Already exhausted by years of vicious online remarks about every aspect of her existence, Fraser described how she had retreated from the world, and was even avoiding socializing in case fellow school mums wrote about it afterwards. And now some unknown foe had spotted her having “a quiet coffee and gelato” with her daughter in the Italian city, and made an acerbic comment about it on the Tattle Life website. Soaking in the bath that night and feeling horribly hunted, she says she reached her “rock bottom”.

Celebrities and influencers have been complaining about Tattle Life’s existence for years, and Fraser’s dramatic new tale of persecution only adds more energy to the growing campaign against it. In February, a group of Labour MPs wrote to Ofcom implying that posts on the site were responsible for the suicide of a 16-year-old girl called Princess Bliss Dickson. Ofcom has since said it is “moving quickly” to examine if there are grounds to take action, while the Information Commission said it is also investigating.

More from this author

Confessions of a grown-up tech addict

By Kathleen Stock

On one hand, then, we have the framing of the famous and semi-famous women who say they have been deeply hurt by Tattle Life: a place of unalloyed evil, seething with inexplicable hatred and contempt. But there are other stories too, and to my mind they complicate matters. One such story is also narrated by Fraser, and it starts well before that fateful night in the bath.

It can be found over on her Instagram account, where she visually depicts a life that appears to be heading towards perfection in an ever-ascending arc. Row after row of artfully composed photographs display her gorgeous existence for the admiration of passers-by. There are morning espressos in Venice, where she seems to spend much of the year; shots of her beautiful children and handsome man; selfie after selfie of her own toned body and immensely photogenic face.

Here is Liz flushed after another marathon; here she is drinking champagne and toasting the camera; here she stands on a mountain peak. Here is a picture of her brunch in Salzburg; here she is in the bath again, muscled legs stretched out glistening before her. The accompanying captions try to convey humility and likableness, and her wish to “make a small difference to some part of the universe”, but the pictures themselves scream success, money, desirability, winning at life.

Viewers are obviously supposed to covet what this woman has, for there would be little point in the laborious display otherwise. What they are not supposed to do, presumably, is imagine Fraser taking a photo of her own legs in the bath: tucking her chin, craning her neck awkwardly back and perching the phone on her chest as she tries to get the angle right, wiping the lens intermittently with a washcloth to stop it getting fogged up. The anonymous posters on Tattle Life imagine all this sort of thing and more, providing a brutally deflating commentary to the curated exhibition that is often as funny as it is biting. Egging each other on, they virtually gather to dissect, mock, speculate, bitch, and generally have a lovely time at Fraser’s expense. And they are particularly scathing about the way she likes to photograph her own legs.

So rather than a simple story of inexplicable internet harassment, what we have is a cautionary tale, featuring a co-dependent relationship between two parties: on the one hand, the influencer whose aim is to evoke a feeling of envy in others, and on the other, groups of anonymous posters who readily oblige. Of course, most influencers will furiously deny the charge, partly because being a thoroughly nice person without any rapacious superego whatsoever is a standard part of the female influencer schtick. Or as one Tattle Life commentator summed up the contradiction, as it manifests in Fraser specifically: she want us to know she is both “#hot and #humble”.

Equally, the anonymous posters on gossip sites will presumably deny they are really envious of the women they criticize. It is easy to pretend these places are just an extension of having a good gossip with friends, but there’s an obvious difference which betrays the spiteful edge. Namely, your targets can read what you are saying; and indeed, many posters on Tattle Life seem positively to want them to. As Fraser says, she is often addressed directly by posters. There is no doubt things can get out of hand in such places, with reputations seriously trashed as a result. Anonymity means tempting disinhibition, and envy doesn’t tend to know when to stop.

Suggested Reading

Meet the man behind Tattle Life

By David Rose

In her article, Fraser says she used investigators to find out the identities of her anonymous trolls, and discovered they were “almost exclusively women, often middle class, educated and mostly in their forties and fifties”, some of whom work “in journalism or in business” and who “post photos of walks in the woods, holidays in pretty European villages, and … charity fun runs”. In other words, they sound very much like her.  A long time before the internet, Aristotle perspicuously noted that “we envy those who are near us in time, place, age, or reputation”. Or as Hesiod put it, more pithily, “beggar is envious of beggar and singer of singer”.

Yet despite her undoubted suffering over the years at the typing fingers of rivalrous mean girls, I can’t get too worked up about Fraser’s plight in the Venetian bathtub. There is an easy enough way to stop anonymous saddos talking about you on the internet, and it involves not being a massive show-off about your life. In contrast, the story of Princess Bliss Dickson —  the teenage child of influencer Sophie-May Dickson, who took her own life in February, allegedly after Tattle Life criticism — is genuinely dark and disturbing.  It really does suggest we urgently need to change the norms governing female social media use — though in a way that has nothing much to do with gossip websites per se.

