PassTheAux with Camilla Long: column writing, cancel culture, and where to find ideas
Sunday Times columnist & critic Camilla Long reflects on her career
I used to dream of having my own column. It was, I felt, the sexiest job in journalism. I’d get one of those hot but authoritative byline pictures where I’d be caught between a pout and a knowing smile, and every week I’d trend on Twitter for a brilliant, whip-smart opinion about, er, something, with just the right amount of relatable but also totally unique personal anecdote that would impart wisdom wildly beyond my then-23 years.
Which is why, when I got an email from a national newspaper very early one morning asking if I wanted to put my hat in the ring to become their new dating columnist, I almost passed out with joy. Then I immediately woke up my boyfriend of five years, and told him that I was about to become the new Dolly Alderton.
“But you have a boyfriend,” he said, looking confused. “Me.”
“Oh yes”, I remembered.
“And you’ve never been on a date in your life,” he added.
“Shit.”
After a 10-minute negotiation period, my boyfriend kindly agreed that I could pretend he didn’t exist for the sake of my application. Just to see what happened. And if I did somehow get the job, I could go on dates for research purposes only. That is, frankly, what dates are to most women anyway.
The application consisted of writing three trial columns. Despite never having been on a date, and having never downloaded a dating app, I filed my three dating columns about three imaginary dates, and, with an audacity that stuns me to this day, patiently waited for my congratulatory reply.
A couple of days later, the editor politely told me that the newspaper had gone with another candidate.
I was horrified. Not because I had been rejected, but because I read back those columns in the cold light of day, and realised just how deeply, utterly, tragically terrible they were. Even now, five years later, I cannot bring myself to look at them despite the academic rigour demanded by this newsletter.
I’d like to say that’s when I stopped fantasising about becoming a columnist but unfortunately for me and also several thousand men, I somehow found myself writing “Tinder Shrink” columns for British GQ, where I gave men unsolicited advice on everything from whether they should put their height in their Tinder bio to why they should read Cat Person before dating (literally shoot me). Thankfully my editor put an end to it after just three columns – to my boyfriend’s great relief.
Since then I have admired columnists – and particularly newspaper columnists – from afar. It is, truly, not only an art but also an endurance sport. To have fresh and engaging ideas week on week out. To have opinions you know won’t change in a matter of days. To be brave enough to stand by those opinions on Twitter. To be funny on a deadline. To be funny regularly. (Is there anything more humiliating than an editor crossing out a preciously mined joke?) To have had enough of a life that you never run out of anecdotes. I mean, even the other week I recycled an anecdote to a publicist I had last seen two years ago.
Which brings me, in my usual meandering way, to this month’s interviewee, veteran Sunday Times columnist Camilla Long, who began her career as a Features Assistant at Vogue, before moving to Tatler, about which she wrote a wonderfully funny piece which perfectly captures her sharp, entertaining style and which contained this description of her job:
“Obviously I had the perfect qualifications to work on Tatler — blonde pony hair, a small but growing collection of mental illnesses, and I was resolutely, toilets-and-serviettes, middle class. I was hired as a features assistant but no one seemed to know what this meant. Corral alpacas? Titivate marquesses?
After five weeks of listening to people complaining about animals (“I’ve only got five ponies for this Saturday’s match”), I asked Kate what I should do for stories. Did dukes call us, or did we call them? And she gave me a deep Soho gaze and said: “Obviously, dearie, you go to parties. READER, I did. I went to five parties a night five nights a week. At one point I became so addicted to parties I think I went to the launch of a dog.”
She then moved to the Sunday Times in 2007, where she now writes two columns a week: one about television and the other about current affairs. Formerly the paper’s film critic, she has also twice won Interviewer of the Year at the British Press Awards, and profiled everyone from Imelda Marcos, Melania Trump and Nigel Farage to Simon Cowell, Michael Fassbender and Christine Quinn.
Like all successful columnists, Camilla is a divisive character in the British press – clever and waspish, hilarious and outrageous, right about some things, wrong about others. And never afraid to wade into debates most writers would run a mile from – often landing her in controversy. All of which makes her a very interesting person to speak to for Pass the Aux. So, enjoy my conversation with Camilla below and stay with me until the end to read my culture recommendations for the week.
Eleanor: What was one of your most memorable edits when learning the ropes as a journalist?
Camilla: I think if you're a journalist, and you've reached a point where you think you're above editing, then that’s the point where your journalism stops evolving. I remember being edited by Geordie Greig back when we worked together on Tatler, and that was always a great experience, because Geordie was a brilliantly trained newspaper journalist – and there weren't many of those working at Condé Nast.
