Author Sarah Tucker shares her thoughts on the reaction to the death of Margaret Thatcher
I can’t really remember much about when Maggie Thatcher was in power. I know my parents were full of praise for her because our country was almost third world when she became PM, strikes crippling industries, rubbish being left on the streets and she broke the unions – something that was thought impossible. She stood up to them and it took a lot of courage to do so.
Her Evening Standard editor father was known as “Chilly Charlie” and she’s become “Nuclear Wintour”. This New York based Brit states that she’s “lost count” of the number of times she’s been attacked by activists and once retaliated by sending anti-fur campaigners a plate of roast beef when they picketed her Condé Nast offices. In her youth, Wintour went to parties with the Daily Mail’s Nigel Dempster, dated older men and set her stall out clearly in the remark: “You either know fashion, or you don’t”. Now, this divorced trendsetter has morphed into a grande dame and hidden behind her sunglasses and a pageboy bob, this powerhouse of fashion truly does deserve the title: “Unofficial Mayoress of New York”. The Devil Wears Prada may have indeed been based on her, but the reality is far more salacious.
This singer-songwriter grew up in rural Devon but has become a “word-of-mouth” star and a “one-man One Direction”. This whisky loving Englishman cites his influences as Van Morison, Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel and won both BRIT Awards he was nominated for in 2013. He states that he “doesn’t really believe in fame” and nor is he into fashion either: “If I tried to be fashionable I’d look like a twat”. We like his style.
The Steeple Times asks journalist and author Jessica Fellowes: “What’s on your mantelpiece?”
The Steeple Times shares “wit and wisdom”. What’s your guiding force?
To learn from history – in all senses of the word – but listen to the needs of the present.
“Don’t get even, get medieval” is, in our humble opinion, a great motto. What’s yours?
“No man lives by bread alone – he needs his bit of crumpet”.
Our thoughts on the £10.8 million payout to Rebekah Brooks
Rebekah Brooks is a lady who is variously described as looking like Lady Macbeth and Merida, the animated hero of Pixar’s Brave.
Brooks is of working class extraction but rose to find herself in the company of the likes of Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Matthew Freud and Jeremy Clarkson. At her peak she was the editor of one of the biggest newspapers in the country and had David Cameron on speed dial. This chameleon like lady’s rise was meteoric but her fall was just as dramatic.
This week, Brooks has been attacked over the £10.852 million payoff she received from News Corporation. We don’t see what all the fuss is about. She is not the only villain in the scandal of phone hacking. It is wrong to singlehandedly blame her and turning her into the sole scapegoat of the piece is just a malicious distraction. We’d much rather see Piers Morgan and Alan Rusbridger were brought to book.
The Steeple Times asks the journalist and equestrian expert Victoria Spicer: “What’s on your mantelpiece?”
The Steeple Times shares “wit and wisdom.” What’s your guiding force?
Sat nav, usually.
“Don’t get even, get medieval” is, in our humble opinion, a great motto. What’s yours?
I’m stealing my motto from someone else – “Don’t gamble with what you can’t afford to lose.” Wise words, and not just applicable to my fairly lamentable betting technique.
Kerry Katona was considered unacceptable in 2007. Who or what is unacceptable in 2012?
Animal suit onesies.
Tony Blair misses being Prime Minister. What do you miss most in your life?
I’m in the process of moving to the Surrey countryside so I dare say I’ll miss London, easy commutes, a plethora of restaurants, twice weekly trips to the cinema and the Canary Wharf skyline.
What might you swap all your wealth for?
I’d gladly swap my wealth for somebody else’s. I doubt they’d be delighted with the deal though.
Donald Trump was once a case of: “If you owe the bank a thousand, they close you down; but if you owe the bank a billion, you own the bank.” What’s your view on the banking crisis?
I blame Kerry Katona.
What phrase or word do you most loathe?
“At the end of the day.” Ghastly.
In the UK, some people consider charity to “begin at home.” What’s your view and what causes do you personally support?
I ran the London Marathon in 2008 in aid of World Horse Welfare so that’s a biggie.
The judge in “Law Abiding Citizen” states: “I can pretty do whatever I want” before being blown up whilst answering her mobile phone. What’s your view on the appropriate use of such devices?
As my friends will tell you, I never look at my phone, and I certainly don’t pounce on it the second I see that little red flashing light.
If you could fill a carriage on The Orient Express, who would be your fellow passengers?
Scotland’s rugby team, Andy Murray, Daniel Craig, Elbow, Ross Noble, Ryan Gosling, and a handful of my closest female friends to redress the balance.
If you were unfortunate enough to end up on death row, what would be your last meal and where would you eat it?
