Allison Pearson: Hypocrite or Man-Hater?

Allison Pearson is currently a Daily Telegraph columnist. Before that, she was a Daily Mail columnist, having taken over from the late Lynda Lee-Potter, a highly regarded writer. Somehow, I can’t imagine Pearson ever commanding the respect Lee-Potter enjoyed. This is not just because Lee-Potter did not fritter away her time by writing lucrative but pisspoor chick-lit fiction such as I Don't Know How She Does It (latterly a Sarah Jessica Parker film vehicle) and I Think I Love You.

No, it’s also because Pearson is responsible for one of the nastiest, most callous pieces of ‘journalism’ I’ve seen for a while. In her Telegraph column recently she wrote on the subject of Tony Nicklinson [NOTE: Ms Pearson's employers have, happily for her, removed her article from their website. Even more happily for her readers, however, they can still read it thanks to the Wayback Machine]. Mr Nicklinson suffers from ‘locked-in syndrome’, a truly grim condition brought on by a stroke whilst holidaying in Athens in which his body is utterly paralysed from the neck down whilst his mind remains as sharp as ever. He is totally incapable of looking after himself, every physical need from feeding, going to the toilet to something as minor yet maddening as scratching an itch must be attended to by carers. So miserable is his life that he craves cancer and even wishes that he had not been saved from his stroke:

“Am I grateful that the Athens doctors saved my life?” Tony Nicklinson asks. “No, I am not. If I had my time again I would not have called the ambulance but let nature take its course.”

Mr Nicklinson is currently trying to persuade the High Court to allow people such as himself, who are fully alert and able to make rational decisions, the right to die by requesting that a doctor assist their suicide or even to actively kill them painlessly.

Allison Pearson is opposed to this. Fair enough, it is an incredibly sensitive and controversial issue, cutting right to the heart of what human dignity means and how far the rights of the individual should extend in relation to wider societal concerns about life and death. I can respect somebody’s view on a matter as sensitive as this even if opposed to mine if they express it with the respect such a serious subject demands. Unfortunately, Allison Pearson chooses, for some inexplicable reason, to trivialise and belittle both Mr Nicklinson’s life and his concerns.

First, she writes in a startlingly offhand pull-yourself-together tone:

Others suffer as he does – Professor Stephen Hawking comes to mind – but they make the best of the dreadful hand that fate has dealt them.

What is the relevance of this comparison? She may as well say that because some athletes can run a mile in under four minutes, why can’t we all? But she surpasses that with this statement, which is astonishing in its repulsive callousness:

Tony Nicklinson could refuse food, but his wife objects that starvation is a horrible way to die. Yet isn’t Tony Nicklinson’s argument that his life is too horrible to live? Legally, he already has the right to refuse medical intervention. He can sign a binding “advance decision” setting out the treatments he won’t consent to… If Mr Nicklinson gets a serious infection, highly likely for someone in his condition, then, without antibiotics, he will soon get the merciful release he seeks.

How compassionate, Allison! So it’s merely a choice between starvation and disease, is it? I’m only glad she didn’t write it in the run up to Guy Fawkes Night, otherwise she’d be recommending he could always flick the switch on his powered wheelchair and propel himself into the nearest bonfire.

By itself, this column would be depressing enough, the mark of a dead-hearted moralist posing as someone who cares about the dignity of life. But then Allison’s past comes back to haunt her in the form of a column she wrote for The Daily Mail in 2010 in which she movingly defends a mother, Kay Gilderdale, who killed her disabled daughter, Lynn, who was suffering irretrievably from ME:

Lynn Gilderdale was a 21st-century Lady of Shallot. The heroine of Tennyson's poem was under a curse that meant she was confined inside a castle and forbidden to look directly at the world… Lynn's utterly devoted mother, Kay, felt she had no choice but to help her daughter take her life. The life that she, Kay, had given her… In the end, the only dignity and independence left to the 31-year-old, who was in constant pain, was making the decision to die… I can hardly begin to imagine how Kay, a former nurse, steeled herself to give her daughter double her normal morphine dose… Then her mounting horror and panic when Lynn awoke in distress and Kay had to try again, first with crushed-up pills and finally with injections of air, in the hope of sending a fatal air bubble into her heart.

Suddenly, Allison Pearson is revealed as a hypocrite! Far be it for me to note that many people suffer as Lynn Gilderdale did, but they make the best of the dreadful hand that fate has dealt them. In Pearson’s eyes, Lynn Gilderdale is permitted her dignity by allowing her mother to kill her. But for Allison Pearson, Tony Nicklinson is not permitted any dignity, he must ‘…make the best of the dreadful hand that fate has dealt [him]’. At best, as far as Pearson is concerned, for Mr Nicklinson only the agonies of disease or starvation can release him because, after all, his life is already agony and bereft of dignity, so extending the pain and shame to the end doesn’t really matter, does it?

The cruelty, maliciousness and inconsistency of Allison Pearson’s positions would be amusing, were it not for the fact that what Mr Nicklinson advocates – the medically controlled ending of someone’s life – would have spared Lynn Gilderdale the thoroughly unedifying spectacle of her mother making a complete balls-up of killing her, and having to resort, in mounting panic, to three different methods to despatch her daughter! In what sense was Lynn Gilderdale’s death, all panic and horror and pain at the last, ‘dignified’?

And why is Mrs Gilderdale a heroine, but Mr Nicklinson a heretic? Is it because mothers are inherently good, saints in female guise, whereas men are evil and not to be permitted a moral choice? In short, is Allison Pearson a Hypocrite or a Man Hater? Repeated requests to her by twitter to justify her position have failed to elicit a response, so I must leave the reader to decide what she is. Either way, it ain’t pretty…

Happily, the reaction of Telegraph readers to Pearson’s article has been almost wholly negative. Indulge me while I quote one of my favourite comments in full:

Copingmechanism
Allison, I don't make it a habit to wish harm on a person; but in your case I think the desire is wholly justified. We can only hope that you end suffering an appalling quality of life in the same vein as poor Mr. Nicklinson. Suffice it to say, it is likely the only way in which bottom-feeding scum such as yourself might be compelled to feel a twinkling of empathy to him and many others in his circumstances; dreary, narcissistic personality-disordered as you are.
How a fellow human being can muster such a repulsive mind-set as yours really is beyond rational comprehension. There is no Hell (we'll leave the god-bothering to addled individuals such as yourself), but if there was one based on moral consequentialism, you'd be at the front of the queue.

Finally, and most amusingly, the coruscating American comic commentator Doug Stanhope has been accused of bullying Pearson by Twitter! As if the fetid rancid harpy that is Allison Pearson could ever be bullied – surely it is she who does the bullying? Though only of the most helpless…

UPDATE
William Peck (who commented below) has written an excellent article on his blog in which he details not merely the grotesque ironies in Pearson's original piece but also the response of the Catholic Herald, the latter of which makes potentially libellous and (not at all potentially but actually) ill-supported accusations against the Belgian Health Service. And Mr Peck also includes quotes from more of Pearson's witless supporters and defenders, accompanied by pithy commentary. Well worth a read, though the sheer idiocy, hypocrisy and mendacity he reveals may cause symptoms of extreme irritation...