Barney Boom's Top Five Rotters
- 31.12.13 -

2013,  just like every year, has been a busy time for the Rotters of Great Britain. And what with our vaunted class system having a rather spiffing revival over the last few years, the UK’s ground has never been so fertile for Rotten behaviour. As the Rotters of our nation said a teary goodbye to their Cyborg queen in a glorious state ceremony this year, they also had causes to celebrate. The very expensive-to-the-gallon NHS was further dismantled and the pesky disabled were taxed out of their dirty little bedrooms. So, for the Rotters, 2013 was something of a mixed bag.

Of course, our leader of glory and renown, David Cameron had an exemplary year of Rotten behaviour, culminating in a selfie when he pretended to be asleep on a four-poster bed,  just like a normal bloke and everything. Between pouting in the House of Commons because the British public didn’t want to pour our money and our firstborns into a war and hypocritically falling over himself to tell everyone about how much he loved Nelson Mandela while the man’s corpse was still fresh, Cameron’s had a Rotten year. But he’s not the only one. Who else, a little more below the radar, have been Rotten in 2013?

Well, that’s what I’m going to tell you.

5) BT Advert guy

Beyond the usual suspects of Vladamir Putin, Ian Watkins and Justin Bieber, who are altogether more Rotten than this article can accommodate, one of the more unusual requests when I floated this subject on Twitter was the BT Advert Guy. He was suggested by my sister, no less, but please don’t assume that nepotism has anything to do with the inclusion of this out-and-out Rotter. He’s actually the biggest Rotter on TV. I’ve just been informed that his name is ‘Simon’ and that’s the perfect name for this absolute wet noodle of a handshake. It’s like some bright spark, probably called Russell, in the advertising agency said, ‘I know, let’s cross a young version of Mark from Peep Show with that googly-eyed one from My Family and create a several-year long advertising odyssey where this guy moves in with a load of students and then… well I dunno, he figures out how to make the internet work’. They add other points of interest like a MILF mum and girls he pulls that are way out of his league and two friends that are trying to get it on without him noticing but you don’t really remember them. You come away from the 30 second experiences with nothing more than a haunting revulsion of this lumberjack-shirted, cow-flick haired Rotter. And this year, to add insult to the injury of having to watch this performance play out for the last five years, he was especially Rotten when his advert meant that the Advertising Standards Authority reprimanded BT for making speed claims about their fibre optic broadband service, based on out-of-date data. I bet it was Simon’s Rotten fault.

4) Richard Littlejohn

This perennial Rotter had a relatively quiet year in 2013, presumably a little worn out from all the Rotten commentary he’s been slinging at the UK from his home in The States for the last few years. He wasn’t so tired, however, that he couldn’t help drive a person to a suicide by increasing the social stigma against transgender people in one of his classy columns in the favourite newspaper of Rotters everywhere, The Daily Mail. Schoolteacher Lucy Meadows was found dead after parental pressure and press attacks strongly contributed to her suicide, egged on by Littlejohn’s thoroughly Rotten little opus. ‘HE’S NOT ONLY IN THE WRONG BODY… HE’S IN THE WRONG JOB!’ it scoffed, pointing and raising its eyebrows. As if the stress and adjustment to taking a course of action to reassign your gender isn’t quite enough, we need Rotters like Littlejohn inferring that such people aren’t fit to work and, even more spitefully, that they are a danger to children.  Even with a suicide on his hands, Littlejohn was unrepentantly Rotten about the whole affair. It’s kind of sad that the muck of The Daily Mail is so thick and twisted and dirty and predictable that we no longer fully smell the stench of it on our society, like some hapless tramp who has got used to his own foul pong. If the Daily Mail hatched out of an egg today and we could see what genuine injury and harm it contributes to the fabric of our society, we’d surely BAN the Rotten thing, but that’d probably be what they want.
 

3) Boris Johnson

The majority of apolitical people understandably consider Mayor of London Boris Johnson as ‘alright’. You mention him and people tilt their heads, chuckle gently and go, ‘he’s alright actually, him’. And who is to blame them? His jolly moon-face, his fumbling about on bikes, his hilarious appearances on Have I Got News For You, and of course, his ubiquitous mop of funny, soft, golden, scruffable hair. But I’ m going to tell you something. I have always considered the man a prize, yellow-topped Rotter. And this year he’s really gone and proved it with his speech in November where he dropped his bumbling, lovable-rogue demeanour and sneak-attacked us with a broadside that would’ve made that dead Rotten harridan Thatcher blush. From atop his Mayoral throne, Bozza claimed that inequality that currently ravages our austere nation actually fosters ‘the spirit of envy’ and hence is good for our economy. He waffled on about the merits of the philosophy of Gordon Gekko(!) and posited that greed was a ‘valuable spur to economic activity’ before moving on to blathering about IQ’s correlation with equality and other such typical Rotten claptrap. Like Cameron and the rest of the Bullingdon Club Rotters, Boris and the gang have spent the last several years fabricating a straight-forward, middle-England, men-of-the-people façade around themselves that obscures the calculating, elitist Rotters within. Let’s suffer this fool gladly no more. 2013 is the year that Boris has truly proven himself a prize Rotter and never let it be said that he’s ‘alright’ again. Next time he’s on Have I Got News For You, please alert the rest of the room, make sure everyone’s sat down and say calmly and loudly ‘see him? That Boris? Rotter.’

