The Big Mac

Peddling like mad down at the gym this morning, I found myself opposite a large screen recording the evidence of Kelvin MacKenzie to the Leveson Enquiry. I think that most of us with any sense know that the serpent in the Garden of Eden was in reality a dick. Kelvin MacKenzie is a man using the Press Freedom figleaf to disguise the fact that he is a dick.

Thankfully, the disguise doesn’t work because every phrase uttered by this profoundly unpleasant man screams “I’m a dick”. Like Piers Morgan – whom he trained, and boy does it show – he sees the Enquiry as yet another stage upon which he can display his unholy talent to mislead, to trick, to bully, and to smear. But based on the excerpt I watched this morning, he just keeps on opening his metaphorically dirty Mac and yelling, “I am a dick”. The effect, in fact, is doubled by the unfailing politeness of the infinitely more civilised people who are interrogating him.

Most accurate double-barreled shot into foot of the day from Kelvino was his editorial policy: “If it sounded right, I’d say let’s bung it in”. It was all just a jolly jape, do you see? MacLacklustre had sold his sub-atomic soul to Rupert, and so it was no longer journalism: it was (and is) public execution – trial by Sun, minus only the Rule of Law. The kind of amoral, mindless turd-gardening that saw Currant Bun drongos shouting to Christopher Jefferies during the Joanna Yeates murder enquiry, “D’yer kill ‘er, eh Chris? D’yer kill ‘er?”

How easy it would be to write off MacKenzie as anti-social, when in truth any reasonably awake empiricist can see that he is cultural anti-matter – a man who would dearly love to see our lives descend into a sewer of gotchas and rent-boys and toffs and celebs: a tawdry existence in which it is not even enough to dishonestly turn those shades of grey into black and white….for Kilvictim MacBigot, the world will not be on an even keel until there are only Coons and Nazis.

Mr MacKenzie needs the world to be a Lord of the Flies single-syllable place primarily because he left school with one O-level, and openly admitted some years ago that his ‘talent’ lay in “making up headlines”. What can one say in the face of that? Kelvin MacKenzie is not a journalist and never has been: to employ the cockney rhyming slang of which he is so patronisingly fond, he is a born publicity stunt.

And what better result could there be – for the fevered if limited imagination of such an onanist – to be both a Hampton Wick and a cunning stunt  in the same body?