Giles Coren finds out that Times readers are terrible

Giles Coren has been writing for the Times for 23 years. But incredibly it has taken him until this week to discover what many could have told him a long time ago – that many of his own readers are awful!

Coren was shocked by the reaction to a diary column he penned for the paper on Tuesday, headlined ‘Tommy Robinson’s rally tally was far from right’, in which he queried the hard right rabble-rouser’s dubious claim that three million people took to the streets of London at the weekend for his coke-fuelled protest.

“Three million people is a third of the population of London (and three quarters of its adult males),” he wrote.

“It’s more than the combined populations of Newcastle, Liverpool, Nottingham and Leeds. And yet in the aerial photos of the march, we see them just about filling a large urban roundabout and its approaches, like an FA Cup Final crowd, as the 110,000 police estimate would appear to confirm.”

Alas for Coren, such numeracy riled readers of the Thunderer, which has turned increasingly right wing under editor Tony Gallagher. More than 1,300 of them – at the time of writing – took to the comments under the article overwhelmingly to turn on the columnist for questioning their hero Robinson.

“This is one of the most sneering pieces of trash I have ever read on a broadsheet,” wrote Pam Watts, while Stephanie Jacobs labelled him a “nasty, judgemental bigot”. Meanwhile, S Davis wrote “Awww, ickle London Posh Boy doesn’t like all the nasty Proles coming to his nice, stunning and brave city” and David Toze called him a “condescending scrote”. And these were among the nicer ones!

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Now Coren has made the brave/foolhardy move to take to his own newspaper’s sister radio station to question what had happened to its readership.

“I took the Mickey out of the Tommy Robinson march on Tuesday – a tiny item – I wrote a thing, they said that it’s three million when it’s 100,000, 150,000 – ‘it’s so terrifying that they would lie so huge, do they have any idea what three million looks like?’,” he told hosts Kate McCann and Stig Abell.

“I acknowledged that the marchers had a reasonable case to march, there’s problems with immigration… I just mocked them a little bit, the numbers, and I’ve never had so many comments, more than when I got it wrong with the Israel thing [Coren caused a storm in the Jewish community earlier this month with a column attacking Israel’s actions in Gaza in which he described antisemitism in the UK as “piddling” in comparison].

“One-and-a-half thousand people below the line telling me ‘typical, sneering libtard Coren, from his high castle, ivory tower, doesn’t understand the concerns of real people, Tommy Robinson is a hero’. And I’m thinking, what has happened to my newspaper? Who are these people?

“I clearly called the Robinson march wrong. I thought it was appalling, and it seems that Middle England seems to think that it was marvellous.”

Poor Giles. If only there had been some way of knowing about the Times’s increasing lurch to the right!