Doesn’t She Have a Garden Party to Go To or Something?

The great Jack Marx once described the execrable Kathy Lette as the “dogshit on the heel of Australian journalism”. No matter how much you try to scrape it off, it still leaves its stench on the furnishings.

Lette’s meagre claims to fame seem to be: writing a sleazy roman à clef about teenage slags in ’70s Sydney, marrying a pompous Pommy ‘human rights lawyer’ (which is perhaps the most tautologous phrase imaginable) and writing reams of insufferably smug garbage that inexplicably keeps getting column inches. Mostly, it seems, in the sort of publications patronised by the same insufferably smug upper-middle-class white Boomer women as herself.

So, there’s no small irony in her latest smirkathon.

Weather Warning! Incoming! Forget the heatwave. The UK is about to be hit with a huge fog of smug.

Well, that ship sailed in 1988, when Lette first blighted Blighty with her presence.

England has a considerable chance of winning the World Cup and the fevered anticipation of victory has temperatures rising.

In an outburst of privileged white woman whining to rival Virginia Woolf (whom, it should surprise absolutely no one, Lette certainly just adores – she stole the name of her tedious podcast from one of Woolf’s more tedious Feminiads, after all), she frets that, if England win, then the Poms will be “insufferable”. Sayings about pots and kettles spring to mind.

Nevertheless, cue the usual catalogue of stereotypes: Englishmen who only run when the pub’s on fire, who hug and kiss only after a goal, who possess an “Eeyore gene” and “corrugated bottoms from being beaten so much at boarding school”.

The pièce de résistance, though, is this historical howler:

After all, this is the only nation in the world who had a revolution … then asked the monarchy back.

History is clearly less her strong point than genuine wit. Britain is far from the only country that restored its monarchy after a revolution. The French did it, briefly, after Napoleon’s first exile. The Spanish restored theirs after Franco. Cambodia brought Sihanouk back. Nepal did the same until relatively recently. But why let facts interrupt a good sneer?

Did Lette, who goes to great lengths to tell everyone that she lives much of the time in London, somehow miss that Muslim fans literally rioted in the streets of the Caliphate of Southern England when their team lost? Cars torched, police attacked, shops looted: the full ‘vibrant diversity’ package. No word from Lette on that particular fog of, ah, enthusiasm. Perhaps it doesn’t fit the narrative of English “superiority complex”.

Poms already have a superiority complex. The clue is in what they call themselves: not small, not medium, but Great Britain.

That is not just a recycled joke (as most of Lette’s are), this time from Ben Elton, but a particularly egregious curl of her smirking lips. After all, the sheer temerity of a people who built the largest empire in history, exported the common law, the industrial revolution, parliamentary democracy and the language the entire planet uses for commerce, science and aviation, potentially feeling a flicker of pride if their football team finally wins something. How dare they.

Indeed, what Lette is probably really afraid of, one might discern from her gratuitous dig at Reform, is that the actual English, as opposed to the ‘multicultural’ invaders, might have something to be proud of.

Reform UK, which is leading in the polls, constantly manufacture arguments because they like nothing more than optimum whingeing opportunities. Nigel Farage sees the bad side of everything.

Heaven forbid the natives notice the bad side of open borders, grooming gangs, knife crime epidemics and no-go zones. Because, as every insufferably smug, upper-middle-class Boomer White woman knows, the only acceptable emotion for the indigenous English is shame. Otherwise, they might start getting ideas about taking their country back.

If England do win the World Cup, and now I fervently hope they do, the celebrations will be raucous, the song will be overplayed, and yes, there will be a bit of gloating. Good. After decades of being told their history is a crime, their flag is a hate symbol, and their only permissible future is demographic replacement, a bit of unapologetic national joy might be just the tonic.

Let Lette and her kind clutch their pearls and write another column about how frightfully common it all is. The rest of us will enjoy watching the dogshit get scraped for once.