Liz Jones

Liz Jones is a writer for the Daily Mail. She often creates controversy and offends or outrages people. I have an inkling she may be doing it deliberately. Take for example a few random quotes by the inimitable Ms Jones:

On Feminists:

"I am now going to write something that will enrage feminists the world over, and provoke an outraged backlash in the columns of online feminist website Jezebel (which already has an entire section that monitors me, entitled Keeping Up With Jones)."

You are going to write something that will enrage feminists the world over? What, deliberately? Hold it right there Liz - I'll get the popcorn.

On Mothers who Blog:

Free? You blogging mums may as well wear burkas! I had no idea blogging could be so lucrative. I wonder, too, what their husbands think of them and their rantings. 

Here is what I don't understand. Liz Jones herself gets paid vast amounts of money to write about her life. Surely they are doing the exact same thing and it is far more lucrative for Ms Jones.

I have queasy feelings in my empty womb about all this. The most revolutionary tool we have – namely, free speech on the internet – has been turned into a giant WI meeting, with women being PAID to sit at home, ignore the child about to toddle into the glass wall that makes kitchen and garden seamlessly as one, and to write about being mothers.

Failing to remember that perhaps, that Liz herself writes about face lifts, Brazilian waxes, hair colouring, airbrush tans, pedicures and manicures and sexual fantasies about Gordon Ramsey. How is that in any way superior to some random mother writing a blog about her children, family and household?

The only difference between what they do and what she does is that she gets paid over £250,000 a year for writing about her life. Much of what Liz Jones writes seems to be about her expensive and high maintenance beauty regime. I'm struggling to see how this does justice to the 'revolutionary tool' she speaks of:

In London, I pay £75 for an everlasting gel pedicure, £70 for a root tint and £125 for various waxes.

As someone who has probably had every inch of her body exfoliated, pummelled, plucked, dyed, snipped, hoisted and lasered...

I had a Brazilian wax, hair tint, pedicure, facial, eyelash extensions and an airbrush tan so deep I now look as if I have been on holiday for two weeks.

I love Nigel Slater’s herb garden, and wish I were married to Jamie Oliver. Oh, and I’d adore animalistic sex with Gordon Ramsay, too.

Liz Jones: Using the revolutionary tool of free speech.

To be fair, Liz Jones also visited Somalia and wrote about the famine and poverty there – but even then she went on to boast about buying a dress for herself for £1850 just 17 months later. While it is nobody else's business what Liz spends her money on, and if it wasn't for the fact that she consistently pleads poverty it would be easy to assume that £1850 is just a drop in the Ocean to her and that she probably donates money to these charities all the time. But she claims to be poor! And so when she finds herself with a spare £1850 knocking around she decides to spend it on a designer dress for herself. 17 months later. If she'd met them on holiday they would probably still be on the Christmas card list.

Liz Jones in Somalia.

And let's not forget that Liz Jones donated her fee for the Somalia article to Children In Need. So she CAN be unselfish and give a gift for other reasons than to write about how ungrateful her relative/friend/aquaintence was to not appreciate her generosity.

On Internet Abuse:

Here, Liz claims that:

I turned down two offers to be on ITV last week, at £1,000 for each five-minute appearance, as I didn’t want to cower later that night avoiding pot shots behind a metaphorical locked loo door.

For once, Liz has really shocked me here. In the immediate aftermath of the tragic death of the 29 year old South African model Reeva Steenkamp, it seems incredibly insensitive to say the least. Oscar Pistorius claims he shot his girlfriend dead by firing 4 bullets through the bathroom door when he mistook her for an intruder. 

And Liz Jones is comparing online name-calling with cowering in a bathroom whilst being shot through the bathroom door. Stay classy Liz.

Liz Jones - she's an enigma, wrapped in Prada, Shod in Louboutin. Probably.