Mehdi Hasan - the Man who Makes me Feel Shy, Retiring and Modest

It’s not true that there’s no English word for ‘Schadenfreude’. That fine old monosyllable ‘Gloat’ has always worked for me. And I am trying reasonably hard not to gloat too much at what has just happened to Mr Mehdi Hasan, an occasional character in the drama of this blog.

 

Many of you will recall Mr Hasan’s way with words, his debating technique, his interesting use of quotations, his mistaken account of my thoughts on the Olympics on a Radio 4 programme, his  controversial musings about cattle. Some of you won’t. If so, all you need to know, including lots of links,  can be found here http://dailym.ai/1fQ5ti6 

 

But now Mr Hasan has achieved something approaching greatness, though not necessarily in a good way.

 

Some of you may have seen him denouncing the Daily Mail, sister paper of my own Mail on Sunday, on the BBC’s ‘Question Time’ programme last Thursday, 3rd October 2012.  My,  did he let rip.  It was almost as if he had been thinking about the subject in advance. He concluded with this version of a now rather frequent format (borrowed, I believe, from a soft-drink commercial of many years ago) . He spoke of the  ‘immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting Daily Mail’.

 

An interesting set of charges, all, shall we say, open to rebuttal. But that’s not what I’m here for today. The following day, the Daily Mail let it be known that Mr Hasan had, in July 2010, written to the Daily Mail’s editor, Paul Dacre,  asking to write for what he calls the ‘immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting Daily Mail’. Nor was this a perfunctory, going-through-the motions letter. Oh, no.

 

Amongst other things, he said the ‘immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting Daily Mail’ was apparently also a paper whose ‘passion, rigour, boldness and, of course, news values’  he had ‘always admired’. Always!  A rather potent word. But it did not apply, apparently,  last Thursday night, when the studio audience were clapping him with all their might.

 

Apparently he also admired the ‘immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting Daily Mail’, for ‘your relentless focus on the need for integrity in public life and your outspoken defence of faith, and Christian culture, in the face of attacks from militant atheists and secularists.’

 

He was ‘attracted’ by the ‘immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting’ Daily Mail’s ‘social conservatism on issues like marriage, the family, abortion and teenage pregnancies’.

 

Those who want  more details of this rather Dickensian outcome can easily find it out there on the World Wide Web, and there are many laughs to be had in doing so.

 

So which of these two rather distinct sides of Mr Hasan should we conclude is the real one?  

Mr Hasan doesn’t really speak to me these days, so I can’t ask him. I believe that this is a man possessed of enormous self-confidence. He’s always right, and he always knows it.  I love to contemplate him, because he makes me feel so shy, retiring and modest.

 

His allies have been complaining about what they regard as the unfair release of a private letter. I can’t quite see this. If someone gleefully insults your newspaper on national TV, after seeking actively to write for (and presumably be paid by) it, then he’s opened himself to such a reply.

 

And I’d note that, in his recent squabble with me, he made public his version of a private conversation with me, a version he couldn’t actually substantiate with shorthand notes, a recording or witnesses. Whereas I don’t think he’s disputing the wording of the letter.

 

I’d like to think we’d hear a bit less of him in future. But I doubt it. Since he first stormed into my e-mails many years ago, anxious to bombard me with his views of Israel, he’s grown, and grown and grown as a voice in our media. I think he will continue to do so.