So when I arrived at Tatler, I suddenly found myself being edited by somebody who had a very high standard when it came to immediacy and getting the who, why, what and when into the first few paragraphs. He was a very intuitive editor. I remember we worked very hard on one profile I did of Keira Knightley and it definitely changed the way I approached things in terms of starting pieces.
In what way?
I think when you're a young writer, you can be quite nervous, and you can want to put too much into the first few paragraphs. You may want to set the scene in a vivid manner, but you can end up piling in too much. If you look at all the greatest writers who started off as journalists, such as Ian Fleming, Hemingway, Tom Stoppard, they all write with that immediacy, clarity, precision, and non-floweryness. Journalists are taught we couldn't self-indulge – you need to remember that the reader is the most important person in this relationship.
How do you get your ideas for your columns ?
What I begin to do at the beginning of every week is I talk to a lot of people. Talking to people is always the best way to get material actually – stories and ideas. Just to see what your friends are thinking about, what they’ve noticed. You need to be hoovering up everybody else's thoughts on things. I think it’s a great underestimated skill with journalists now, actually talking to people in person rather than on Twitter. Then of course I read constantly, all the papers, all the little bits and pieces. All the letters – because that’s a form of conversation from ordinary people. So the letters are very important to read.
The idea of being a columnist terrifies me – I’m sure I would quickly run out of ideas, and I’d be constantly worried of having my opinions dismantled on Twitter.
If you've got good editors, then they will tell you when to be nervous about stuff and when not to be nervous about stuff. And I mean, even before the internet, people being rude to journalists was completely par for the course. I receive non-stop abuse all the time. And I'm not on Twitter anymore, because I just thought it was not a place to develop as a person. I thought to myself, is it making me a better newspaper journalist or a better person and the answer was no to both. So then it just becomes a complete time suck – it’s not a good business proposal. I spoke to the social team at the Times and I said, do I actually need to be on Twitter? I had wanted to have a “presence”, as journalists do, but the reality was it didn’t benefit me enough to justify the occasional mental stress it caused me. So I came off it.
Do you worry younger writers are sometimes writing for Twitter rather than what they think?
Yes. I will literally pay absolutely no attention to what people say on Twitter. That said, I think the pressure to conform is not a new thing. Yes, Twitter is new, but it has always been human nature to try and shut people up, to try and stop them from saying things you disagree with. Journalists have faced this throughout history. They have always been told they are scum and that they are bottom feeders and that they are nosy and pry and make everyone’s lives miserable. It’s very easy to blame social media for that now if you can’t handle it, but actually this has been the territory for journalists for decades.
You know, before the internet, readers would write letters to the editors, and these would have sway, because the editors would not want to annoy the readers. That is essentially the same thing. Journalism is by nature an abrasive profession, and to go into it you have to understand that.
I guess what is new then is this idea of the “cancelled” person.
Well I’ve been cancelled about 14 times and it’s had no effect on my life whatsoever.
Has there ever been a piece that has earned such a backlash that you have felt really shaken by it?
No, because the response to my pieces only becomes mad and uncontrolled when it’s on Twitter. Very often, I'd write quite controversial pieces in the paper that the readers found interesting, and which received an interesting, complex response. And then I would put it on Twitter, and then the debate becomes so shrill and insane – and people wouldn't have even read the piece. So I prefer to look at responses on the website or in the paper.
You’ve spoken before about a very uncomfortable interviewing experience with Dave Lee Travis, but I wonder if any others haven’t gone to plan?
I’ve had people walking out of the interview, but I can't off the top of my head remember who it was. I have walked out of interviews as well. I remember interviewing Gus O'Donnell, and he was so boring I left after 30 minutes. It was like interviewing a paperclip.
I’ve been very stressed when my tape breaks. I remember interviewing Michelle Mone, the lingerie Baroness. She was giving me an amazing interview, and she was talking about her divorce and in floods of tears. And oversharing massively. And my tape broke, and I told her, and credit to her, she paused her tears so that I could fix my tape. Then when it was working again she turned her tears back on, which tells you everything you need to know about that interview really.
Another extremely stressful time was when my interview audio with Martin Amis came back extremely low and quiet, and we’re still not sure why to this day. We had to get a professional recording studio involved. I only had two days to write this 5000 word interview up and I just had this terrible audio.
Have you ever regretted an interview? And is there an interview you would still love to do?
No regrets, I have a pretty clean slate when it comes to that. In terms of who I’d like to interview, I’m quite fascinated by female alphas. I’d like to interview Carrie Johnson – not that she’ll be giving interviews any time soon.
I liked how you once recommended journalists make a joke of a celebrity’s “rehearsed script” to try and get them to say something new and different. And how it’s “hard to stitch somebody up who’s already awful”. Do you have any other interviewing tips?
