How a media hack is born.

You know those cretinous hacks who climb aboard every populist bandwagon going?  Ever wondered where they came from?  Well now, the mystery is solved.

Here is a girlie who got herself up the duff without planning for it financially, quit a reasonable paying job without having something else lined up, had already spent her money on iPhone, TV, armchair (and a piano!) instead of saving for such eventualities - and now, thanks to her galactic ego, has allowed herself to be exploited, writing for peanuts at the HuffPo - and just when you thought you couldn't get much more sanctimonious, she boasts:

I speak at conferences on food poverty and food waste, have spoken in Parliament, and am off to the G8 summit as part of the Enough Food If campaign.

I have also moved into one bedroom in a shared house, which I share with my son, because despite some people’s assumptions, i’m not walking around with a fat cheque in my back pocket from my publishing deal, nor am I paid for my media work. I’m not out of the woods just yet.

I have been part of campaigns for Oxfam and Child Poverty Action Group, and am now a guest blogger for the Huffington Post, whose bio refers to me as ‘a passionate, if accidental, spokeswoman for the realities of poverty.’

So now she trots off to all the lefty NGO hunger events and select committee meetings (presumably at some else's expense), as though her few months of relative hardship in a first world country somehow puts her in solidarity with sub-Saharan Africa and the refugee camps of Syria.

On the back of this she will (probably) presume to lecture us all on things she knows nothing about on the pages of Komment Macht Frei - telling us how more should be done to help the needy.  She will then be a self-appointed expert on farming, nutrition and food processing just like Jamie Oliver, and Hugh Fearnly-Wittingless - and even do the odd spot on Radio 4 when most people are at work.

Having established herself as the nations foremost expert on cooking with tinned tomatoes, she will the be taken seriously by the bien pensants of the wider media because she's earned her poverty stripes, never letting the reality intrude that nobody in the mainstream media (especially the Telegraph) would have given her a second look were she not a twenty-something, literate, (somewhat) attractive female.  It's not like poor people or laptop wielding harpies are in short supply is it?  Mumsnet is replete with them, though usually they're bun-scoffing, double-buggy pushers in flip-flops and leggings. 

Next thing you know, she'll be on Question Time shouting down Ian Duncan-Smith (while trying her very hardest to suppress twinges of a regional accent) to rapturous applause from the carefully selected audience, while Owen Jones nods sagely in the background.  Born is another one of these middle class, self-regarding cretins who makes a career on the back of a few months of hardship (the same as virtually every student in the land has had) because she "knows what it's like to be poor and living off benefit".  She'll go far.  Maybe even the green benches.  I'm after you with the sick bucket.