Camilla Long

"I'm quite relieved that Nigel Farage MEP has only one testicle. When the former leader of the UK Independence party (UKIP) had the other removed in 1987 because of cancer, the doctors offered him an artificial replacement to give him "greater social confidence". But to watch him screaming at Herman Van Rompuy as he did last month, saying the European council president had the "charisma of a damp rag", tearing around with a loudhailer on his campaign to oust John Bercow, the Commons Speaker, from his Buckingham seat, working "100-hour weeks", inhaling whole packs of Rothmans and choffing down hundreds and hundreds of pints, I dread to think what he would be like with ... two."

"Actually, I'm feeling a little exhausted by the constant badinage — chatting with [[Piers Morgan|[Piers] Morgan]] is like endlessly throwing a stick for a demented borzoi, back and forth, back and forth, to the extent that after one particularly long and tiring session, I finally call him a tosser. He is thrilled: "Ha, ha, she cracks!" he says."

"The only genuine flash of insecurity comes halfway through the interview when I remember to congratulate him on his performance in Shame. But embarrassed? No, he is assured, confident, smooth, an actor of talent and depth. And I couldn’t help but notice he has an enormous penis, too. Would he have done the film if he was less well-endowed? "Ahhhh." His eyebrows shoot up. "That’s kind of you to say. I didn’t have any references to measure it against. I figured it was average." Average? Come on. "No! I’m serious. I don’t check out..." Other men at the gym? "I don’t really go to the gym," he shakes his head. "Obviously I figured I didn't really have a small penis. Would I have done it if I didn’t have whatever-sized penis? I didn’t think about that.""

"Personally, I like his playful recklessness and feel quite certain that he would willingly show me his penis, given slightly different circumstances and a bucket of champagne. Stupid me for not asking — he admits, "I like getting naked"."

"The novelist Rachel Cusk has written a book about the collapse of her marriage which is, quite simply, bizarre."

"Cusk herself seems extraordinary — a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish. She tramples anyone close to her, especially [second husband [[w:Adrian Clarke (photographer)|Adrian] Clarke]], whom she has forced to give up his job in order to look after the kids."

"Perhaps the nastiest attack is reserved for someone outside the family: a description of a one-legged landlady who fails to provide Cusk with hot and cold running lattes on a riding holiday in Devon."

"She rips into her latest meat with all the poison and vigour of her earliest memoir, A Life's Work, an excoriating account of pregnancy and motherhood she wrote in 2001. She was flamed then by the critics for her self-absorption and fearlessness — and there's plenty to get the blood circulating in this book, too."

"What have we done to deserve a man who slept with 2,000 women telling us what to think about politics, and a man who addresses the nation through his teddy telling us what to think about class? Some people say judge a society by the way it treats its women. Others say judge a society by the way it treats its prisoners. I say judge a society on the people it offers as its greatest thinkers. Our society’s leading public intellectual has admitted mistreating women and is famous for sticking a Barbie up his bottom on stage, so make what you will of that."

"As the ceremony started and magic finally began to seep in, it became clear what sort of magic this was: it was the full panto, rabbit-out-of-the-hat, balloon-animal type of magic, rather than the divine right of kings."

"[On lockdown and social distancing during the pandemic restrictions] It was fine. [...] I'm actually not that sociable, you know? I hate people. [...] That was a joke, for the record. [...] No. It's actually not a joke. It's not a joke."

"It's weird when someone close to you is arrested. It's as if they’ve been deleted: there’s a stream of text messages as normal, and then there isn't. You think, at first: oh, he hasn’t got reception. Then you think: well, he can't still not have reception. Hertfordshire isn't Lapland. Where is he? For an hour I thought Ben had had a car accident and was unconscious in hospital or dead."

"You look at the litany of moaning and showboating — never more on display than last week at the empty fawnathon over poor Volodymyr Zelensky — and think: MPs are so out of touch with what ordinary people want, they’ll be giving themselves medals next. And that, as it happens, is exactly what some MPs are proposing. To say I howled when I read the recommendations in a new report about "supporting MPs at their point of departure from elected office" is to understate how horrifying and revealing it was."

"Why does Stanley Johnson even want a knighthood? ... Scan his CV and you will see how incredibly easy life has been for him. He comes from a generation of men for whom jobs, wives, money and houses fell like confetti — knighthoods grew on trees. You can still see the sheer power of this system in, say, the behaviour of Fiona Bruce on Question Time on Thursday, when she rushed to defend Stanley against accusations he'd abused his first wife: friends of his said it was a "one-off", she claimed. "He hit me many times, over many years," is in fact what Charlotte Johnson said not long before she died in 2021."

"I must say, as an avowed lifelong anti-monarchist myself, I find it tiresome when I am lumped in with speaking-clock part-timers like [[Steve Coogan|[Steve] Coogan]], Jeremy "Donkey Jacket@ Corbyn and the muppets from Republic, whose idea of a protest is off-the-peg Just Stop Oil-style stunting. They just don’t get it. If you truly want to get rid of the monarchy, it is a full-time job."

"Why can't women just love having babies? Is it too laughable, parochial, bourgeois not to obsess over your career? If there is one thing I wish had been different at my hard, driven, academic school, it's that no one, not a single teacher, said to me: "Look, by the way, there's this thing that might happen in the middle of your life and it's going to be amazing. Make space for it, because it’s going to be a lot, lot better than getting 87 per cent in Latin." But no one ever did."

"One young man summed things up towards the desperate, tired end. "Is there any policy you can offer me that would positively impact my life?" he whinnied. The sense of hurt entitlement and rage: me, me, me. Is Sunak a political vending machine? That's where politics is now: give me what I demand at all times."