Has Janan Ganesh run out of road?

And: Joseph Bernstein joins the New York Times

Janan Ganesh is rather like Rishi Sunak - in the sense that it is obvious that he has received a leg-up in his career from being non-white, but it is difficult to really resent him for it.

He is nothing like Sayeeda Warsi or Nadine Dorries – the latter of whom was imposed by the Conservative Party twice onto different local associations because they wanted female MPs, a decision which resulted in the passage of the disgusting Online Safety Act – they are not offensively incompetent.

In a genuinely colourblind society both Janan and Rishi would have made it near the top of their respective fields, albeit at a slower pace. Janan is objectively a talented prose stylist, whose ability to write articles which work from several angles (informative, humorous, pleading, self-satirical) is something which I have tried to emulate in these pages with varying degrees of success.

That it clearly makes Lionel Barber feel fuzzy and warm to talk to a young Asian man about Arsenal and the Markets does not detract from this. For my own sins, I must declare that I have warm feelings to anybody who appeared on political broadcast television in the early 2010s (Janan was a recurrent panel guest on Andrew Neil’s Sunday Politics live). Nostalgia for the golden age of YouTube politics clips, that world of David Boothroyd and Farage on Question Time is a cross I shall always bear.

Janan has also read widely, even if he is a bit hung up on VS Naipaul - his most able intervention into literary criticism being his suggestion that London Fields (Martin Amis) should be rewritten to remove Nicola Six, the only female character, because Janan finds her dull and refuses to reread any parts of the book (one of his favourites) in which she features.

There is a faint but stirring sexism which thrums through his columns, many of which read as if they are written as if they are intended to aggravate lovers past and present. In one article, Janan tells us that he and his friends have decided against having a family because of a ‘dread of sexual monotony’. In another he bemoans the ‘neuralgic hold’ that infidelity has in Western society, comparing the taboo around cheating to that of interracial relationships and homosexuality in the mid 20^th century. He boasts constantly about his lack of home training, celebrating the fact that he doesn’t use kitchens in his rented flats and once went a whole year without owning any cutlery.

When I read these asides it evokes the mental image of Ganesh winding up a doughty, brooding thirty something woman of his acquaintance, his lengthy disquisitions on the merits of bachelorhood being punctuated only by the sound of her biological clock ticking.

Ganesh, like most writers, is at his best when he sets out to insult people from his personal life in front of a national audience (this describes nearly all satire); and it is when his venom is directed at his background, and by extension his family, that his work comes to life most. Janan, the man of Global letters, comes from a distinctly humdrum background in Zone 4 suburban Croydon, which he describes vividly as ‘that world of interwar housing and parks called simply Recreation Ground in between: so unsung as to lack a name’, from which he is an ‘unrecallable fugitive’.

One of his most extraordinary articles is entitled ‘Why changing class comes at a price’. It raises an interesting point, that successful people from humble origins can become alienated from their families as they cease to have common ground with their parents. Then, this passage:

“I know high-achieving people from ordinary backgrounds who, with all the best will on both sides, have nothing to say to their parents anymore. They have been educated beyond intelligibility to their own kin. Each meeting - and the businesslike noun is appropriate - is an ordeal of dumbing-down and furtive clock-watching, of familial estrangement in very slow motion. Some will even lie about their lifestyles, playing down holiday destinations and rent-expenditures, to maintain some pretence of commonality with parents that they have, in all honesty, outgrown. There is such a thing as raising children too successfully.”

In case it wasn’t completely obvious, the ‘high-achieving people’ that Janan is referring to is himself. The real giveaway is the jarring aside about ‘holiday destinations and rent-expenditures’ which are far too specific to be impersonal (how many people tell their parents how much they spend on rent?) Ganesh wears makes much of his own decision to rent indefinitely instead of saving money (see Only tenants truly live the London dream) and is in hock, in regards to flying, of that old Millennial canard - the ‘Experience Economy’. It is revealing that Ganesh feels the need to put his own experience, of furtive clock watching during family reunions, in the mouths of unseen ‘high-achieving people’.

