Allison Pearson and Carole Malone aren’t traitors... just hypocrites

“Anyone else looking forward to watching the Trump administration humiliate our calamitous Labour government?” wrote the Daily Telegraph’s shouty right wing columnist Allison Pearson on X on January 18. “I’m standing here with my hand up shouting ‘I am’” replied the Daily Express’s shouty right wing columnist Carole Malone.

Within the bounds of reason and the law, everyone has the right to post what they like on social media, even if it is deeply silly. That includes Pearson, Malone and the people of different political views who read those posts and instantly thought of the title of a popular TV show starring Claudia Winkleman.

But you do wonder what Pearson and Malone might have said about two shouty left wing pundits who, shortly after a UK election did not go their way, started posting they hoped Britain might now be humiliated by left wing governments from abroad as a punishment.

Malone is fond of writing about “wokies” who “hate Britain”, but now seems to hate Britain herself. She will bang on in the Express and on GB News about how “Starmer needs to remember that four million people voted for Reform”, but has conveniently forgotten that 9,708,716 people voted for Starmer, whose party won a 174-seat majority

She has come to resemble the kind of people she says she loathes – whose aim is “destroying people who don’t think like they do”.

In 2022, on the sixth anniversary of the Brexit referendum, she railed in the Express about the idea of “the pathetic little country our unpatriotic Remainers would have you believe Britain now is”. The same could be said about unpatriotic Daily Express columnists right now.

Pearson, meanwhile, might heed the advice she gave to Remainers in 2018, on the second anniversary of the vote: “Time to stop being sore losers and start listening. Anything else is, frankly, un-British.”