The Evening Standard sinks to a new low with a list of the predictions for 2017 from a bunch of the “capital’s wisest visionaries”
The Evening Standard used to publish revealing stories and its weekly ES Magazine was always a place where one could expect to see Dominic Dunne-esque revelations of society’s highs and lows.
Now, under the ownership of Evgeny Lebedev – a man keener to pomp up the egos of the likes of Sir Elton John and his titleless husband than on good, old fashioned investigative journalism – the paper has gone south and yesterday, it sunk to a new low in publishing a feature by Frankie McCoy and Rosamund Urwin.
In a double page spread titled “Back to the future”, the columnists featured the views of eleven of what they ambitiously called “the capital’s wisest visionaries”. Amongst them were the loudmouth “gender X” blogger, Jack Monroe. She bizarrely ignored the common thought that “everybody is replaceable” and remarked: “No one will ever fill” the shoes of the late Labour MP Jo Cox. She also usefully added: “Gender is construct”.
Others featured included the nastiest television anchor in Britain, Kay Burley. Her claim that Prince Harry will “marry and have twins” this year plainly belongs in a horoscope and that the gossip columnist Perez Hilton also got a look-in seems odd given he has nothing to do with London and lives in America.
Hilton’s predictions that “Kanye West is going to divorce Kim Kardashian”, “Britney Spears is going to start dating a woman” and “Bella Hadid will actually eat an entire cheese sandwich” were of utterly no relevance and frankly the other offerings in the piece were about as much use as a chocolate teapot.
We call on the Evening Standard to raise its game. That would surely be a better thing for McCoy and Urwin to want this year.