For Ian Allsop, life has become a never-ending search for material to go into his next column.
My oppurtunism when considering topics for this monthly piece has become a bit of a standing joke between the editor and myself. “I could get a column out of that” is a regular phrase used in our conversations.
This time out I have been considering writing about either the chugger who attacked me with a courgette on Loughton High Road, or how the ex-Culture Secretary tried to add a gloss of respectability to her recent resignation by giving her severance pay to a charity.
Situations grounded in real life are great because they save the effort of making things up, like the two examples I have just quoted were. Apart from the second one.
When editing a piece in this month’s (excellent) technical briefing, and seeing the term ‘columnar format’ I did wonder if the Sorp Committee had got round to recognising me in accounting terms.
I suspect if I had been present when Nelson died at the Battle of Trafalgar, Hardy would have been muttering in the background that I would get a column out of it.
Vicious circle
The problem is that you end up spending your life wondering if what you are doing is column material, rather than enjoying it on its own terms. Which in itself could be the topic of…do you see the vicious circle I have become trapped inside?
And it has not been lost on me that I am even starting to get a column out of the subject of getting a column out of something. But I realise that this isn’t really sustainable and could easily become over-exposed and stale – a sort of Three Peaks Challenge for monthly-opinion merchants.
Happily, while I was pondering what to write about this month it was brought to my attention that I had made a mistake in my April column, and I realised I could get a column, or at least part of one, out of that. I am nothing if not a consistent advocate of recycling.
I say happily. However, I might well mean unhappily as the mistake in question was to potentially libel someone. And not just anyone, but the Justice Secretary.
While ‘libelling the Justice Secretary’ might make a good working title for someone’s autobiography, or a half-decent drinking game, it is a serious issue. Or would be if he read this column.
Perhaps I should explain. My sharp-eyed legal team* spotted that in my last outing, where I listed Tory MPs who had been critical of how charities operate beyond their ‘proper’ remit and mentioned which school they attended – subtly implying that the fact they were educated at independent schools, with charity status, somehow meant they should be careful throwing hypocritical comments around – I included Chris Grayling as an alumni of Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe.
Now I thought I had checked that the schools I listed were charities, but apparently not with sufficient rigour. For RGS, HW (as I hope it is sometimes called) is in fact a state-funded boarding school (no, me neither).
Which means that I have made people potentially feel sorry for Chris Grayling, which I can assure everyone – with my hand on my heart – was never, ever my intention.
My wife did point out that what I had done might not even constitute libel. Which made me worry even more.
Is claiming you have libelled someone, when you haven’t, in itself libel? In many ways, it is a legal Grayling area.
Take me seriously
It would be nice to escape this getting-a-column-out-if-it mindset. Like all sarcastic, cynical, misanthropes I secretly harbour a desire to be taken seriously. I would love to be regarded on a more studious academic level.
But this will be even more difficult now I have demonstrated, and then even highlighted for my own benefit, that I haven’t checked my facts properly. Which is why I have tried to give the illusion of intellectual gravitas by including a footnote in this piece. It may, in this cunning disguise, end up in a library, if there are any left open. And whether it does or doesn’t, I could probably still get a column out of it.
*a lawyer I know who reads my column on the train
Ian Allsop is a freelance editor and journalist, and regular contributor to Charity Finance.
