Tough week to be rich, famous and female. You may or may not be aware of the days of online abuse directed at Vogue Williams and Karren Brady, women of two different worlds, with two different lives, united mainly by the fact they move in fantastically wealthy circles and are both on the telly a bit.
They are also linked, for this week at least, by it being their turn to wander into the crosshairs of the bottom-feeders who have nothing better to do than call people names on the internet. Williams, for a perfectly inoffensive story she told about herself in a newspaper interview. Brady, after stepping down from her role as vice-chair of West Ham.
Let’s get Vogue’s one out of the way first, mainly because it was all so fist-gnawingly stupid. She did a Q&A interview with the Irish Independent, the kind of thing celebrities do all the time in every newspaper on earth when they’re selling whatever their next gig is. What’s your earliest memory? When and where were you happiest? What keeps you awake at night? And so on.
One of the questions, down towards the end of the copy, was: “What’s your most embarrassing moment?” She proceeded to take the piss out of herself.
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“When you start waving at someone you don’t know,” she said. “Which can be embarrassing. It happens often, but it doesn’t matter, because we mostly say hello to everyone in Ireland. Though I was on a hike with my sister in Howth recently and I said hi to three people, and none of them said hello back to me, and Amber thought it was the funniest thing ever. I got burned three times in a row.”
So there you have it. Her answer was mildly self-deprecating, not at all up itself and actually just pretty humdrum. It was in keeping with the rest of the interview – light, breezy, a bit of fun. Enough to keep you scrolling for a few minutes of distraction as the world burns outside.
The headline on the piece did her dirty, though. “Vogue Williams: ‘I was on a hike with my sister in Howth recently and I said hi to three people, and none of them said hello back to me.’” Cue the pile-on. Release the hounds.
“Has it crossed her mind that she might just be an insufferable [Bleep] and nobody likes her?” was the first comment on X. “This vacuous fool angling for the #LateLateShow job and the acquiescent media playing along” was another. “This is the new Ireland that she & her ilk supported ...” And on and on and on. For days.
Meanwhile, across the water, Brady was stepping down from her role at West Ham, after 16 years of being vice-chair of the London club. Brady has been involved in football for 33 years, first as chief executive of Birmingham City and with West Ham since 2010. She has always been a trailblazer, the (mostly) lone female voice at executive level across English football.
She has also been, to put it mildly, a polarising figure. She was the main driver behind getting West Ham residency at the London Stadium after the 2012 Olympics had finished, moving them from Upton Park to a much bigger ground in order to get more people at home games. This, it’s fair to say, hasn’t been a universally welcome development among the club’s fans, who say the pitch is too far from the stands, that the atmosphere is terrible and that the club’s identity has been lost.
Which is all probably fair enough. Fans know and care for their club so much better than nosy outsiders. When enough of them have the same criticisms, they are bound to have some merit.
But there’s also the fact that West Ham now have the second highest average home attendance in the Premier League, with only Manchester United above them. When they were based at Upton Park, they averaged around 10th on that table in a good season and below it in a bad one. Somewhere in the region of 30,000 more people pay for a ticket to every West Ham home match now than was the case before the move.
Now obviously, a football club is more than bums on seats. West Ham’s current debt sits at about £120 million (€138 million) and they go into this weekend just two points above the relegation zone. If they don’t find an escape route over the next five games, the London Stadium will house the prettiest corpse in the Championship graveyard, which isn’t a legacy any executive can be proud of leaving, be they male, female or alien.
And yet, drearily and inevitably, Brady’s exit was met with vitriol that came with that extra twist of spice aimed at her for the crime of being a woman. “Can get more time having cosmetic surgery and Mounjaro jabs now,” said one of the commenters – this time not on X (where it was much worse, obviously) but in the normally far more demure space of The Times of London’s comment section. Probably best that we elide the rest of it.
This is all old hat, of course. Women getting abused online – particularly successful ones – is just the wallpaper of life now. The fact that Williams and Brady are both very wealthy just cranks it up a notch. Everything is fair game and nothing is out of bounds.
What can be done about it? Very little when it comes to the likes of X and Facebook and the swamps of social media, clearly. That horse has long since bolted, won the Derby and sired endless progeny to carry on its grim lineage. But that doesn’t mean the rest of the media has to submit to it.
When there’s a pile-on fed by an obviously disingenuous headline, we can change it. When a comment section devolves into repeated misogyny and innuendo, we can close it. These might only be tiny fingers in massive dykes but they’re not nothing.
Nothing is what we’ve done, consistently, for most of this century.
Look where it’s got us.