At the time of her death, Princess Bliss had her own TikTok account where she would pout and grind in a heartbreakingly self-conscious way for the camera, as girls these days often do. But unlike most teenagers, she had already been in the public eye for most of her life. Aged four, she was featured in a 2014 television documentary, getting a spray tan. The show was about mothers — including her own, Sophie-May Dickson — who would painfully tease hair weaves in their tiny daughters’ curls, dress them in elaborate frills and furbelows, and cover them in make-up and glitter. Some comic genius at Channel 5 called the show “Blinging Up Baby”.  Gleeful pieces in the tabloids followed, and a year later the mother also appeared on This Morning to discuss the excessive “pampering” of her two girls. The die seemed to be cast. From then on, Princess Bliss and her sister would be turned into living dolls full-time — and when television ceased to be interested, Sophie-May’s social media accounts would take up the slack.

Reportedly living in supported accommodation at the time of her death, the girl is said to have read critical comments on Tattle Life, both about her mother and herself, before her overdose of prescription medicine. Campaigners are implying that these must have been instrumental in her act. In advance of the release of a coroner’s report, it is hard to see how this connection can be made for sure; not to mention that it flies in the face of all professional advice about avoiding speculation in such cases.

But what we can say, perhaps, is that the role of Tattle Life in the awful saga is somewhat double-edged. Certainly, it was a place where cruel things were being said about the mother at the time, with a few strays caught by her blameless daughters too; and I wonder if posters really think about what it is like for a loyal child of a target to read this stuff. But equally, a lot of outrage was being expressed on the girls’ behalf about the circus-like spectacle being made of their young lives. And in that sentiment, at least, the anonymous posters weren’t wrong. In fact, they were drawing attention to an issue of child safeguarding few others seemed to care about.

Taken together, the Fraser and the Dickson cases demonstrate the unstable role of female gossip in the moral economy, and especially when the internet gets involved.  Sometimes — perhaps even usually — it’s just a cheap way of striking at another person who makes you feel inferior and crap about your life, with criticism and mockery employed as a kind of leveling psychic compensation. But sometimes gossip has a constructive role, a way of expressing collective moral disapproval: of chewing someone’s behavior over from every angle, and saying out loud what they are doing wrong. Tattle Life exemplifies both tendencies vividly, and you can’t lose one without the other.

The campaigners who want to see these sites banned conjure up an improbable world, where you can still have influencers and celebrities posting endless vain selfies and humblebrags to their rapt followers, but suppress the skepticism, envy, and spite of those not similarly entranced. I don’t think that’s possible. Last time I checked, Liz Fraser was still merrily posting about her fire emoji life, and says she is now writing a book about “female-female rivalry”. Meanwhile, Sophie-May Dickson was putting up pictures of  Princess Bliss’s funeral, and seems to have coordinated her outfit with the coffin (still image and video both available for clicks). With such people in the world, I predict the gossips are not going to go away anytime soon. And to be perfectly honest, I’m tempted to join them.

“Helen McDougal” is the suspiciously normie name adopted by the founder and operator of Tattle, a message board that acts as a dark mirror to influencer culture. If the currency of influencer culture is likes, then the currency of Tattle is hate. The users of Tattle follow the objects of their attention every bit as avidly as a fan would — dissecting relationships, speculating about what’s going on behind the camera, and tracking influencers’ movements. The difference is that on Tattle, this is all animated by a fundamental loathing of the people they obsess over. It is the home of anti-fandom, of communities formed in antipathy.

According to Tattle’s own description, it’s a “commentary website on public business social media accounts” that allows “commentary and critiques of people that choose to monetize their personal life as a business and release it into the public domain”, but has a “zero-tolerance policy to any content that is abusive, hateful or harmful”. According to Tattle’s subjects, this is humbug: Tattle is a factory for libel and harassment, and its favorite targets (like its users) are women. Comments like “play dough arse”, “prime example of disordered eating” and “looks like a sofa” are the norm.

Last week, a libel judgment from the High Court in Belfast was published which confirmed the worst about Tattle. Originally issued in 2023, but subject to reporting restrictions until now, the judgment called Tattle “a site which has been set up to facilitate the deliberate infliction of hurt and harm on others. Its very nature is to allow anonymous trashing of people’s reputations and the people facilitating this are making money out of it… This is clearly a case of peddling untruths for profit.”

The couple who had sued Tattle, Neil and Donna Sands, were awarded £300,000 in damages. But perhaps even more gratifyingly, they were now able to reveal the true identity of “Helen McDougal” — not, in fact, an ordinary woman who wanted to blow the whistle on the corruption of influencers, but a man called Sebastian Bond. Bond is an influencer himself, promoting “healthy plant based recipes” under the name Nest and Glow. The next step for the Sands and other Tattle targets will be to identify individual posters and bring them to court in turn. Their ultimate aim would be to shut the site down, either by direct order or simply by making it too expensive to run.

More from this author

Does Olly Murs make you thirsty?

