Before I start this column, I’ll declare an interest. Lots of people, when they’re drunk, have a weak spot, and do things they wouldn’t do sober. The phenomenon of “drunk dialling” – bothering an ex on the telephone – is well known. Mine is more niche: I get an AI robot to write an admiring poem to a public person I like, and send it to them in their X messages. My most recent was to Jeremy Vine.
My husband had enthused about Mr Vine for years, but I just couldn’t bring myself to watch/listen, having identified him as a cyclist – something he bangs on about a lot, and a breed I have no truck with. Not just a cyclist – but one of the most self-adoring, exhibitionist kind, as he proved last year when he took to riding a penny farthing around the streets of west London, on one occasion simply to meet his wife at their local. That’s showing off on a level that makes Madonna look like a Trappist monk.
But then, also last year, Vine did something strange and beautiful, which he wrote about in this newspaper. When his 18-year-old daughter asked if she could have a tattoo, and told him that it would be a Smiths lyric, and he would have the other half of it, he agreed. I thought it was about the most gorgeous and original demonstration of paternal love I’d seen. But more than that, in the course of it, Vine outed himself as a huge Smiths fan – this was a lovely bit of rebellion. We’re all meant to accept that Morrissey is “far right” and that decent, kind, caring people want nothing to do with him, so in displaying his fan-hood once in a newspaper and then repeatedly on his skin, Vine was showing his insouciant side. What on Earth would his fellow cyclists say!
So, I started to partake of his oeuvre on radio and television. He really is good! Such an excellent adjudicator who genuinely gives a fair hearing to both sides of an argument. He’s so very good with people – and he still seems genuinely fascinated by them after all these years, encouraging any deviation that seems at all interesting. He can be very funny; he may have been a fan of Chris Morris because he often adopts the same comically over-serious tone, particularly when talking about something that isn’t serious – “And is your cat depressed?” type of thing.
All things being equal, he’s that singular celebrity – spikily sincere but never embarrassingly “authentic” – who you’d think any sensible charity would love to be associated with. Which makes it even odder that he has been ushered aside from presenting next month’s awards for Carers UK, an organisation which seeks to speak for those who look after disabled people, and many of whom are disabled themselves.
As usual, it was those with too much time on their hands who had the loudest voices, social media wildfire being stoked by statements such as “all he ever does is host judgemental guests who demonise disabled people and doesn’t correct them when they make false statements about us”.
An online petition quickly followed, and with only a hint of a flounce, Vine replied: “Because I host debates about welfare, benefits etc I see I was a controversial choice to be the (obviously unpaid) host of the prestigious Carers UK awards so I’m very happy to stand aside and give someone else the honour of doing it.”
Now it’s personal, with a man called Mike O’Brien of the “Unpaid Carer Assembly” making public on X messages he claimed were from Vine, in which our shunned hero shows himself to be every bit as secretly sarcastic as you’d expect from a man tattooed with Moz. In them, he asks Mr O’Brien whether he should run his other patronages of charities past him so he can decide whether Vine should pull out of them as well as “the last thing I want is anything like the disgusting vitriol and abuse of the past 10 days” and finishes with a zinger: “Is it acceptable to have named Carers UK as a beneficiary of my will? Because I don’t want you to traduce me when that is published and I can’t defend myself.”
In July, the “” went crying to ITN over Vine’s Channel 5 show because, as they put it: “His programme has become notorious among disabled people for whipping up hostility towards them, particularly those who receive benefits […] recently he failed to challenge a guest who claimed the benefits bill was ‘out of control’. On another show, last November, he asked bluntly: ‘Why don’t you cut welfare?’.”
ITN – outrageously – replied that “discussions about social security reform on the shows reflected a range of views, with contributors who both supported and opposed proposed changes.” The rotters!
At the root of this is whether or not the disabled and the organisations that represent them want to become part of the permanently aggrieved lobby, which the state has bent over backwards (try that in a wheelchair) to financially support in recent years, leading to the untenable situation whereby one in four people in the UK identifies as disabled. Every year, the benefits bill exceeds the state’s income tax revenue. Is this really not worth hearing the argument against? Or are the disabled – who were once among the most grimly realistic of minority groups – reaching for that status which other pressure groups claim for themselves, when even to question their claims is viewed as “violence”?
As someone who is severely disabled, of pensionable age, but still working and paying tax, I really want to see the idea that someone who can’t work because of “anxiety” is every bit as deserving as me of benefits interrogated in the media. Last week, a 28-year-old PIP claimant and campaigner for disability rights called Gigi El-Halaby spoke on a radio phone-in with astonishing entitlement about her demands that a job must be “meaningful” and “fulfilling” in order for someone with mental health issues to consider coming off benefits and gracing an employer with their presence.
People in wheelchairs have nothing in common with these pampered poltroons, and by placing ourselves on their side, we risk being viewed with suspicion and contempt by the millions of taxpayers who get out of bed every morning and go to jobs they find neither meaningful or fulfilling in order to allow a quarter of their compatriots to take their ease. Kemi Badenoch was right this week to mock those who believe that “working in Boots is bad for your mental health”. We were all supposed to run screaming from Vine when those messages were made public – a cruel quipper to a selfless carer – but it makes me feel like commissioning another robot poem.