2) Jamie Oliver

Oh what an absolutely Rotten year for Jamie Oliver. As middle-aged spread absorbs his once pukka young mockney frame he’s truly beginning his transition from young gastronomic gadabout to portly pillar of the Bwitish establishment. Mark my words, in ten years, the only way you’ll be able to tell him and Jeremy Clarkson apart is by the hair colour.  Somehow, alongside that fat tongue of his, Jamie managed to find space in his Rotten mouth to TWICE stick his foot in it during the space of one week in 2013. During Jamie’s first interview promoting one of his Rotten new ventures in the Radio Times, he proved how utterly out of touch, judgemental and thoroughly Rotten he’s become when he shared his Marie Antoinette-tinged thoughts on why the trampy people of Britain eat such shitty convenience food. And according to Jamie, it’s not simply because it’s cheap and they’re skint because they can’t possibly be poor because they’ve big tellys! And upon meeting these foul creatures Jamie explains ‘I just want to hug them and teleport them to the Sicilian street cleaner who has 25 mussels, 10 cherry tomatoes, and a packet of spaghetti for 60 pence, and knocks out the most amazing pasta.’ How patronisingly supercilious of you Jamie! See, the thing is, for all his talk on health food, that doesn’t sound like a particularly nourishing meal to me. Lots of carbs there, Jamie.  Not much of anything really. So just, say what you mean Jamie. It’s not about health is it? It’s about culture, Jamie. It’s a snobbery thing, Jamie. We should all go to the local farmer’s market and eat rustic food cooked on an Aga, smothered in a whole gallon of Olive Oil and served on a walnut plank with Jools before fucking around the canal bank on a scooter like a twat, Jamie. And then a week after he’d suffered our righteous indignation at that, he raised us a Rotten and brought back the conquering spirit of the empire, when he declared that that immigrant workers were stronger than their British counterparts who tended to ‘whinge’ about their hours. Oh, I’ve had quite enough of going on about him now. What an absolute Rotter.
 

1) Katie Hopkins

No Rotter has burned harder and more Rotten in 2013 than Katie Hopkins, this year’s answer to Samantha Brick. And, just like that other answer to a question no one asked, I can practically guarantee that in a year no one will be going on about her either. This year the almost comically repulsive Hopkins took trolling off the internet blogs and into the living rooms of the great unwashed. Having gained the unique kind can’t-change-the-channel infamy that odious people tend to achieve on some reality toss or other a couple of years ago, this Rotter of a woman was remarkable in her unshakable snootiness and pomposity. She wasn’t ashamed of it, hell, she was proud to be a Rotter! In early 2013, Hopkins was introduced to the world at large as a guest in live debates on the show of choice for early-rising Rotters everywhere, This Morning. Presumably there to animatedly and humorously represent traditional British values of peevishness and conceit, the show’s producers found they may have bitten off slightly more than they could chew when Hopkins went way beyond the call of duty in a frankly quite frightening diatribe about tattoos on women. While the other guest, an understandably affronted lady with a few relatively tasteful tattoos, didn’t know whether to shit or wind her watch, Holly Willoughby gently stood up to the nonsense and raised a cheer from inked Brits nationwide. The Rot continued later in the year when Hopkins cracked open a warm can of Rot on live TV that approached an almost fascist tirade, detailing why her kids are not allowed to play with kids with common names. This borderline-psychotic rant angered Willoughby enough to strongly retort and social media became truly alight with the sharing of this compelling showdown. In subsequent months, greedily propelled by the spotlight her foul trolling was affording her, Hopkins piled on the Rot in ghastly Tweets, joking about the skeggy name of a sick child on X Factor and, for good measure, cheering on Charles Saatchi for strangling his wife Nigella Lawson. However, it was on the day after a plane crash in Scotland when Hopkins took to Twitter and cracked a funny about low life-expectancy in Glasgow that her free-range chickens came home to roost. That was one Rotten statement too far and even the Rotten old Daily Mail was affronted enough to turn on this preposterous woman. As of now ITV say they have no plans to bring her back. So, maybe, hopefully, we’ll never have to hear from this absolute Rotter again. Perhaps, all in a year, the story of Katie Hopkins in the mainstream has shot its Rotten load. And that’s why, in 2013, Katie Hopkins is Rotter number one.

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