By Sarah Ditum

The layers here are certainly tastier than the cursed slop posing as food that Bond puts up on his Instagram account. The scourge of influencers turns out to be an influencer. The person behind the internet’s fiercest criticisms of fakes and phonies turns out to be a fake and phony of the first order. And the Tattle users, who take great delight in “doxxing” online personalities (that is, finding and releasing personal documents or information), are now anxiously checking their own opsec, fearful of having their cover blown.

Best of all, though, is the gender reveal. How better to cloak yourself in benignity than by pretending to be a woman? “Helen McDougal” gave automatic protection against charges of misogyny — yes, Tattle might be furiously engaged in the character assassination of any female in the public eye, but it was a female-founded site with majority female users! The latter statement is still true (probably), but there’s a different vibe to it now we know they were all acting in a space owned and controlled by a man.

Not that Tattle’s users ought to be surprised by this act of mendacity. One of the busiest topics on the site is “Gender Discussion” — “Where men & women are born, not worn”, as one poster puts it. The idea that a man would adopt a female persona for deceptive purposes should be very familiar to people who think like this. Tattle is one part of the internet that never got the #bekind memo, and as a result it settled, from early on, into a bracingly realist approach on trans issues.

Even though the site was founded only in 2018, it feels like a portal to an older, more anarchic version of the internet than the manicured lawns of the social networks. One of the first things you’ll notice if you look at Tattle is that it’s ugly. That’s not just in terms of its content, but aesthetically: Tattle is a wall of sans serif text. When threads read 1,000 posts, they’re automatically closed and the conversation has to migrate to a new thread. Navigating them requires much patient clicking to find out what people are talking about.

You might assume this is a fault with the site — shouldn’t a message board want to be accessible to the maximum number of potential users? Actually, I think it’s a feature. Tattle’s jankiness means it takes commitment to participate. The friction-free UX of Instagram, X or Bluesky means that anyone can join in; on Tattle, though, you have to learn the rules of engagement before you can be in the club. Membership is also restricted. According to posters on Reddit, it hasn’t been open to new signups for several years.

That makes Tattle a closed world subject to its own mores. Crucially, though, it’s a closed world that’s visible from the outside. If all the posters on Tattle wanted to do was trash-talk influencers, they could do that on WhatsApp: the appeal of Tattle is being able to do it where people, including the people they’re talking about, can see. On Tattle threads, you’ll routinely see a comment that imagines how the subject would feel if they were reading — or even better, relishing the fact that the subject has angrily acknowledged Tattle’s existence elsewhere.

That kind of behavior tells you a lot about Tattle’s complicated relationship to celebrity. “Of course it is a gossip site, so we’re not going to take the moral high ground,” said McDougal/Bond in a Q&A from before his outing. But the truth is that Tattle does consistently take the moral high ground: its justification for its existence is that influencers engage in unethical practices, and this ought to be exposed. And as far as it goes, there’s some truth to this.

Influencers do behave in sketchy ways — not flagging ads, promoting unethical products or lying about results — and neither regulators nor the platforms have the resources or appetite to keep up with this. Beyond the legally dubious, there are influencers who promote dangerous health crazes, who exploit their children or who manifest troubling behaviors that their audiences enable. Users of Tattle might also look at the coverage of their site in places like Mail Online (which called Bond the “king of trolls”) and point out that this is hardly an outlet with clean hands when it comes to publishing nasty commentary.

More from this author

The dirty truth about the OnlyFans economy

By Sarah Ditum

An amateur influencer watchdog could fill a significant gap, if that was what truly Tattle was. Instead, Tattle is a machine for laundering resentment toward people who are good at engagement. “You want attention?” goes the implicit argument of a Tattle post. “Well, here’s some attention that you don’t get to control.” The best revenge of all? It elevates the posters themselves to micro-celebrities in the ecosystem of the site. They get all the pleasure of name-recognition, and all the satisfaction of shaping public opinion, while being able to keep their names safely detached from the lives they want to protect. As gratifying as the unmasking of Bond might be, it hasn’t so far seemed to herald the end of Tattle, or a demise of trolling culture overall.

In his Q&A as McDougal, Bond pointed out that “If Tattle ever did shut down, another site would pop up in seconds to fill the void and several others already exist.” He was telling the truth about that much, even if his entire identity was a fiction. Bitterness, cruelty and a desire to bond against an enemy are powerful human impulses. So is the urge to claw your way into the limelight — even if only pseudonymously, and even if you have to do it at the expense of the people who are already there.

No one cares as fiercely about fame as those who wish they had some of it, which is why it feels inevitable that the person behind Tattle would turn out to be a wannabe food blogger. But no one understands the brutality of fame as well as a hater, which is why it makes sense that Bond protected his privacy so carefully. The heart of Tattle was Bond’s understanding that loathing could bring people together. Now his name is public, Bond can finally become everything he envied and everything he feared.

