Anne Robinson was a reporter and television personality who was born on Merseyside in 1944. From 2000 she established a strong public profile on both sides of the Atlantic with the television quiz show The Weakest Link — much talked of in its day for the calculated insolence of its approach.  Robinson was at that time a personable woman in her middle fifties; her function in the programme was to fascinate viewers with her rudeness towards contestants.

Robinson boarded at a southern Catholic private school till she was sixteen, leaving with four ‘O’ levels which included Cookery and Religious Instruction. She briefly attended a finishing school in Paris, and after a desultory year back on Merseyside had various small jobs in London television and journalism. She made the best use of her looks to win a position on the Daily Mail during 1967. (This by her own account, though the photographs show her to have been a rather dumpy 20-year-old; she has been one of those women who have grown more handsome in their forties: a fact which has its part in explaining the late peak in Robinson’s public career.)

In 2001 she published an autobiography called Memoirs of an Unfit Mother which is essentially an extended and not very coherent exercise in self-justification. The book has little worth as self-analysis, and was no doubt intended to cash in on Robindon’s TV fame while it lasted. It has value for the account it gives of certain professional circles in London during the last third of the twentieth century. Robinson uses it to develop her view of some of her family, to explain her career, and to try and provide a perspective on the alcoholism of her late twenties and thirties — which she tends to talk up as a force external to herself which explains her marital breakdown and the loss of her daughter’s custody to the husband she had married in 1968 (Charles Davies of the Daily Mail, who later became Murdoch’s editor at The Times).

Robinson misinforms as she sees fit; name-drops fearlessly; takes her opportunity to deliver various crushing retorts decades after the minor slights which prompted them; lavishes on herself many vague testimonials and some unearned qualifications.  She freely launches attacks on those groups — teachers, lawyers, ‘the Establishment’, and men as a class — whom she blames for her numerous mistakes. Her account of an episode in which she masturbates a casual acquaintance is emblematic of the relationship she claims with the world: innocent on her part, exploitative on the part of the world. The reader will judge for himself the credibility of Robinson’s claim that she was just a passive naïf:

“I was still a Catholic Crosby girl at heart. And when one day I was put to the test, I treated the episode exactly as a nice Crosby girl could be relied on to do. I hardly knew Ned and couldn’t imagine how he had got my phone number. He was an American who had lived above a gang of us when we briefly shared the furnished flat in Queen’s Gate. … Ned was a voice coach on an American movie being made in Britain. In the call he fixed a date with me. I imagined we were going out to dinner and dressed accordingly. He sailed into my flat in Sloane Square and within seconds he had dropped his trousers and asked me to ‘pull him off’.

“I had no idea what was happening. I held on to his anatomy like I would an old piece of piping. He came, hauled up his trousers and announced he had another appointment. After he left I wasn’t entirely sure I hadn’t imagined it all.”

It’s a good tale anyway. She relates other parallel episodes, in which she confesses to taking this or that unhappy step not because she decided or wanted to, or got anything out of it, but because she was the innocent dupe of circumstance:

“It was in the autumn of 1969 [about twenty months after her wedding] that I fell into an affair. I say ‘fell into’ because typically I didn’t sit down and plan it. It was not calculated. He was a member of the Insight team. Tall and gregarious. If not a titled barrister he was built along the same lines. He was also married. It began with the odd lunch date. We somehow contrived to spend an evening together in Leicester. I prepared myself for the night to come by arriving at the hotel several drinks ahead. That way I wouldn’t have to think too long and hard about what I was getting into. I simply wanted someone to hold and cuddle me who wouldn’t the next morning be listing my shortcomings. Sex wasn’t the point, uncritical companionship was. I didn’t realise that my chosen companion was a man unhappy in his home life who took his pleasures as they became available.”

And so the lapse. The taking pleasures as they become available is always someone else’s fault. Robinson is ever willing to extend to herself a generosity of interpretation which she notably withholds from others.

