an undignified end, possibly even

suggest that you stop filing your column a couple of

months before the contract ends. But the actual axe, the falling of the actual guillotine,

is an admission of epic wrongdoing on the part of whoever it was that allowed that column to be

printed or whoever commissioned that column in the first place. When Katie Hopkins wrote her

disgusting column about people trying to cross the English channel, the editorial staff at the sun

were adamant that no one had actually seen it, that it had somehow managed to reach the light

of day unchecked. For what it's worth knowing some of the people involved and some of the processes concerned,

I actually believe them.

But it doesn't matter, does it?

Because they still didn't get rid of her immediately after the column appeared.

...