Hair matters to Suetonius — as it evidently would for his patrician Roman readers in the second century AD. Lives of the Caesars helped to make Julius Caesar history’s best-known exponent of the comb-over, “combing forward the thinning hair from the top of his head”, because advancing baldness “offered his detractors endless material for jokes”. As for the divine Augustus, his successor, Suetonius treats the story that he employed “various stylists simultaneously” while he read as proof that he disdained fancy hairdressing. Really? Vain Otho, in contrast, “wore a hairpiece so skilfully fitted that no one would ever have known he was going bald”.

The fine — or coarse — details of imperial coiffure have not passed into legend to the same degree as some of Suetonius’s other juicy titbits. More renowned are the scenes of the aged Tiberius having his genitals nibbled while swimming with his young male “minnows”; Nero singing (not fiddling) while Rome burned in the fires that he had himself started, or castrating his toyboy Sporus before marrying him “with all the traditional ceremonies (dowry and bridal veil included)”. Less gamey than such chunks of scuttlebutt, Suetonius’s hairpieces typify the way he writes. Intimate data that high-minded historians would scorn help him to build a full-length picture of each imperial figure. An emperor’s barnet sits, or maybe falls, on the visible borderline between personal habit and public image: a revealing site of individual choice but also — as those imperial slapheads ruefully understood — inexorable fate.

The writer who paid so much heed to hair respected testimony from barbers as much as from senators. As Holland notes in his new edition, Suetonius takes care to source all his stories, however outlandish and outrageous they may sound: “The methodology is careful, balanced, nuanced.” Some of the most striking moments arrive when he draws on evidence from his own home and family, citing his soldierly father and other relatives.

More from this author

Thomas Mann predicted the New World Order

By Boyd Tonkin

The Lives of the Caesars spans the 12 rulers of Rome and its empire from the ascent of Julius Caesar (born 100 BC) to the assassination of Domitian in 96 AD. Suetonius probably completed the work in the late 120s, after the Emperor Hadrian had sacked its well-connected author from the job of correspondence secretary. For all its procedural scruples, The Lives nonetheless ranks as one of the first, greatest and most influential fusions of low scandal and high politics in the history of history.

Every breathless “unauthorised” biography of premiers and presidents that currently vies for media and bookstore space aims for the Suetonius touch: what Holland calls an “amalgam of lurid anecdotes” that enriches and extends a full-spectrum account not just of persons and policies, but of a state and a time. As its rocket fuel, or secret spice, this all-round portraiture rests on a targeted deployment of gossip.

Gossip, like the sexual activity it habitually evokes, is everywhere practised and everywhere condemned. Highbrow defences of its means and ends are very hard to find — although Patricia Meyer Spacks, a Yale professor of literature, has elegantly argued for its value. She observes that “for several centuries everyone has gossiped, and everyone has felt ashamed of doing so”. Make that “millennia”. In her 1985 study Gossip, she demonstrates that “few activities so nearly universal have been the object of such sustained and passionate attack”. Spacks warmly champions gossip, in life and in literature, as a “resource for the subordinated” — women above all — and a democratic creator of community: “Gossip emphasises what people hold in common, dwells on frailties, seeks the hidden rather than the manifest.” This charitable, even utopian, vision of gossip as the whispered revenge of the oppressed may fit small-scale traditional communities. Sadly, it hardly suits the partisan campaigns of toxic innuendo now practised by media giants and political enforcers.

Three decades ago, I could, had I so wished, flick past the gossip columns in the paper. Now I visit X to answer a direct message and can’t unsee (just one current example) the ludicrous claim that President Macron is married to a transgender person originally called Jean-Michel Trogneux. In reality, that’s Brigitte Macron’s brother. The siblings sued over this viral fantasy and, last September, won damages of €13,000 against the pair of internet muck-spreaders who began to circulate it in 2021: Amandine Roy and Natacha Rey. Yet algorithmic elves still shovel the manure around as busily as ever. Sought or unsought, hardcore scandal and outright “fake news” now splatter into every screen-facing mind.

The “transgender Brigitte Macron” meme obviously intends to ridicule the president and benefit his enemies. It harks back to the distinctly similar weaponizing of rumor — sexual and financial — via popular prints in the decades before the French Revolution. Think of Marie Antoinette: one of history’s most gossiped-against figures, by repute an adulterous lesbian spendthrift cheat responsible for ruining her nation; in reality a blundering naif guilty of almost none of the crimes and misdemeanors attached to her name. (The apocryphal “Let them eat cake” — Qu’ils mangent de la brioche — is attributed to a fictional princess in Rousseau’s Confessions, written in 1769.)

