The Mystic Megs of the Telegraph love predicting Armageddon
You will be familiar with the American-born concept of the intervention.
The friends and family of a person in trouble ambush the loved one with the intent of forcing them to seek help for whatever it is – generally drugs or drink, though more recherché forms of self-destruction are also available – that ails them.
One notable example came in The Sopranos, when members of that lovable New Jersey family held the one for heroin-hooked psycho Chris Moltisanti that climaxed, perhaps inevitably, in a mass brawl.
It is to be hoped that our intervention would conclude without a group outing to A&E. But if violence is the price to be paid, so be it. Something must be done, and soon, for Allister Heath of the Telegraph.
Before we go further, two things must be disclosed. First, I was fired as a columnist for the paper – one I had loved since childhood despite being a shade distended from its political worldview – about a decade ago. However, I’ve been sacked by countless others, and rightly so, without developing an appetite for sour grapes.
Secondly, in a strictly technical sense, this is none of my beeswax. I am not related to Mr Heath by blood or marriage. Far from being his friend, I have never met him.
Yet, as human beings, are we not all family? Is our shared humanity not connection enough to establish a duty of care? Did Jesus teach us nothing at all? (Yes, yes and no, for the hard of comprehending, are the answers to those.)
Mr Heath is not the most talentless inhabitant of the Telegraph’s capacious stable of the ostentatiously deranged. To glance at its website is to glimpse a digitised version of medieval bedlam.
One after the next, the inmates scream about whichever socialist-driven, apocalyptic nightmare has invaded their minds that day, until you pray for the attendants to storm in and forcibly inject the Diazepam.
Yet, of them all, Mr Heath seems the one who might be rescued. He isn’t notably stupid, and doesn’t seem motivated by malice. He may even imagine himself to be well-intentioned.
The most palpable problem with a man who’d discern the imminence of Armageddon in a marginally overcooked steak, a tube train delayed for 17 seconds awaiting a green light outside Earl’s Court, or a small hole in a sock, is the pulverising lack of self-awareness.
No amount of being hysterically wrong, no torrent of ridicule for the wrongness and hysteria heaped on him by Private Eye can degrade the self-appraised omniscience.
This disorder is no rarer in columnists than in politicians, of course. But Mr Heath has raised the art of being hyper-confidently wrong to a zenith such that if you asked him about the weather, and he said, ‘It’s a beautiful, sunny afternoon,’ you wouldn’t dream of going outside without an umbrella.
‘Few would have predicted how much she would grow into the role,’ he wrote of Liz Truss during the Tory leadership campaign in August 2022. ‘They [her critics] will rue the day they so completely underestimated her.’ Indeed.
‘This was the best Budget I have ever heard … by a massive margin,’ he observed a month later of the fiscal triumph that destroyed his heroine, her Chancellor and very nearly the pensions industry with them.
‘Trump is finished,’ ran the headline above yet another Meisterwerk a few weeks after that. ‘The future of the Republican party belongs to DeSantis. Now it is clear that the ex-president repels more voters than he attracts, the American Right needs a new champion.’ But of course.
The unelectable Trump, he wrote last November after Trump’s election, ‘won’t want Russia to be able to declare victory’ over Ukraine.
How very, very true. If anything has typified the President’s approach to ending this war in the early days of his second coming, it’s the tone of clinical even-handedness towards the combatants.
The Telegraph has been desperately seeking new ownership for a good while. But apart from the odd Middle Eastern petrostate on the hunt for a propaganda outlet, curiously not a soul has seemed interested in paying way over the odds for an asylum hijacked by its lunatics.
The era when newspapers were sufficiently relevant and powerful to justify inflated asking prices has passed.
But there are nobler reasons for buying a newspaper than political influence and the commercial opportunities that follow. Common humanity is one of those.
So if any of you have half a billion swilling aimlessly around in the Nationwide and a surplus of goodwill to match, I’d love to talk about facilitating that intervention.
It won’t be pretty. It may well require mild physical coercion. But if you, as new proprietor, and I, as your new editor-in-chief, could only strap Allister Heath to a chair and read him a choice selection of his oeuvre, I have a hunch that, after as little as 30-34 hours, the tiniest shard of humility would puncture the staggering self-confidence, and the process of recovery could begin.
