What's The Hari?

Although I have discovered in the last minute or so that he seems to have gone to the trouble of blocking me on Twitter, I must confess that I had quite forgotten about Johann Hari.

His re-emergence raises four issues.

The first is the extraordinary persistence in British public life of those who cheered on the invasion of Iraq, a position that made Hari almost unique in his generation, and entirely so in his generation of public commentators on the Left.

It is true that Hari eventually recanted. But not until 2006. At that point, the dogs of war were set on him. He is particularly loathed by Damian Thompson, so he must have some good points.

Those who remained uncritically pro-war have never suffered the slightest adverse consequence, and even GI Johann is allowed to come back.

Secondly, Hari's employment pioneered the practice of routinely using well-connected current students and very recent graduates as regular, big name opinion-formers.

That is now endemic. Correspondingly, student doings are reported, and commented upon, as if they were news.

Damian Thompson again, of course. A number of very young men secured advancement by succumbing, so to speak, to the advances of Mother Mabel.

Readers of Telegraph Blogs, and occasionally of the very Daily Telegraph herself, were therefore treated to their emissions, at least while each of them remained flavour of the month.

But it all started with Johann Hari.

Perhaps Mabel's hostility derived from the fact of Dirty Hari's progress without having passed through her? Perhaps the ephebe once resisted at one of those parties? Who knows?

Thirdly, there is the continuing failure of people from working-class backgrounds to secure access to the media, overwhelmingly due to the internship system, which is itself not unconnected to the shenanigans of the likes of Damian Thompson.

Hari's success always gave the lie to his claims to proletarian identity. He was not educated in the state sector until his Sixth Form college, and that was in Finchley. In that sense, he was not, and he is not, even middle class.

And the fourth point is that Hari has reappeared among us in order to promote the fashionable view of drugs.

Like Russell Brand, he is lining up with the Adam Smith Institute and all of that crowd, including a Chancellor who wept at Margaret Thatcher's funeral and who now counts drugs (and prostitution) towards our Gross Domestic Product, against the last Labour Government in general and its very ferociously anti-drugs final Home Secretary in particular.

As Tony Blair once said to Alan Johnson, "Gosh, you really are working-class, aren't you?" Gosh, he really is. A book, or even an article, by Johnson on loving the music while hating the drugs would be very well worth reading. A television programme by him on that theme would be very well worth watching.

But instead, we have to make do with Russell Brand. Accompanied, as if the Cheeky Girls were still riding high in the charts, by Johann Hari.