The fact is that by her own report she goes through life exploiting people. Many of those around her try to communicate this truth about herself (a psychiatrist, her mother, her daughter, her second husband, her friend Jill Foot), but Robinson records their efforts while maintaining her determination not to hear. She spends much of her energy on frightening her more vulnerable acquaintance into silence. Despite many conventional claims to the contrary in the ‘self help’ style, Robinson’s capacity to learn from experience seems limited indeed. The point is attested in her book’s dedication, which is addressed in part to her mother: “who taught me that the biggest time saver is money. And if you rack up enough of it, you can spend the time saved shopping”. It is just this aggressive vacuity that causes so much unhappiness in her life, and in the lives that come into contact with hers. So brazen is her empty materialism, and her ignorance of herself, that the reader is left wondering whether she is conscious of how her book displays her: as self-centred, acquisitive, ruthless, vapid.

She married an unsuitable husband in part to secure her job at the Daily Mail, and the pair took a free honeymoon in Teneriffe on the understanding that they would silently repay the travel company with a laudatory article in their paper — an article which was never written. Robinson recounts that she was unfaithful at least twice during her short first marriage, procured one abortion and flirted with a second (lower-middle-class convent girl though she was). Both she and her husband hired private detectives to spy on each other during their run-up to divorce, and Robinson’s prospective second husband (another journalist, John Penrose) was provoked to testify against her during the custody case over her infant daughter. Either on the verge of marrying this selfsame John Penrose in 1980, or some time afterwards, Robinson consulted the loathed solicitor who had earlier represented her first husband, thinking to herself “who better to seek advice from about protecting my assets from the next husband?”  She shared financial arrangements, including a bank account, with Penrose until her work became more lucrative than his, and then she insisted on separate finances — and at last separation altogether.  Finding herself alone, however, she engineered his return after a couple of years. Another lawyer she employed had to threaten to possess her house before she paid his bill. All these facts she piles up against herself as though there were nothing in the least reprehensible about them. At numerous points, as with the lawyer just mentioned, she represented herself as sexually available to men, and then affected outrage when they took a nibble at her bait. She makes no bones about her view that men are fools to be bilked for all they are worth.

In all her treacherous behaviour Robinson never betrays any real moral sense. She assuages her guilt with a general and unconvincing mea culpa in retrospect. Her massive egoism apparently has its main source in nothing more mysterious than her own nature. Her stance has been — and it persisted at the time she was writing her book — that she deserves as of right an outsize share of all the good things that life has to offer. She imagines that any difficulties in life exist only for the perverse, specific purpose of limiting Anne Robinson’s material enjoyment. She spends her adulthood cramming desirable things down her neck, applying as a concomitant of this that Thatcherite revision of the New Testament teaching: “Do one to others before they do one to you.” She is an example of the hard-nosed tele-age celebrity who senses that in an epoch dominated by mass culture notoriety is no less profitable than distinction. She is all surface and little substance, short on finesse, on accuracy — on most of the higher virtues, which she would no doubt dismiss as pretension, or a racket.