Gossip about the great always serves sectional interests. In Marie Antoinette’s case, it became an armor-piercing weapon of revolutionary war. For all his zest, bite and wit, Suetonius also spreads tales initially devised to favor one senatorial faction or another. And he plays on the same drives — curiosity, prurience, envy, schadenfreude — as his mass-media heirs. His enlistment of scurrilous anecdotes cuts imperial titans down to human size. He conjures up a community of readers in the know, united by what Spacks calls “the glamour and the power of secret knowledge”. Have you heard that a posh young blade called Valerius Catullus “boasted loudly” about screwing Gaius Caligula “as though he were a slave”, and of being “left exhausted by the demands he made in bed”? Well, you have now. Pass it on…

That frisson of complicity — half-exciting, half-demeaning — persists across the ages from the pages of The Lives to the latest squirt of online bile. And gossip, as Suetonius knew, contributes not just to the matter of history, but the making of history. Take the (reputed) sexual adventures of young Julius Caesar.

Ancient Rome, as everyone surely knows by now, had no concept of “homosexuality”. It did expect that high-status males should take their chosen pleasures actively. Top boys had to be, well, top boys. Right at the start of The Lives, we learn that Julius Caesar “was rumored” to have submitted to King Nicomedes of Bithynia’s sexual advances. This early surrender of power haunted Caesar as “a lingering scandal, and one serious enough to provide material for endless taunts”. In a droll paragraph, Suetonius primly asserts he “will not dwell” on tittle-tattle about the divine Julius as “queen of Bithynia”. Then of course he does exactly that, right down to the legionaries’ marching songs: “Caesar bent Gaul to his will; Nicomedes bent Caesar”, etc.

Yet Suetonius’s examples blend ridicule and affection. The soldiers evidently didn’t mind seeing their revolutionary dictator taken down a bit. That “lingering scandal” may have won as well as lost votes. Besides, what happens in Asia… Suetonius, a pioneer practitioner of gossip as history, also explores the ambiguous force of gossip in history.

Suetonius has a well-merited name for memorable vignettes of atrocities and debaucheries. However, much of his most piquant hearsay simply underlines the sheer fragility of the attempt to control Rome’s domains via the frail figure of a single princeps. Tortures and fornications aside, Suetonius’s cameos of hidden lives frequently arouse not loathing but compassion: as in his sketch of the always-chilly Augustus, muffled up against the winter cold with “four tunics, a thick toga, an undershirt, a woolen vest, and strips of cloth wrapped around his thighs and shins”. The sort of gossip transmitted here illuminates the vulnerability not only of a princeps but of the system he fronted. In this instance, malice and resentment — presumed to be gossip’s default setting — give way to something nearer sympathy.

Suggested reading

Why America is haunted by Ancient Rome

By Tom Holland

Gossip, in Suetonius’s hands, can turn a man into a monster, as when Nero kills his wife Poppaea by “kicking her in the stomach when she was pregnant and sick, after she had scolded him for coming home late from the chariot races”. As so often in The Lives, it’s that final clinching detail that pushes what might count as hostile spin from political foes into an unforgettably plausible vignette. Yet it can also humanize and complicate the princeps, especially when rival rumors push in contrary directions.

Holland believes that the perplexing contradictions of imperial portraiture of The Lives may stem from Suetonius’s dependence on both friendly and hostile sources for a single narrative. Whether the cause, this cross-grained gossip makes the man in full appear. The deep ambivalence towards “laughing stock”-turned-conqueror Claudius planted the seed of Graves’s peerless novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God. In Suetonius, what lingers are not the “cruel and bloodthirsty” stunts of Claudius or his “paranoid sense of suspicion” but backstairs memories of the family fool: the hapless scapegoat who had to make “an entire tour of the dining room” before someone would grudgingly find space, before being pelted with olive and date stones and lashed by some toff “with a rod or whip” — “just for the banter”.

Or look at Otho, one of the short-lived rulers of 69 AD, the “year of the four emperors”. Predictably, Suetonius tells us that Otho and Nero had been “in the habit of abusing each other sexually”, and that the former ran around the streets at night, picking fights with the “puny or drunk”. Later, however, he mentions that his father fought with Otho and found him a brave and decent commander with a “horror of civil war”. Confronted with one soldier’s self-sacrifice, Otho said that “I will no longer risk the lives of such men, who deserve so well.” When Nero, his protector, sent Poppaea to him for safekeeping, Otho genuinely fell in love with her. He barred his front door to Nero, who was left “alternately threatening and imploring him to no effect”.

Our digital dependency has made public gossip ubiquitous and inescapable save for hermits, Luddites and — paradoxically — the sort of well-staffed magnates and celebrities who become its subject. For the rest of us, however frugal our online habits, it forever spits in the face and lodges in the brain. Suetonius can come to our aid. An analyst of gossip as much as a connoisseur, he shows where it springs from, how it flows, and where it issues. If we can no longer stand haughtily aloof from rumors about authority and celebrity, at least we can learn to recognize their motives, means and effects. Entertaining and enlightening, The Lives may also equip readers with the tools to become more critical consumers of gossip about politics and power — better able to assess both their own impulses as receivers of rumor, and the aims of its diffusers. As always with historical gossip, the reader or listener has to judge. Who told this story? Who spread it? Who gains from it? Who suffers? Whose interests does it ultimately serve? Cui bono?

