Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Benneton-shroud of faux-progress. The ludicrous
irritancy of pontificating film stars. The moral, hypocritical
black hole of most journalism. The spineless
and simpering betrayal of New Labour and the ‘post
feminists’ (offering to remove their clitoris and voting
rights if they found the new era of relative equality
so awful.) She’d left most of her pro-Thatcher phase
behind by the time she’d gone to the Graun; this was a
brutal patriot-Commie bruiser. I found myself punching
the air in agreement (metaphorically of course, I
am a Graun reader after all), overjoyed that she’d hit
the nail on the head with far greater accuracy than her
more measured colleagues.
Of course I still strongly disagreed with vast
amounts of what she said; the death penalty, Israel,
Ireland, invading Iraq, paedophiles and the talent of
Gareth Gates springing most immediately to mind.
But even then my perceptions were challenged and
above all I was entertained. She could even ignorantly
defame my idols George Orwell and Mike Leigh
and I’d still lap it up. When she went into perversity
overdrive, calling for public hanging, and claiming
suicides should buck their bloody ideas up I just found
the middle-class outrage of those taking the bait on
the letters pages hilarious (bringing to mind one of her
classic put-downs “now, before you get out your pink
Forever Friends notepaper.”).
Basically, violently agreeing with about 40% of what
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and
she said and reeling at the rest was a damn sight more
edifying than vaguely nodding at 60% of what Polly
Toynbee puts out. I don’t read her Times columns,
and by all accounts she’s gone into manic pro-war,
extreme Zionist overdrive now, which even I might
find too much. But when I hear about her typically
savage dissection of the loathsome neo-snobbery of
those sniffing at “chavs” I still think “that’s my Julie!”
with a warm glow.
When it comes to her books though, even a fan such
as myself remains a sceptic. There was no way I was
going to read her hagiographies of Princess Di and
Beckham, no matter what clever class-conscious leaps
she was doing to laud her unworthy heroes.
And the fiction? I once read a chapter of Ambition
and found it pretty awful, an unconvincing English
take on Dallas and Dynasty, neither of which I liked in
the first place. I actually picked up Sugar Rush, Julie’s
lesbian-driven “first novel aimed at a teenage audience”
as a kind of aversion therapy. This is a woman who
now claims to support George Bush for God’s sake. I
needed to quell my ongoing crush for her perversity.
Surely this rubbish would put me off for good?
Sugar Rush tells the tale of 15-year-old Kim, a
middle-class girl at a private school, who is forced
into the nearby rough-as-shite comprehensive due to
the financial hardship of her stuffy dad who’s been left
holding the kids by her feckless mother, herself still
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