Fillet steak, on the run.
What time is it acceptable to consume the first drink of the day?
12.01.
A Negroni, a martini or a cup of tea?
Can’t I have a cold glass of Pinot Grigio instead?
Whose parties do you enjoy the most and why?
The post-show parties during Olympia Horse Show are usually pretty memorable.
Who is the most positive person you know?
Not sure I know many – or if they start off positive, I soon drag them back down to earth with a healthy dose of cynicism.
What’s your most guilty pleasure?
Made in Chelsea.
If a tattoo were to sum you up, what would it be of?
Snow Fairy. Class mare. Unfortunately for her, I can’t stand pain and have no desire to get a tattoo.
If you were a car, what marque would you be?
I’m quite like my own car – an MX5. Looks like it could be fun to drive but is actually rubbish at getting up hills and handles terribly. Plus it’s either boiling hot or freezing cold, never in between.
Cilla Black presented “Surprise, Surprise.” Tell us the most surprising thing about you.
I’m related to Cilla Black… And I’m a compulsive liar.
What’s currently sitting on your mantelpiece?
I’m about to move house so I currently have no mantelpiece – but I’m working on it.
Victoria Spicer is a freelance journalist. She is also press officer for the All England Jumping Course at Hickstead and web editor for Horse & Country TV.
View Victoria Spicer’s website at: http://www.victoriaspicer.co.uk
This mouthpiece was born in Rettendon, Essex in 1958 and vents bile on all manner of subjects. Articles such as: “Why don’t more women moan like me?” and “Liz Jones’ baby craving drove her to steal husband’s sperm in ultimate deception” are frankly illustrative of why she’s so unpopular. After she got banned from the majority of fashion shows and her husband left her, she quit London for Somerset in 2007 to feed organic muesli to the rats in the barns of a 47-acre farm she purchased as her “rural idyll.” That misadventure came to a sticky end in November 2012 after she’d alienated the whole county by calling them, amongst other things, “smelly” and “faintly Amish.” Goodness knows whom she’ll choose to offend next. Phillip Schofield sums her up best: “She is inconsistent, bitter, nasty and unhinged.” Our advice: Just steer well clear of this acid tongued poison pen.
A George Orwell quotation sums up the current media firestorm perfectly
We at The Steeple Times thought this image of a lady holding up a piece of cardboard summed up the events of the weekend perfectly.
As a debate rages about the future of the BBC and the role of social media in the “outing” of personalities in connection to alleged stories of abuse, the words of George Orwell ring utterly true:
“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”
For this simple reason, we make it our picture of the week. This scandal should not be brushed under the carpet.
Matthew Steeples examines the truth behind Liz Jones giving up on her “rural idyll”
The Mail’s Liz Jones is a waspish woman who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Those who’ve paid even a moment’s attention to her bleating, will be familiar with lines such as: “Last week, my brand new £1,300 MacBook Pro broke” and “Phil Spencer wanted his £46,000 and he wanted it now!” She never stops talking about money and the size of what she both owns and owes.
In today’s Femail, Jones bores on about about how she feels “like a cross-dresser” trying out the Kardashian Kollection of clothing in a pointed attack on Kim Kardashian, but it was for her diatribe yesterday that she truly got the goat of the nation in “[bidding] a ferocious farewell” to life in the country in an article entitled “Goodbye… and good riddance!” 2,151 people have commented so far and most of them have been far from sympathetic.
When Upcott Farm at Brushford, near Dulverton in Somerset came up for sale in 2007 at a price of £1.6 million, it featured in an article by The Telegraph’s Caroline McGhie. The 5-bedroomed farmhouse came with a 2-bedroom annexe, a courtyard of barns and stables and 47 acres of land. McGhie waxed lyrical about the merits of moving to this location: “People come here for the peace and quiet, the night skies, the dramatic coastline, and they work from home,” she stated before adding: “You can find everything here, including butchers, bakers, afternoon tea and cake, fish and chips, an art gallery and a shop selling fishing tackle.” Of Upcott Farm itself, she concluded:
“This would suit a member of the new wave of buyers dubbed Droppies (Disillusioned Relatively Ordinary Professionals Preferring Independent Employment Situations).”
McGhie got it half right: Upcott Farm sold to someone who considers herself far from “relatively ordinary” and someone who is far from “professional.” The purchaser, however, was certainly someone who’d become “disillusioned” with what she’d bought and someone whose desire to be “independent” and create a “situation” just alienated all she encountered. The buyer, you’ve guessed it, was none other than Elizabeth Ann Jones.
