I used to read the Guardian. I used to like reading the Guardian. For me it used to be the go to newspaper for media news and in depth reporting on stuff that might not have been covered by other newspapers. It once had an excellent and world beating picture desk who ran a stable of good and sometimes excellent photographers. It’s letters page and comment pages were filled with interesting points of view not all of which I agreed with but still informed me of a variety of viewpoints.

Fast forward to today and the Guardian is a shadow of what it once was. It’s become a home for the middle class activist left and their classist and often snobbish notions about how the world should be run. Gone are the days when you could look at the Guardian and see viewpoint diversity, now it’s a monoculture of a paper that I don’t think is fit to line my chickenhouse let alone take the time to read.

Julie Birchill has written a brilliant piece for the Spectator about the decline of the Guardian, a paper that once employed her at the turn of the 21^st century. She speaks of the cultish reverence that the paper has for the transgender issue, the dominance of the trans cult on the paper’s editorial policies, the hounding out of gender critical women from the Guardian’s staff. Ms Birchill also writes of the whiff of nepotism surrounding the editor’s decision to employ her husband to write a column for the paper and called some of the Guardian’s contributors, such as George Monbiot, ‘blowhards’.

But what damns the Guardian in Ms Birchill’s eyes is the paper’s descent in to what she calls ‘silliness’. She’s correct here. There’s many newspapers that have made mistakes, made the wrong call on a story or a press campaign or had editorial policies that have not worked. But these newspapers have survived because they have at least taken seriously the things that need to be taken as such. A paper that is seen by an increasing number of people as silly, as the Guardian now is, might not have any sort of long term future.

Ms Birchill said:

A newspaper can survive being callous, or hypocritical, or dishonest, but once a paper is branded as silly (those savagely amusing memes of Guardian writers getting upset about everything from asterisks to zebras) it’s a long haul back. And it couldn’t have come at a worse time, credibility-wise, with the news that, rather like Mitchell and Webb’s slowly comprehending Nazis, the holier-than-thou Guardian has been hectoring the rest of us from atop a platform made of the broken bodies of the slave trade all this time. 

As Jonathan Sumption wrote for Coffee House: ‘This has caused something like a nervous breakdown in the paper’s York Way offices. The editor, Katharine Viner, writes that the revelation made her “sick to my stomach”. The paper’s staff are said to be “tormented” by the thought. There have been abject public apologies, promises of amendment, and all the usual apparatus of cringing self-laceration.’

But will this awful revelation have any real effect on the bumptious blowhards who act as the Guardian’s star columnists? Will George Monbiot give up lecturing for Lent? Will Zoe Williams flagellate herself over the way we heteronormative types have overlooked the trials of trans people? Or will they keep telling the great unwashed how they should feel about everything from breakfast to Brexit while the paper’s sales dwindle and their heads disappear further up their fundaments?

Ms Birchill is correct, the Guardian is disappearing up where the sun don’t shine. It has become a paper of a monothought clique and that’s not what’s needed right now in Britain’s press world. What we need is a diversity of newspaper voices and the Guardian could have been part of that as it once was in the past. Sadly it doesn’t exactly looks as if the Guardian will be able to extract itself from its death spiral of silliness to become an organ that hosts a multitude of different views and voices.