For instance: did the disguised Nero truly make the rounds of Rome’s cookshops in order to mug customers “as they made their way back from dinner”, or dump his victims’ corpses in a sewer, or break into taverns to loot them and then “auction off the spoils” back at his house? We will never know the nocturnal itineraries of the volatile tearaway born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. But we do know his solidly-grounded later notoriety for theft, plunder and confiscation — which these tales render as a kind of grotesque comic-strip. Many of Suetonius’s wilder anecdotes follow this formula. Don’t always take such gossip literally; but do take it seriously.

This month marks 30 years since the first publication of the Modern Review, the magazine which I co-founded with Toby Young, my then soulmate, and Cosmo Landesman, my then husband. Toby was a teenager when I met him in 1984, his academic family living next door to Cosmo’s in Islington. When I abandoned my first marriage and small son at the age of 24 to elope with Cosmo, I promptly annexed Toby as my amigo-in-chief. (We were such a close threesome that my son, Jack, was blessed with the middle name Tobias.)

It all started on a sunny spring day in 1990; as we queued for a rollercoaster at Thorpe Park, Cosmo and Toby were talking about Intellectual Stuff while Jack and I — both video game addicts — chattered away about Mario. When Toby joined our conversation, I remember marvelling at his ability to one minute bang on about the Frankfurt School and some bird called Theodora Dorno, and the next do an impression of Bart Simpson. It occurred to me that he was a new type of person — as much concerned with Baywatch as Beowulf — who needed a new type of magazine. And so we started to plot: “I’ll be boss because I’m the rich one and Toby, you’ll be the editor because you’re the clever one.”

It certainly helped that I was loaded. Sometime in the Eighties, in my late 20s, I was earning more than the Prime Minister and the Chancellor combined, simply by writing for newspapers and magazines. Then I pocketed an advance of £100,000 to write a smutty novel about a girl reporter on the make, called Ambition. But there’s only so much cocaine a person can take — and even after I gave away a not insignificant proportion of my earnings to charity every month, there was still quite a bit left, so I started us off with a few thousand.

A saintly patron since my impoverished teenage days, Peter York, declared his willingness to invest — and John le Carré sent us a cheque too. But it was tireless Toby who did the legwork; after a year of begging letters he amassed £16,666.50 — just £1,983,333.50 short of his £2 million target.

Suggested reading

The dying art of the hatchet job

By Dorian Lynskey

Toby used to say that he had “negative charisma”; he’d walk into a room and everyone would loathe him. Cosmo told me that he’d given Toby the classic anti-hero novel What Makes Sammy Run — and Toby read it as a users’ manual rather than a cautionary tale. But I never saw that: I adored him. He was full of life — more exuberant than anyone I’d ever met. So I wasn’t surprised when he gathered around him a coterie of very clever youngsters who got it completely.

LOW CULTURE FOR HIGHBROWS was our strap-line; inside our first issue of Autumn 1991 our two-page mission statement was accompanied by images of Bart Simpson and Roland Barthes. “Imagine if FR Leavis was editing Smash Hits!” I said at the time.

The run-up was very dramatic — as Toby put it a decade ago: “We couldn’t afford a laser printer, so the literary editor, who also happened to be the assistant arts editor of the European, sneaked us into Robert Maxwell’s newspaper emporium and showed us how to use the equipment. When Maxwell found out he applied for an injunction against the magazine and, when that failed, pursued us through the courts for damages.” On the eve of the court case, which would have without doubt bankrupted us, Maxwell went for a midnight swim — and we were off.

I didn’t keep anything from those days, but Cosmo still has a collection of old copies, including an ironic “home-shopping catalogue” supplement that features a Julie Burchill doll, basically a Barbie dressed in black with dark hair: “Pull the string and she tells you how much she earns.”

The covers and headlines were funny and forthright – “KEANU REEVES – YOUNG, DUMB AND FULL OF COME”; “WHY PRINCE CHARLES MAKES ME SICK” (Guess who by?); DI HARD: WHY DIANA IS OUR POP PRINCESS; (Me again!) POSH SPICE – IS SHE FUCK!; WAZZA MAZZA WIZ GAZZA? (David Runciman — now a distinguished academic.)

Suggested reading

A brief history of profanity

By Ian Martin

Our writers were brilliant and diverse. Nick Hornby before he was famous. The eternal enigma that is Ian Penman, who I chased down and snogged into submission. A review by one of the Velvet Underground — Sterling Morrison — of a book about the Velvet Underground. A very amusing ongoing column by Cheers writer Rob Long of conversations with his agent. A young Louise Doughty, now a famous novelist, visited D.M. Thomas for writing tips and found a dirty old man. Mark Steyn took down the untouchable Dennis Potter; Richard Littlejohn took a hatchet to the hypocrisy of the broadsheet newspapers and their parasitical relationship with the tabloids.