It also happens that she lacks most of the writerly graces. Her tin ear for the language leads to her commonly mismatching idioms without any notion of her violence. She is heavily reliant on obvious effects, stereotype, cliché. She shows us that she was a brutal reporter but never a thoughtful journalist, and that she never came within rocket range of being a serious writer. None of this would be worth mentioning were it not for the fact that she cherishes a fantasy of herself as a writer — dreams of emulating Brendan Behan whom, like others she mentions, she gives no indication of having read. She seems to believe that she has some literary claim on our attention, and there is a drab little episode where she trails around Manchester after Norman Mailer trying to add him to her collection of celebrities — but the great man has little to say to her. It is symptomatic of her philistinism that a passage beginning with the following words should have survived into her book despite the services of a paid copy-editor and what Robinson calls the “immense professional wisdom” of her sisterly commissioning editor at Little, Brown & Co.: “There is a story of George Orwell journeying to the north-east to chronicle the effects of poverty and deprivation during the worst years of the Depression … “ (p. 11). There is indeed such a story; it is called The Road to Wigan Pier, Wigan being a wellknown town about forty miles from Robinson’s birthplace in the English Northwest. There is no sign anywhere that Robinson has any acquaintance with Wigan Pier or with any other book by ‘Orwell’ (though his name is dropped twice again, later on). In a somewhat similar way, she repeatedly and confusedly invokes feminism, to which she had no commitment during its crusading days and whose theory she obviously has little detailed knowledge of. She drags it in as a vague, irrefutable underpinning to her run-of-the-mill selfishness. There are constant rhetorical mentions of The Female Eunuch but there is nowhere any knowledgeable account of it.

It is not kind to cavil at the ignorant, but Robinson aggravates the reader a good deal.  A different kind of sloppiness, hard to admire in a career journalist, is her writing at the end of the millennium that the casualties of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings numbered 17 dead and 120 injured (p. 150), when the casualty figures had long been established as 21 killed and 162 injured. A journalist of Robinson’s hide may easily dismiss the difference as pedantic. What are a few dozen people dead or mangled to someone who is concentrated on shopping, bedding the next useable man, fixed on building her career out of any materials that come to hand?

And amid all this we have to battle Robinson’s unattractive prose, and ever and anon her wobbly grammar. The grammar is mentionable in a writer who is not above sallying forth in the English way to rout her social inferiors (as she believes them to be) with a sneer at their solecisms. It would risk the reader’s patience to list here Robinson’s numerous slips.  A couple of garbled sentences may stand as illustrating her limitations as grammarian and stylist:

“I didn’t appreciate that to have introduced your spouse (former gifted drunk) to your newspaper (your boys’ own club) and then watch as those boys chose to promote her out of all recognition was hard to swallow.”

“The unsatisfactory explanation is that clever, grown-up, quick-witted, decent people frequently make decisions that are as irresponsible as those made by half-educated youngsters that at least gives them an excuse not to know better.”

In the new and debased civilisation which Robinson and her media colleagues have helped gift to us — in which intellectual life is experienced mostly at the level of an Oprah ‘special’ or a gig with Michael Parkinson — grammar, like fact, has low priority. The main thing always is to be promoting yourself and your attitude. You are not going to succeed on the greasy pole anyway if you know so much that it inhibits your climbing.

Robinson’s sanitised résumé is presented to us as part of her publisher’s blurb: “She began her Fleet Street career at the Daily Mail in 1967, before moving to the Sunday Times, where she stayed for a decade. In 1979 she joined the Mirror, and was made assistant editor the following year, the only woman in Fleet Street in that position. Subsequently she became a star columnist. In 1993 she joined Today as a columnist, a position she would go on to hold at the Sun, the Daily Express and The Times.” It is hard to see the point of such nonsense when Robinson’s book undercuts it at such detailed length. It would not be gallant to set about determining how much of her résumé is strictly factual. Who wants to take a sledgehammer to such a fragile nut? We’re being taken for dopes, however, if we’re expected not to notice that the blurb blandly ignores the detail that we’re given as the meat of Robinson’s memoir. For example, the detail that she lost her Sunday Times job after being hauled off drunk by ambulance from one of the office lavatories; that she was eased out of the Mirror job simply by being dropped from the duty roster. Her book tells us that lying is the order of the day in Fleet Street, and there is nothing in her book to hint that she’s ever found it difficult to live in that ethos. She is proud of her feat in securing her job at the Sunday Times by claiming ‘A’ Levels she didn’t have — had not even thought of studying for.  Later on, when she was working with the Liverpool Echo (a newspaper so provincial it’s not named in the blurb), she was too drunk to file her copy on a papal election and so it was written and filed by her husband.  That’s an act of deception which in some fields of writing would be regarded as fraud and perhaps met with dismissal. In writing her column for the Daily Mirror she is not above conveying “The happy picture of a busy wife and mother struggling with the everyday ups and downs of normal life”.  (‘Having it all’, ‘juggling the work-life balance’.) Even though she is in fact a recovering or not-recovering alcoholic whose only child lives in another country and sees her on access visits once a fortnight. Censoriousness is of course unattractive, but we are entitled to our dislike of Robinson’s cheerful greed, mendacity, egoism. We’re entitled to reflect that it’s parenting such as hers that has left us our present parlous civilisation. She betrays no inkling of any betrayal that may be involved in her falsifications to readers — of how her lying might influence the attitudes and lives of millions of readers.

