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Daily Mail's 'Legs-it' front page a reflection of plain English public stupidity

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Nirpal Dhaliwal
Nirpal DhaliwalMar 30, 2017 | 12:47

Daily Mail's 'Legs-it' front page a reflection of plain English public stupidity

Brexit has, momentarily, been overshadowed by "Legs-it". The Daily Mail ran a front-page spread of Prime Minister Theresa May sat beside Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland's first minister, in which it compared the women's legs. The scorn this has attracted has been rebuffed by the paper, that told its critics to "get a life".

May played along with this garbage, saying the attention given to her body was just "a bit of fun". But she would: only the US president induces more a servile craven response in British leaders than the headline writers of the Daily Mail. British prime ministers – of the Left and Right – live in terror of them.

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The Daily Mail is easily the most important newspaper in Britain, telepathically connected to the bitterness, mediocrity, low aspirations, and neurotic plain stupidity of the lumpen Anglotariat. It panders to every prejudice and ignorance that blights the British public: immigrants, homosexuals, the EU and powerful women all routinely suffer its spite and snide asides.

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The Daily Mail ran a front-page spread of Prime Minister Theresa May sat beside Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland's first minister, in which it compared the women's legs.

Its hold over the nation is vampire-like: while the paper thrives and grows ever more influential, the nation grows ever more insular, fractious, mean-spirited and dumb. The Mail is a painfully accurate daily barometer of how dumb the British are: indeed, it is an hourglass that, with every moronic nasty piece it publishes, counts down the seconds to their looming extinction. A population that is so in thrall to such rubbish has no future.

Sarah Vine, in the article she wrote accompanying the spread – supposedly a comment on the leaders' meeting to discuss Scotland's possible secession post-Brexit – opined: "what stands out here are the legs. There is no doubt that both women consider their pins to be the finest weapon in their physical arsenal. Consequently, both have been unsheathed. May’s famously long extremities are demurely arranged in her customary finishing-school stance… a studied pose that reminds us that for all her confidence, always respectful and anxious not to put a foot wrong."

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This is what passes for political thought among the witless provincial Anglotariat who buy the Mail.

Nicola Sturgeon's legs on the other hand, Vine declared, are "undeniably more shapely… altogether more flirty, tantalisingly crossed, with the dominant leg pointing towards her audience. It’s a direct attempt at seduction: her stiletto is not quite dangling off her foot, but it could be. 'Come, succumb to my revolutionary allure,' she seems to be saying. 'You know you want to'.''

The shameless idiocy of all this is astonishing, given that Britain is now leaving the EU and facing its biggest existential crisis since World War Two. Scotland and Northern Ireland could feasibly break from the UK, and the country is now negotiating with an EU that wants to see it suffer in order to deter other recalcitrant states from leaving.

But the Mail's focus on nonsense such as politicians' legs is simply its natural pandering to the complacent head-in-the-sand psychology of a public that having clamoured for a Brexit in the belief that it would make Britain great again, now wants to ignore the reality that no such future ever existed for it.

Britain has now entered the process of realising how weak and marginal it is in the world: a reality the EU sheltered it from for 44 years, and from which it now has nowhere to hide.

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The Mail receives a lot of opprobrium for its content, but the real poison is not what the newspaper publishes but the gossipy stupidity and fatal petty-mindedness of the nation that buys into it.

Last updated: March 30, 2017 | 12:47
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