There was an ongoing column — so pertinent now — called If I Ran The BBC, written variously by Garry Bushell, Mariella Frostrup and Quentin Crisp. See what I mean by diverse? Today, when the word is deployed by the likes of the BBC, it just means people of various hues and sexualities all saying the same thing on everything from the importance of breakfast to the horridness of Brexit.

As for me, when I wasn’t drooling over pop stars half my age, I was getting into massive squabbles with academics. The best one, with Professor Camille Paglia, ending with me elegantly advising her to “Fuck off, you crazy old dyke”, became such a classic spat that it remains plastered over the internet — sadly, unlike the rest of our wonderful publication.

From a starting circulation of 5,000, we were soon up to 30,000 — not a lot, but imagine if there’d been Google back then! When one of our journalistic heroes, the brilliant James Wolcott of Vanity Fair, came to London to write a profile of us, we couldn’t believe our luck. But a few years down the line (or lines, considering the amount of coke I was keeping my young Stakhanovites going with) all was not tickety-boo between Toby and myself.

Perhaps we had just been too close not to combust, like a passionate love affair. The New Lad fad had arrived, and as someone who’d been a feminist since the age of 12, when I shoplifted The Female Eunuch, I didn’t want us associated with it — we were too good for that.

Suggested reading

Substack is doomed to fail

By Will Lloyd

Take Elizabeth Hurley. I thought she was a smasher, and was delighted when she agreed to read excerpts from Ambition as a free giveaway with the magazine. But I was starting to feel I knew her nipples better than my own. She obviously felt the same and upon hearing that Toby was planning to publish some revealing photographs of her, hired a scary law firm to dissuade him. Quite right too. “We’re not bloody Loaded!” I snarled at him.

But it was to be another vamp who put an end to our phenomenal fun. Toby mentioned that he had met — and slept with — a girl called Charlotte Raven and was employing her as an editorial assistant. Her name alone thrilled me, and when I heard that her dad was rich, and discovered that we had a pleasant time in bed — mostly at Blakes Hotel — I decided on a whim that I wanted her to be editor instead.

Toby, understandably, closed the magazine down in the summer of 1995. Charlotte compared him to Hitler, which is when I started to go off her. Our relationship was never going to last; I had my eye on her younger brother within three months, whom I’m still married to after a quarter of a century.

But I think the Modern Review would have folded within the year anyway. We were victims of our own success; all the broadsheets started to poach our writers. As John Harris of the Guardian put it: “Out of all proportion to its meagre resources, it soon comprehensively redrew the cultural map, forever wiping the high-cultural smirk from the face of Britain’s critics.”

What happened to this silly lot of self-important kids? I’m still looking for trouble — and finding it — at the age of 62. Cosmo wrote an excellent book called Starstruck in 2009. Charlotte has a terminal illness; her book Patient 1 is published in November. Toby did the best of all of us; now founder and director of the Free Speech Union.

Could the Modern Review happen today, in this weak world of echo chambers, cry-bullies and cancel culture? I suspect not. We no longer live in a time when two people can be rude to each other without running to the authorities. I feel sorry for the brightest kids of today, desperately wanting to be journalists but terrified that one unconventional thought might find them finished before they’re started.

As for me and Toby and Cosmo and my bright little boy Jack, whose beautiful mind was eaten alive by madness and who took his own life six years ago, we’ve all lost a lot along the way in the 30 years since we queued up, waiting for thrills. But we’ll always have that rollercoaster.

1. Mobutu Sese Seko, African dictator, who embezzled at least $4 billion while leading one of the poorest countries on the planet?
2. Héshēn, the most corrupt official in Chinese imperial history, who amassed a vast fortune including 20 solid gold bedsteads and 600 concubines?
3. Benedict IX, who stands out among dodgy medieval popes as the only one who sold his position to his successor?
4. Boris Johnson, who tried to get some private donors to pay for improvements to a public building, before giving up on that idea and paying for the work himself?

Not for the first time in his life, Mr Johnson appears to be the exception. Clearly, sleaze ain’t what it used to be. Even by boring British standards, the current “scandal” — if that’s what you can call it — is underwhelming. There’s no comparison to, say, David Lloyd George who flogged-off peerages to the highest bidder or John Stonehouse who faked his own death.

And yet over the last week, we’ve had day-after-day of screaming front-page headlines — depicting Downing Street as a latter-day court of Caligula.

It’s absurd. Everyone knows it’s absurd. And yet “we” — by which I mean those in the media — pretend that this nonsense matters.

Take the allegation that the PM remarked that he’d rather see “bodies pile high” than take the country into another lockdown. I don’t care whether he said it or not. I do care if our leaders can’t use intemperate language or gallows humour to let off steam in private.

What next? Perhaps we could force our politicians to wear body-cams and microphones at all times in case they do or say something offensive. What was that, Prime Minister? An inappropriate smile? A muttered expletive? Will you apologise to the British people and resign immediately?

