Niki Shisler

Here’s a good one, you’ll laugh. Actually, you won’t. If you’re anything like me, your jaw will drop, you’ll vaguely wonder why you bother, before you realise that the only sane response is to bang your head repeatedly on the desk. So. The Evening Standard, that once great London paper, has given an agony column to Peaches Geldof. It’s called Peaches Teaches and readers are invited to send their problems in, for a response from the 20 year old socialite. Now, you may be thinking that this is likely to be some harmless guff about which shoes go with which frock, or perhaps the etiquette of round-buying at Mahiki, but you would be wrong. No, Ms Geldof, spoilt, sullen daughter of Bob whose drugs OD, 5 month marriage and bouts of shoplifting have put her in the public eye, is dispensing nuggets on career paths, relationship woes and fertility issues. I thought we’d reached the nadir of agony column advice when Jodie Marsh advised a man whose girlfriend refused to have anal intercourse to “slip it in anyway, when she’s not expecting it” (er, isn’t that rape, Jodie?). Peaches however, goes one better. One of her correspondents is a woman who is worried about how her sister’s overly-controlling, potentially abusive husband is making it extremely hard for the sister to have any contact with friends or family, Peaches advice to the woman is, essentially, to mind her own business. Never mind that two women in the UK die at the hands of their partner every week, or that the first sign of a problem is often the victim being increasingly isolated from the outside world.  

Clearly it’s no longer what’s on the inside that counts. Why would we turn for advice to someone who has, through education or experience, actual wisdom when, instead, we can have the imbecilic brain-fart of a self-publicist whose wealthy, pampered existence ensures she can’t even relate to her own generation? When Geldof’s micro-marriage went wrong she hopped on a plane (first class) and checked into a five-star hotel on the other side of the Altantic. This, presumably, is where she decided that if a woman really didn’t like her bullying spouse she’d simply leave him, and that the wife’s frantic family should probably, like, butt out and just, like, totally let her live her own life.  

The arrogance is breathtaking, and I’m not talking about Geldof who, as an idiot and a virtual child, can hardly be expected to turn down a job for which she is eminently – dangerously – unqualified. No, it’s the Standard who seem to believe that we will be so blinded by the dazzling lights of celebrity, that we won’t really notice they are telling us that a fool like Peaches has something, anything, to teach us. Except they almost certainly don’t really believe that. You see, for The Standard it’s pretty much a win/win situation. Readers are likely to respond to Peaches Teaches in one of two ways. A small number of readers (let’s call them ‘morons’) will think “Oh Peaches, I love her! She’s so cool and quirky, I bet she knows loads about life ‘n’ stuff” and will find her column an insight-filled breath of fresh air. A much larger group (and I’m referring to them as ‘sentient’) will be, much like me, horrified. But, and here’s the good bit for the new owners of The Standard, if enough horrified readers write in or, like I am here, blog about the absurdity of giving Geldof this platform, they can chalk it up as a result. These days it doesn’t really matter what people are saying about you, as long as they’re saying something. If Peaches Teaches provokes a big reaction, even if that reaction is entirely negative, it’s a hit. Better still, if an organisation like Shelter, the domestic violence charity, can be persuaded to make a statement condemning the shitty, dangerous advice doled out by the moronic Geldof brat... Well, you can’t buy that kind of publicity; good work everyone!

Peaches Teaches tells us everything we need to know about The Standard and its journalistic ‘standards’. Can anyone think of a worse person to be put in charge of an agony column? I know I can’t, and I have really tried. If The Standard had any interest at all in providing their readers with something useful, they would never have employed Geldof. Being informative is clearly not high on their list of priorities, pretty damning for a newspaper.