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For in her life as much as her work it's Julie's best aim to put her worst

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For in her life as much as her work it's Julie's best aim to put her worst foot forward; after all, why screw with a winning formula?She admitted to me that when she bailed out - for a vast tranche of payola - from her short-lived contract with the Express, her career was on the skids on the giant slalom "I thought the world had turned upside down on its axis It just seemed like madness. There was Tara-fucking-Palmer- Tompkinson and she was a columnist, and there was I taking the rubbish out. It was very amusing considering where I'd been a few years ago ... If I hadn't been so heavily tranquillised I'd've been a lot more hurt." And the failure inside the success burst into peals of raucous, throaty laughter.When Mrs Raven turned up the three of us went to a Chinese restaurant in central Brighton. The manager came up to thank Julie for "making my place famous" through a mention in a piece she'd written This was received with a certain unshowy dignity. Being with the two of them was another conundrum: the unprincipled harlot being best mates with the mother of her sibling lovers? But then this is also the woman whose ex-husband, having just concluded a gruelling divorce battle with her, then penned a radiant portrait of her for public consumption.And so I chugged away from Brighton thinking warmed-up things about Burchill, and felt warmer still when the fax and the card came; after all she was confirming my desire - so cannily identified by Lynn Barber - to find the good in everyone.

Of course she felt gutted about no longer having her child living with her - who wouldn't? Who doesn't? And who'd wish it to be portrayed any other way by the media? Certainly not her. But Burchill has big problems with the division between the private and the public in her life - just like the rest of the street she's spent her career grubbing around, and just like those who read what we produce. It was my wife, Deborah Orr, who, when editing the Guardian's Weekend magazine, gave Julie a way back in to serious opinion-forming, in the shape of a column of sufficient heft for the deployment of substantive ideas."Of course, it's all down to Deborah, the cosmic renaissance I was festering in a heap until she like ... She was the only one who'd give me a chance." So Burchill quite rightly, acknowledged the debt. She also acknowledged it by writing some superb copy, including a piece on her father which was plangently emotional.

This piece was clearly written by a woman with an evolved ethical perspective, and even insight into the vagaries of the fourth estate itself. Could she be the selfsame character who has made a large chunk of her career out of cheap ad hominem cracks and puerile cynicism?Why not? Life is easily that complex - and so are people. While I was in Australia for three weeks, Burchill was using the column for which she feels so indebted to immolate the sensibilities of what she's termed - with typical hand-biting fervour - "the liberal misogynist media". In a piece entitled "Why the Serbs are not the New Nazis and the Kosovans not the New Jews" she put on show a ghastly little gallimaufry of failed gags and sickening suppositions. It's Burchill falling heavily on the high wire of her own facetiousness so that it slices straight up into her underbelly - and ours.For, after all, it's we who pay her to do this - and we take our choice. If Burchill represents merely a deeply held conviction in the value of conviction, with no sign of an actual conviction itself, it can only be because Britain collectively displays these characteristics with such terrific aplomb. If the highly unprincipled Burchill is our lightning- rod, with her unerring sense of bad taste, then we should be scared - very scared After all, as I've reported, she is 1.

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