Camilla Long’s Speccy article about Amy Winehouse lacks any respect
Last year, Iain Dale attacked Camilla Long of the Sunday Times, for her awful interviewing and reporting (“The Menace that is Camilla Long“). Iain was, quite rightly, disgusted by Long’s mocking of Farage’s cancer and the fact he only had one testicle. Later that month she wrote a piece on Joanne Cash, the perspective Conservative candidate for my old constituency, Westminster North. In that Joanne Cash piece, Camilla Long used a tabloid technique that places her ethically somewhere between Johann Hari and a phone hacker (“Monday Morning: Mrs Speaker Vs. Joanne Cash“). I generally try to ignore her and since I don’t buy a hard copy Sunday Times anymore, I’m finding that rather easy.
Unfortunately, as I flicked through this weeks Speccy I find, to my disgust, an article penned by none other than Camilla Long. “Amy Winehouse became more helpless with every photograph” is just as vile as one would expect of her. Camilla’s fleeting admittance that, “at a fashion party in Shoreditch,” she “expected to dislike [Winehouse] … but was wholly different – warm and quiet and hearty, a ub chanteuses, oddly shy” does not justify the rest of her piece.
The article begins by launching into the debate over which story was bigger – Amy Winehouse’s death or the tragedy in Norway – and already you know the article’s off to a bad start. Camilla says “I wish I’d never seen her pictures of her disastrous performance in Serbia last month, knock-kneed and tottering like a broken hooker as her band wheezed, aghast, to a stop.” And then, following brief digs at Britney, Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan, she writes, “but with Amy things seemed ten times worse, unrelenting, endless, all-encompassing, all day, every day, ad infinitum, for real.” “All [Amy] wanted,” Camilla concludes, “was to live in the black and white Sixties nostalgia of her own music videos: the only images that did her justice.”
The moments where Camilla shows any sort of respect to Amy Winehouse are completely dwarfed by the disgusting tone she shows throughout. Amy Winehouse died last week, every negative comment one could make about her was printed when she was alive.
There is a respect for the dead that one should hold, no matter your disposition towards that person. There is no excuse to not give them that certain gratitude and, as one might expect having read Camilla Long’s other articles, she does not give that gratitude to Amy.
This, as far as I can tell, was the first time Camilla Long has appeared in the Spectator. I already have to ignore her in one of my favourite publications, I hope that this does not extend to another.
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I can’t really believe how absolutely you managed to misjudge the tone of the article. Camilla Long is clearly full of sympathy for the horrific way she’s been hounded by the tabloids, and the cruel way they portray her. It really is bizarre that you’ve got it so wrong.