Indigo Jo Blogs

Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective

I could have told them this

by · 21st April, 2006

Anyone who looks at The Spectator’s front page (if they are a site member) will notice a link to an apology to Lady Colin Campbell regarding an article by its columnist Taki Theodoracopoulos:

In his “High Life” column of 4 December 2004 (accidentally reproduced on this website as part of his 11 December 2004 column) Taki wrote that the author Lady Colin Campbell had once been a man who had persuaded her former husband to marry her by passing herself off as a woman. We accept that Lady Colin Campbell is a woman and had no need to pass herself off to her former husband as something she was not. We apologise to Lady Colin Campbell for the distress and embarrassment caused and have agreed to pay her damages and legal costs.

For anyone wondering, she’s Lady Colin because she was once married to an aristocrat called Lord Colin Campbell. Her real name is either Georgie or Georgia.

Lady Colin Campbell isn’t exactly a household name, but her status is fairly well-known and anyone who knows much about British high society (Taki’s column is called High Life) knows this (I know because I read it in a major newspaper). I can’t believe nobody at the Spectator knew, or would not have asked around before printing what Taki wrote. She is a female, who was mistaken for a male at birth due to genital malformations, and such babies were automatically assigned male gender because it was deemed advantageous to them, and because it was thought that people could adjust. She reverted to living as a female in early adulthood.

In my opinion, this just demonstrates that the Spectator under Boris Johnson was a sloppily-edited magazine - we can’t forget its hideously unbalanced coverage of the bombings last July. For an idea of the sort of person Taki is, he also wrote (at the time of the Pinochet extradition affair) that most of the people who wound up dead under Pinochet were basically Marxist troublemakers (I forget the actual terminology, but that was the gist of it). (Tags: .)

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