It becomes obvious from Robinson’s own recital that she has made a practical success of her life through calculation, duplicity, determined social climbing, the judicious outlay of cash and sexual favours: all of which amount to what she would call ‘realism’. Despite her repining at the female lot, she made a career by pushing herself forward as “the unashamed crumpet”.  Her conviction all men are rogues gives her the licence to behave in whatever way’s advantageous. She would like us to see her as Moll Flanders in retirement, as the madam with a heart of gold. She’d be wholly indifferent to our view of her as a dreary parasite. She has the money in the bank to prove she’s not as dreary as we are.

Robinson has represented in Britain the more repellent kind of American-style media performer: self-indulgent and self-promoting, obvious, shallow, unprincipled. At the same time she’s embodied the Thatcherite new Briton, hard and mean. She would protest that there is nothing wrong with any of these attributes — that they are normal constituents of life and biological assets. You’ll make your life much harder if you leave them out of your toolbox. She has made a career out of gratifying our lowest expectations, out of that low fascination which serves as the base of modern mass entertainment. A person behaving badly in public, triumphant and unabashed about abandoning every scruple, every hint of traditional manners — that’s the best we should look for.

Robinson’s egomania is absurd and wearing. It causes her (for instance) to draw close parallels between herself and Margaret Thatcher on the one hand, with Diana Spencer on the other. She learns from these successful women — and also from Robert Maxwell, the fraud and suicide with whom she’s had dealings. The lesson is that no fraud is so outrageous that it cannot be carried off. She almost gives the impression that modern British history has consisted largely of Anne Robinson’s biography, with a few elections and royal weddings tacked on at the margin. As we trudge through her chronicle, her permanent discontent — actuated by her native vanity, greed and unawareness — emerges as her chief characteristic.

Since one could easily conclude that Anne Robinson is mere performance, it is necessary to note that behind the patchwork tats of unscrupulous behaviour which she offers as her life, there hangs a more sombre and solid backdrop of unscrupulousness: the real person. This is the actuality which her nature will not acknowledge, to which indeed she appears to have no psychical access. Constantly reminding us of her supposed abilities — how she is a brilliant prospective journalist, the golden girl with the huge talent and a glittering future — she grows ever less believable. Not much of her alleged talent is manifest in her book. On a sober assessment she seems a near-empty vessel, maladroit in thought and language, out of touch with her own fundamental confusions. However, the fact that she seems not to notice (for instance) her assumption that worldly success equates with ability does give us insight into the world she inhabits. Most of the notable people she has to do with are worldly successes — and that is all. Thatcher, Diana Spencer, Robert Maxwell, Jimmy Greaves and other, lesser lights have all discovered some trick of bullying or flattering or otherwise pleasing people so that they (the masses) are willing to shower money and adulation on these heroes. It’s noticeable that individuals who have a bit more substance to them tend to be silent around Robinson (at least she does not report their saying much). Her own father and brother fall into this category; as do Mailer and Michael Foot. Is it our imagination that these people, having listened to Robinson prattling on about herself in her perfumed accent, fall silent rather than battle against such mind-jamming noise?