Other than relaxing them as quickly as possible, and spending the first 20 minutes calming people down with soft questions and the odd joke, I think the main one is just shut up and listen to them. Because so many times you can find yourself talking over someone. And really listening is a skill you have to learn. It took me a few years to get used to doing that and just letting people talk. I think we're socially trained to fill silence and use nervous chatter to diffuse situations.
Could you tell me about the first time you negotiated a pay rise?
I think it's always useful to remember that you're operating in a marketplace and you need to express your value in the clearest possible terms. Ideally, this is with another job offer. That is going to articulate your worth to the company very clearly. And if your company wants to keep you then you can set your price, you’re in a marketplace, so you can get a raise. I moved from Vogue to Tatler and I got a bit of a pay rise then, and then I moved to the Sunday Times and I got a bit more.
I think a very good time to renegotiate is when you come back from paid maternity leave. Because if you go off on maternity leave, if you're good at your job, and they've missed you, then they will definitely want you to come back. I think there's a lot of timidity around maternity leave. People should come back all guns blazing. I mean men easily get pay rises when they need to pay for school fees, so why shouldn’t women?
How do you know when it’s the ‘right’ time to leave your job? And did you ever consider quitting journalism?
I mean, I’ve been at the same paper for 15 years, and I love it there. But I think you always know, instinctively, when you need to leave. I do remember when I was at Vogue, I was on a six-month contract, and I was failing to get a job anywhere, there were no openings. So I thought I’d just go and work at Starbucks. But that is the last time I considered leaving journalism.
What is your writing routine like?
I never write in the evenings because I always need to be watching TV – sometimes up to 15 hours a week. I have two big writing days a week, and the rest of it is reading and researching and talking to people. So I do all of that in my office. I used to write in bed but I don’t anymore, because I got a really good computer.
Do you have any reading recommendations for younger journalists?
My great inspiration and mentor was always AA Gill. I still read a lot of what he wrote. And if we’re talking TV critics, then Clive James, of course. So I recommend reading his collected TV reviews. And you know, TV reviewing back then was actually incredibly hard, because there wasn’t playback so you would often have to watch two programs simultaneously and review them!
This week in links
I’ve been commissioning Tom Nicholson, who used to be on staff at Esquire and who has been pitching me unique, timely ideas for the Telegraph ever since he went freelance last year, from this piece on how Band of Brothers was made and the legacy of Men Behaving Badly to this interview with the creator of unlikely hit TV show Zen School of Motoring. The successful common thread between all his pitches is they’re ideas we wouldn’t necessarily think of on staff because they’re not tied to the news agenda or extremely obvious anniversaries, and each pitch comes with quality interview suggestions that he always manages to pull off. (Side note, pitching interviews you can’t get is a big turn off to editors!)
I’ve been interviewing the brilliant rising star Lola Young, who blew me away at the Jazz Cafe last year with her booming voice, cheeky charisma and clever lyrics. I was so honoured that she chose the interview to open up publicly for the first time about her schizoaffective disorder. It was fascinating to hear all about how her condition also unlocks an extraordinarily imaginative part of her brain that allows her to write particularly creatively. I also interviewed her manager, Nick Shymansky, who had managed Amy Winehouse and had promised himself, never again. But Lola changed that – his quotes are extremely moving, so have a read.
I’ve been listening to Mahalia’s new single Letter to Ur Ex, which she wrote to her new boyfriend’s ex to respectfully ask her to let her enjoy her new relationship in peace. Mahalia chatted to me and my podcast co-host Kathleen all about why she needed to write the song on our podcast Straight Up, along with plenty of juicy myth-busting anecdotes about life as a star. From why she sometimes can’t afford to pay rent to why she hates it when journalists constantly ask her about Ed Sheeran (guilty!) Listen to it here.
I can’t stop thinking about this very odd revelation about Robert Pattinson in this month’s GQ interview about his obsession with chairs. “He used to have a studio in London. But now he just makes little chairs out of clay, little maquettes, takes pictures of them, and then sends them to a designer he knows who helps get them built. The first one, “an insane sofa,” is inbound soon. He is consumed by chairs. Thinks about them incessantly. When it came time to design the logo for his production company, he just kept sending people pictures of chairs.”
Peeve of the week anyone else utterly confounded by the way in which Netflix’s Inventing Anna portrays journalists? Vivian’s kindly colleagues appear to spend most of their hours sorting through Vivian’s paperwork or fielding her phone calls because they’ve “already filed”. When Vivian’s piece is published, her whole office erupts into cheer and she walks through the room to whooping adulation. Considering working on the show as a consultant was a real-life journalist – New York Mag’s Jessica Pressler, who wrote the source article – I am baffled.
Thanks so much for reading Pass The Aux! As always, hit subscribe if you haven’t already, share with your friends, or send me your thoughts on email. It’s lovely to hear from so many of you every time.