Jones was born in Brentwood, Essex in 1958 and studied journalism at the London College of Printing. She became editor of Marie Claire in 1999 but was sacked, she herself suggests, for “listing in the magazine the freebies she had been offered in the previous month.” Here, it seems, began Jones’s obsession with all things material and here she also met an Indian BBC radio journalist named Nirpal Dhaliwal in 2000.
Jones married Dhaliwal but the union was to prove an “utter disaster” as he had affairs with women she terms “younger, dimmer [and] slimmer.” “I’m no racist” Jones was divorced in 2007 and said goodbye to her “3,000 square foot of Islington real estate” and “easy, if super-busy, London life” in favour of the green, green grass of Somerset.
Whoever’s side you see it from, five years of hell followed. Jones baited the locals and they grew to loathe her. She wrote columns and a book, The Exmoor Files, where she attacked them as “faintly Amish… feral, old and smelly” and another hack and neighbour, Jane Alexander of The Telegraph, responded: “Dulverton [was] positively fizzing with fury” after each and every publication.
Of the local restaurants, Jones stated:
“I have given up trying to eat out in restaurants here on Exmoor… It is still stuck in the Seventies, with only things in baskets and rum babas on the menu… If you tell the waiter you are vegetarian, you are stared at, incredulously, as if you are black.”
She whinged about her inability to find love:
”I will never, ever meet a man here in the middle of a moor, where even to be in possession of your own teeth is a bonus.”
And whined about fieldsports:
“I didn’t increase my popularity by being unable to pass a party of men and often children with guns, shooting rabbits and deer, without getting out of my BMW and saying: ‘Do you really have nothing better to do with your Saturday morning?’ The look of shock on their faces that I had the cheek to challenge them was priceless. I would stop, too, and shout at huntsmen on horses, galloping on tarmaced roads, one hand on the reins, the other clamping a mobile phone to their heads. ‘You will ruin your horses’ tendons!’ I would wail.”
Whilst Jones found little to like in her new community, they found nothing positive in her arrival either. Her dog was blamed for worrying lambs, and Jones’s inability to control it, locals say, was an indicator of the chasm between her life and theirs. In 2009, one neighbour went as far as to tell Danny Brierley of The Independent:
“We have got nothing in common with her, really. I think she may find it difficult to make any kind of life here now. She is not a very friendly person and we are all sick to death of talking about Liz Jones. A hatred has been building up for months. She is actually having a go at people and they are not going to tolerate that. She has feelings like all people, of course she has. But everyone wants her to leave and leave now. No one can make her, but we think she will go. I don’t see how you can live in such a small community with people who think that way about you.”
Matters came to a head when Jones’s precious black BMW convertible, “bought in 2005 for £26,000,” was pelted with eggs and teenagers fired shots at her letterbox with an air rifle. A local councilor even dressed up as her in the local carnival and yesterday Jones took revenge on those she blames for her “five-year prison sentence” and deprivation from Space NK, Cath Kidston and Illy coffee.
Instead, the article just shows the true reality of this bombastic harpy. The lines Jones penned speak for themselves. Country people don’t welcome someone who planned to “hack for miles across the open moorland in my Prada jodhpurs” anymore than the folk of Knightsbridge welcome Arabs treating their roads like racetracks. The gardener who had to endure Jones yelling “walk faster!” at him didn’t deserve such anymore than a bus driver in SW11 deserves abuse from his passengers. Jones concludes:
“I’m now a different person. I became so lonely. I would often get in my car, not just for the warmth, but for the kind voice of the satnav lady. I’ve learned that an amazing view and a pair of nesting grey herons are not enough to make me happy.”
Miss Jones bleats that she’s taken a £500,000 loss on Upcott Farm, which languished on the market at first at £1,900,000 and then £1,750,000 for three years. The “unexpected” sale of the property has given her the ability to “flee back to the city” but the locals and even the “Droopies” should be warned: there’s still 27 acres of the farm unsold and on the market at a price of £200,000. Halloween may have passed but the battleaxe in the Beemer could still call again.
Read yesterday’s “Goodbye… and good riddance!” article by Liz Jones for the Mail on Sunday at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2231033/Goodbye–good-riddance-During-catastrophic-years-country-Liz-Jones-greeted-gun-attack-relentless-abuse-Now-flees-city-bids-ferocious-farewell.html
To purchase Liz Jones’s book, The Exmoor Diaries, go to: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Exmoor-Files-Husband-Found-Rural/dp/0297854437
For more information about the remaining 27 acres at Upcott Farm, contact Strutt & Parker on +44 (0) 1392 976005 or go to: http://www.primelocation.com/for-sale/details/18314693?search_identifier=71cbb8a2fb43a12182bfa7b79b5de0a3
