In response to Janice Davis: Marina the potty-mouthed toff, PierrePendre wrote:
François Mitterrand, who was an authority on women and bedded enough them to stun the #MeToo adolescents into incredulous silence, wrote that la petite quarantaine was a golden age for women’s sex appeal and overall attractiveness to the thinking man and I tend to think he was right. So I would defend Marina Hyde from ungallant attacks on her age. The shallow charm of her girlish looks has probably mellowed to a mature perfection that bears out John Updike’s opinion that men do not deserve the beauty and the mercy of women. (The mercy bit might be less applicable in Marina’s case.) Nor should it be held against her that she works for the Guardian. Being well-bred and expensively educated are prerequisites for employment at the conscience of Old Labour whose closest contact with the working class is probably with their taxi drivers. (The cleaners have gone home by the time they get to work.) It’s a characteristic of modern European socialist parties that they are composed almost entirely of graduates from good universities who have expensive, cultivated tastes and still call their elderly parents mummy and daddy. The rough stuff is left to the unions. They might pay lip service to the eternal beacons of Venezuela and Cuba but the purpose of all those cheerfully leftist Marinas, Tessas and Catherines is to make sure that nothing like that happens here. The potty mouths are to provide enough street cred to keep the lower middle classes and proletariat in a state of contented illusion. It’s a small price to pay and we should be grateful to Marina for playing her part.
