Response to 'Whipping Boy'

A few weeks ago Celia Walden mentioned me as her 'Whipping boy' in her notebook. The piece attracted an unusual level of sympathy. Grateful as I am, don't feel too sorry for me. I wrote a response that the Telegraph declined to publish, but it is reproduced below for kicks.

The original can be found here

It should be restated that neither this, nor the original, ought be taken too seriously.

Celia Walden has seen fit to write a cruel expose of my travails on the Telegraph Features desk, coining for me the name ‘whipping boy’. I suppose this is not the worst sort of boy to me. ‘Rent boy’, ‘cabin boy’ and ‘jam boy’ all strike me as more offensive epithets. However, some of the claims in her article are exaggerations, others are entirely fabricated, and - most scarily - some fall short of the far more disturbing truth. I am far less brave than Just William. I have certainly never used Brylcreem, and I have infrequently worn a suit to the Telegraph – though if I did it would probably be ill-fitting. I also got the Tintin diary correct first time. Beyond these I offer no more corrections for fear of drawing back too far the veil of mystery: the Telegraph joins sausages and legislation on the list of things you don’t want to see being made. But there is certainly some license both ways.

The piece has provoked a range of responses: my father speculated that my reputation (what?) had been irreversibly stained. A lawyer-friend wrote that he didn’t know what was worse – the fact that I’d been publicly humiliated by my middle-aged (his word) ‘boss’ or the fact that an online comment-maker had compared me to the poor boy in the news for being sadistically sexually abused by an older child. Some, particularly those on similar ladders, were very jealous: sitting between Celia and Bryony Gordon on the Features desk seems to be considered one of the more coveted spots in the unpaid world – there is definitely a perception in some quarters that my placement is a bed of roses and I should be lickspittlingly grateful for every second. I try at least not to be actively ungrateful, but nobody likes a toady, do they?

Anyway none of these responses is quite on the money (a cruelly ironic metaphor in the circumstances), but certainly rumours of my enslavement have been greatly exaggerated. In the first place I like Celia very much. She is tall and glamorous as you might expect, and her expensively-perfumed cashmere coattails seem, on balance, like rather pleasant things to desperately try and grip on to. Being ‘cougared’ by her, as she keeps threatening, would have the ancillary benefit of cuckolding Piers Morgan, and thereby dramatically enhancing my standing in the media (and indeed the wider world). Secondly, she has gone out of her way to give me things to do beyond fetching her hoisery and her teas (or as is more often the case a soya latte), though I don’t really mind either. The same can be said of many of the Telegraph’s staff: in a competitive and extremely busy world, I’ve been surprised at how ready so many have been to go out of their way to help me.