The success of an individual like Robinson is real — in her case it expressed itself at the end of the millennium (as she tell us) in the form of hundreds of thousands of pounds each year in salary, and more offers of work than she could possibly accept. Her book leaves us a bit puzzled about this result. In the real world such an outcome is often attributable to charm: to some particular way a person has of inspiring affection or confidence or admiration, any of which forms of approval the opportunist may convert to cash. Because the setting in which this charm operates is normally social and physical — it is a matter of finding people fun at dinner parties and brushing your breasts up against them in quiet moments — it can be difficult to convey in print, except for a writer of talent. Robinson’s writerly charms are minimal; writing (as we have seen) is not her medium. For all her repeated nervous assurances about her brilliance, her book suggests that her cognitive ability — her IQ — is about the middle of the range. Her general knowledge in such traditional areas as history, politics, the arts, languages, seems rather below average, though she would no doubt score better on ephemeral knowledge: on consumer goods, contemporary fashion and celebrity, television and the like. Where she appears to win every contest is in her pushiness: in sheer selfish drive.

Capacity and content aside, her mind is wholly unattractive. It offers us neither the æsthetic pleasures of subtlety, quickness, originality; nor such moral qualities as tolerance, breadth, judgement. The nature of Robinson’s characteristic thinking may be demonstrated by this anecdote which rises out of her final months at the Sunday Times — a yarn she presumably repeats because she fails to recognise the point that glares out of it:

“One day in the newsroom I turned to see another reporter mimicking my drunken speech. In a period when my memory was so frequently wiped out by the effects of my drinking it is interesting how acts of cruelty and acts of kindness stand out vividly. The reporter who mocked my condition would years later ask for an appointment to see me when I was a newspaper executive, in the hope of getting some work. If he had been any good I would have used him. But sadly he was no more talented ten years on than he was when he was enjoying my state that day.”

Vengeance is mine, saith the trull.

This is one of numerous passages where she writes like the vengeful, unconsciously self-revealing ignoramus she is. Apart from publicly triumphing over any she feels have injured her, Robinson throughout her retrospect sheets home her troubles to a domineering mother, to gender prejudice in her profession and to alcoholism.  No question but that each of these has been an influence; however, these emphases deliberately miss the point. The key fact about Anne Robinson is that she has caused massive inconvenience and distress to those around her through her own defects of personality, that she has manufactured human misery out of herself, whether as a result of poor maternal training, her own chemical imbalance, or a combination of these and other factors. Her chief vice has been the untruthfulness in which her book is so eloquent. We may say, finally, that there is no stronger argument for education than a person as ill-educated as Anne Robinson. And this reminds us to mention an odd detail. One of her book’s photographs appears to show Robinson receiving an honorary degree, though neither the text nor the blurb refers to such an event. It is hard to imagine her letting that opportunity for self-advertisement slip. It is equally hard to imagine any reputable institution bestowing such an honour on her, even though she apparently has the contacts to pull the strings, and would be willing to pay an institution handsomely for public recognition ….

No doubt we should dismiss her from our minds as nothing more than a vulgar, crowd-pleasing entertainer. It is painful to think of the national media in the hands of such dangerously thoughtless individuals, and frightening to record (as illustration of the point) that Robinson — then a hopeless alcoholic and briefly preoccupied with screwing one of the defence lawyers — was in 1975 sent to Lancaster by the Sunday Times to cover the trial of the ‘Birmingham Six’.

Robinson chunters on in her book for what seems more than its actual 105,000 words. Towards the end of Memoirs of an Unfit Mother she makes a desperate and unfamiliar attempt to think. This is not successful. After striving hard for some nugget of wisdom, she offers the thought that “biology decrees that we will never entirely rid ourselves of being women”.  We can only agree. And so she concludes, with most of her delusions still thick about her head — on a shopping spree in New York which she believes validates the trail of errors that she has so depressingly, unwittingly documented.