What the hell happened to Allison Pearson?

Like any keen and committed newshound, Pearson watched the proceedings on the telly. At the end of what seemed like many hundreds of hyperbolic paragraphs, in a denouement that has aged like sashimi in the sun, she closed out her tab by declaring that “it comes to something when things [in the UK] are so dire that our dearest wish is that The Donald takes pity on us and adopts the dear old country as the 51^st state of America. I’d be on for that – how about you?”

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This was the stuff, I thought. Every aspect of the dark arts of Allison Pearson had been brought to bear on this beauty.

Note the technique. Allison Pearson’s dog-and-pony show requires an enemy against which to rail –  in this case, a country she claims to love but in truth can barely stand. Making bedroom eyes at Yankee overlords, in an instant, she dispenses with the sovereignty that was once so crucial to our national wellbeing that she insisted we leave the European Union to ensure its survival. 

Oh, and we’re expected to believe she has the authority to speak on behalf of an entire kingdom. Our dearest wish, is it?  

Best of all, though, is the bet-the-farm gusto with which she backs what was always bound to be a losing proposition. One curiously underpriced aspect of the 66-year-old’s clattering columns is that time and again, as a prognosticator, she is about as prescient as a space hopper. One need not rely on hindsight to recognise that Trump is about as beneficial to the interests of Great Britain as was the Black Death. 

Similarly, Pearson was a keen Brexiteer – “a humble handmaiden of Brexit”, as she cringily described herself at a Telegraph event a few years back. On the referendum’s 10th anniversary, she declared that she had been right, listing the achievements of leaving the EU as major new trade deals, higher animal welfare standards, keeping the pound and the fact that “We no longer have to fear that dreaded BBC handover, ‘And now it’s over to Katya Adler in Brussels’”.

With instincts like hers, by rights, Pearson should have retired in embarrassment years ago. “I have come to believe that our 56^th prime minister was hard done by and that some of the ‘conspiracy theories’ which she is accused of peddling may be far nearer the truth than most people realise,” was her remarkable verdict on Britain’s own arsonist-in-chief, Liz Truss. 

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The rancid ultra nativist Laurence Fox, meanwhile, was judged to be a man who “can perform an increasingly vital function, saying aloud what mainstream politicians are too frightened to say”.

After the Church of England declined to ordain weirdo Calvin Robinson as a deacon, in 2022, she wrote about how “I could have seen this hugely impressive, genuinely good and holy man becoming Archbishop of Canterbury one day”.

Blimey! Turns out, of course, that the church was proved right. Currently engaged to a woman who is less than half his age, today, the 41-year-old preacher is a dedicated sectarian bigot who believes that only men should be allowed to vote. 

Away from her columns, there was a much-quoted tweet from September 2023, after allegations against Russell Brand became public.  Pearson wrote: “It’s a measure of the depths of our cynicism that when a scandal like this breaks my first reaction is to wonder why They are trying to silence the person. At least @rustyrockets [Brand’s X handle] has done journalism and tried to bring truth to the public. Not something you could say of his media accusers. Let’s see what they’ve got on him.” 

We have now seen what ‘They’ have got on him, and Brand will be in prison for years to come.

With friends such as these, is it any surprise that Allison Pearson is the architect of her own downfall? Proclaiming that “every single person” on a Tommy Robinson-organised Unite The Kingdom rally is “step by step, inch by inch… taking our country back from those who hate it” may go down a storm with the paramilitary wing of her undeniably committed readership, but higher powers have been given the ick. Evidently, Axel Springer, the new owners of the Telegraph, didn’t much fancy springing for sinister garbage of this order. 

It’s been coming, too. As predictable as a speaking clock, for at least a decade – since about the time she filed for bankruptcy, in 2015 – Pearson’s increasingly incessant and uncharitable diatribes have thrown haymakers at easy and obvious targets such as asylum seekers, Muslims, and – but of course – transgender women and men. As one of her regular readers, for seven years now, not once have I known her to challenge the worst instincts of her most reactionary reader. 

There is a note of tragedy in all of this, I think. In the days before sinking to the level of ugly and disreputable grouches such as Brendan O’Neill and Richard Littlejohn, Pearson was first a reliably clever TV reviewer for the Independent, then a bona fide literary sensation. 

She was an indubitable force for good, too. In selling an astounding four million copies of her debut novel, I Don’t Know How She Does It, from 2002, she did more to promote the cause of reading books for pleasure than many of her seething army of detractors will ever give her credit for. 

Her reluctance to take pride in this incredible achievement might be explained by the relative commercial failure of her second novel, I Think I Love You. Published years behind schedule and burdened by a things-were-different-back-then advance of $700,000, the reduction in her circumstances would surely have been a blow to the ego. 

From this point on, there could be no doubt that her success belonged to the art, not the artist. I Don’t Know How She Does It was famous in a way its author was not.

What followed looks like an attempt to right this piercing injustice. With her face above the fold, week after week on the front page of the Telegraph, Pearson harvested the kind of attention she apparently believes is her due. 

It was easy, too; mewling and moaning as if her life depended on it, all she had to do was invert the principle that underpins all good writing. In both style and substance, in black on white, she became the very worst version of herself. 

As Allison Pearson prepares to vacate her throne as the queen of junk food journalism, I am least grateful to her for one thing. At long last, my own nagging curiosity as to whether an overwrought commitment to cruelty and rancour were worth the baubles of broadsheet fame can now be laid to rest. 

It no longer matters. No one cares.