The Lipster

OK, I know we keep banging on about them, but professional hate-rag the Daily Mail has excelled itself today with a 1,871-word hanging, drawing and quartering of Lily Allen.

What has she done to deserve this? Over to you, Mail. ”At the Cannes Film Festival over the past few days she has seemed to be courting publicity and disaster with equal ardour: stripping off, getting drunk and falling over.”

Let’s pick this apart. She had too much to drink at a free booze filled film premiere – not a crime last time we checked. She went swimming topless in Antibes – something that people do all the time in hot weather. She "fell over" – well, there’s no evidence for this, but the Mail did see her with her head on the table. Hello Molehill, meet Mountain.

The Mail continues to express its "concern" by telling us how ”Lily is almost morbidly sensitive about her appearance just now, and is keen to lose the weight which she has piled on during a recent spell of crashingly low moods.” So they’ve printed some pictures of Lily with her top off and drawn attention to her “tum.” Then they talk in ominous tones about her relationships with her “platonic” male friends, the “pressure” she’s under to make another record, and how worried they are about her “ill-health”, while saying how she’s not as good as Amy Winehouse, wasn’t very popular at school, and, oh, what the hell, lets twist in that knife a tiny bit more.

After all that, the Mail also have the gall to wrap up the piece by saying: “One can only hope that - whether she is greeted with success or falls back into obscurity - this talented and vulnerable young woman manages to find some peace of mind.” After 1,871 words of puff reinforcing what’s apparently wrong with her. Oh for laws against this horrible, soul-sapping, gut-wrenchingly nasty branch of "journalism", we're saying, and sharpish.