What is genuinely offensive is that while the media are engaged in fevered speculation as to what Boris Johnson did or didn’t say, actual bodies are piling up — in India. If you haven’t done so already, I’d urge you to read Tom Chivers’s sobering article on the issue. It’s not just the scale of tragedy that stands out, but the fact that the West could be helping with its supply of desperately needed vaccines.

Suggested reading

The Lefties at the heart of government

By Peter Franklin

Britain — with its close ties to India and its influence on vaccine policy — could be playing a leading role in mobilising a global effort. But with Covid spiralling out of control in the world’s second most populous country, we’ve been arguing about interior decor instead. This twisted sense of priorities is the real scandal, but as it involves the journalistic establishment as well as the political one, don’t expect the mainstream media to complain.

Indeed, far from heralding the fall of the House of Boris, the story behind the non-stories of last week is in fact a reassertion of control. When the Covid pandemic washed over our shores last year, it disrupted the established order of Westminster politics. As the full gravity of situation became unignorable, things that had been seen as important — including things that actually were important, like Brexit — were suddenly overshadowed. That meant that the people who dealt in the normal currency of Westminster politics were overshadowed too. They could only look on helplessly from the wings as the likes of Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance and Jonathan Van-Tam took centre stage.

In newsrooms, science and medical reporters had their stories promoted to the front page. Indeed, just about anyone with a basic grasp of statistics found themselves in demand — and a lot more relevant than the previously dominant Westminster gossipmongers.

Of course, the latter took every opportunity to claw their way back into the limelight. A prime example was last summer’s press conference with Dominic Cummings in the Downing Street garden. One after another, the big names of British political journalism puffed themselves up to express their moral indignation. But in doing so they only exposed their own powerlessness — Cummings lived to fight another day.

Suggested reading

The hypocrisy of David Cameron

By Peter Franklin

More serious was what followed, which was a free pass for actual government policy. Decisions on which ministers should have found themselves under serious pressure — such as the reckless encouragement of international travel — were more celebrated than scrutinised. The trouble we were brewing for ourselves later in the year went largely unanticipated.

Luckily, the vaccine cavalry was on its way to rescue us. But don’t forget that last autumn, the media were more interested in attacking Kate Bingham for who she’s married to and who she went to school with, than understanding her vital work with the Vaccine Taskforce. Had politics-as-usual been in full force, the media witch-hunt may well have forced her out. Fortunately, the grown-ups were in charge and she was able to finish her job.

The irony is that it’s the success of the Vaccine Taskforce that’s allowing politics-as-usual to reassert itself. Half the population has been vaccinated, Covid deaths are heading down to zero and lockdown is lifting.

In celebrating with a festival of gossip our political journalists are signalling that nature has healed and they are back in charge of the news agenda. Indeed, no titbit from the last 12 months is too trivial not rake-up and present again to the public; for example, the alleged animosity between Dominic Cummings and, er, Dilyn — the Prime Minister’s canine companion.

The mystery is why our leaders are so keen to feed the beast, by which I don’t mean the dog. Even if they didn’t have events of world-historical importance to concentrate on, like India, ministers have enough to worry about at home. For instance, it’s just over a week to the Scottish Parliament elections, on which the fate of the Union hangs. There’s also the Welsh Senedd elections and a double set of local elections. And let’s not forget the crucial Hartlepool by-election — which could cement Tory control of the North or provide the first sign of a Labour comeback.

Suggested reading

The politicians we didn't deserve

By Douglas Murray

It therefore seems an extraordinary time for Downing Street to start a briefing war with Dominic Cummings.

But then one has remember that No 10 isn’t just the victim of the Westminster gossip machine, but an active participant. From the Prime Minister downwards, they’re all devotees of a political culture which is all about mastery of the unimportant.

In his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera explores whether it is better to live one’s life “heavily” — that is to deeply care about the situations one finds oneself living in and the people we share them with; or to live life “lightly” — without being weighed-down by any great burden of responsibility for anyone or anything.

Through the characters, he ultimately comes down on the side of heaviness — and, as such, he is writing against the philosophy of Friederich Nietzsche. It may seem strange to associate Nietzsche with lightness or levity, but that is the ultimate meaning of his ideal of the Übermensch. It isn’t actually any concept of racial superiority that makes the Nietzsche’s “super-man” über, but the fact that he rises above the things that weigh down ordinary people — especially Christian notions of morality and the distinction between right and wrong.

In its own shallow kind of way, there’s something distinctly Nietzchean about the British culture of politics. It too refuses to be weighed down. It is ruled by super-persons who consider themselves above the details of governance and are much more interested in fleeting moods and shifting narratives then anything concrete.

Covid, however, made politics heavy again. Suddenly it became impossible to prevail through rhetorical means alone. The politicians who tried, such as Donald Trump or Ursula von der Leyen, came badly unstuck. For the first time in years, politics fell into the hands of people who really know and care about things that actually matter.

In this country we now have a choice. It is whether to stay grounded in the real or to return full control to the PR spivs. I’ve got a horrible feeling that it going to be the latter – and that really is unbearable.