Political satire exhumed in the scribblings of Norman Johnson

Three weeks into the Guardian’s re-design, and they seem to have got found themselves a reason for humour-seeking people to read the Comment section on Saturdays. Norman Johnson writes on Saturday in a new op-ed column entitled ‘Free Radical’. As he himself explained in his first column, his guiding mission is to expose the “caliphate of the Left” for what he sees as its “support of Islamo-Fascism”. He clearly (and self-avowedly) has designs on the portly mantle left by David Aaronovitch’s switch to the Times; yet in his first three columns Johnson has merely wallowed in his own solipsistic self-importance, firstly wrangling over the ethics of taking a job at the Guardian in the first place, anticipating the bile that his appointment would provoke and then taking full credit for apparently being proved right:

“I predicted that my arrival on these pages would burst the levees, releasing a torrent of spuming bile from correspondents convinced their territory had been made safe from the incursions of any Saddam-averse trespasser who might presume to advertise the attractions of universal human rights. I must be psychic. Within three days there was bile enough to pollute an entire letters page with the kind of cheap abuse, which, had it been aimed at, say, a fundamentalist Welsh lesbian, instead of a "pompous middle-aged, middle-class white male from north London" would qualify as actionable hate speech.”

The torrent of vitriol described above, we’ll have to take Johnson’s word for; the only letters printed in the Guardian were somewhat milquetoast pops with all the deadly aim of a toddler throwing food from his high chair.

Then suddenly the penny drops: he's being "humourous"! Ah, such brilliant wit. According to the blog Harry’s Place, Norman was genuinely dismayed by the reaction to his first column, particularly the view – held initially by myself – that the whole deal was in fact a spoof, or if not, a particularly clever satire. The typical Guardian-baiters on Harry’s Place were initially (perhaps ironically) convinced that the former was true, some even entertaining the notion that it was part of an elaborate ruse on the part of Guardian comment-section editor Seamus Milne to wind up his online bete noires. The latter view, that Johnson’s column is an attempt at satire, is one that I find myself loathe to release; after all, what other conclusion can be made by the following (from his most recent column) on Labour party conference heckler Walter Wolfgang:

Our anti-war heckler, on the other hand, emerged as a celebrity spokesman for free speech. Free speech, that is, if you're natty, liberal minded Walter (the Fascist-surviving Islamofascist sympathiser), and not some barefoot Iraqi nonentity living under Saddam's lash.

In a column that seems to be directing itself as a “humorous” one (it will take a great effort to see those quotation marks removed), supposedly cutting comments such as these come across as petty and quite simply desperate. Whether this is an attempt by the newspaper to balance out the tone of its predominantly anti-war comment on Iraq, to lighten up the weekend with a regular ‘funnies’ op-ed piece, or simply to provoke bloggers and letter-writers into further action, remains to be seen.