It may be to spare his family’s feelings, it may also be that the boozy image of Janan Ganesh would crumble if he were to admit such a vulnerability. As far as I can find online, Janan has never addressed what I assume must be profound personal insecurity for him - the fact that he must be an Oxbridge reject on account of him attending Warwick University, which would presumably be a life-defining event for somebody of his background and academic attainment. At different stages of his life he has declared his current age to be the apogee of the human experience (Why your thirties are life’s best decade > the midlife non-crisis).

This tendency, revealing itself most keenly in his frequent boasting about his salary (which he describes as many multiples of the average income) and the conspicuous consumption by which he likes to define himself (the most tedious hobby of all, eating in restaurants), his London postcode (in the foreword to his book about George Osborne he boasts about writing it on Hampstead Heath) are the aspects of his writing which mark out his immigrant background (Ganesh was born in Nigeria). That, and a traceable lazy streak. He refuses to have children in part because he wants to wake up at 10AM. His articles – Janan writes a bi-weekly column for the Financial Times - are often remarkably short.

Although it is not as egregious as Arwa Mahdawi’s weekly three paragraph tweet his wordcount is often times disappointing. What is even more telling is his unfortunate habit of repeating his own work, but also that of others. His recent article Britain is not a broken society was more or less a recapitulation of Sam Freedman’s Substack article on the same topic. Ganesh’s latest contribution to the Financial Times, ‘How to travel’ was a terrible example of phoning it in, a sort of ‘greatest hits’ montage that Sitcoms used to do where he mixes low, William Hanson-esque snobbery with old jokes about his lack of interest in cooking, all for the meagre wordcount of 740 words. This led to one amusing comment that has stuck with me since, and was the trigger for writing this article:

Has Janan Ganesh as run out of road? It is frightful to consider what options are available to a full time opinion columnist once they run out of material. All of us have a book in us but until we start writing regularly we have no idea if there is more than one. Peter Hitchens is one of the longest standing institutions in British Media in part because of his technical ability but also because he has continued as a journalist throughout the latter part of his career - researching and writing widely unread books on topics such as Grammar schools and the Police. How many of us could become as animated as he over the cases of George Bell or Lucy Letby? I fear for Janan, feeling that these time consuming, challenging exercises may prove too laborious for our favourite dilettante.

Janan, much like Sam Freedman and also James O’Brien; belongs to a generation of liberals who went along happily with the coalition and became extremely embittered by Brexit. The revolutions of 2016 was so scarring for Ganesh that he ended up fleeing the country for Los Angeles for a period. Before Brexit, it is clear that he was building to a political career. ‘The Austerity Chancellor’ is a decent biography but what is most telling is how many digressions Ganesh makes to praise various prominent centre-right figures such as Danny Finklestein and Francis Maude at length; it was the book of a man on the make.

Orwell was right to say that all writing without politics is lifeless - once there is no animating project to contribute towards - why not phone it in? Janan has not written a book since he was in his early 30s, in 2012. It is for this reason that I advise any budding young writer to stay behind a pseudonym. It is better to keep the option of reinventing yourself at a later stage in life than to crash out at middle age; condemned to write the same article twice a week to a shrinking audience, croaking out one last boast about your spendthrift restaurant bills at the age of 83 - by then, heard only as a whisper in the wind.

---

EXCLUSIVE: JOSEPH BERNSTEIN HAS JOINED THE NEW YORK TIMES

Readers who used to enjoy the works of Sam Hyde as teenagers – whilst he was a comedian and not a lifestyle coach cum Lobeian political commentator – may be interested to find out that one Joseph Bernstein has become a reporter for the New York Times.

Bernstein, for those unfamiliar, was the author of the original Buzzfeed hit piece against Sam Hyde which led to Adult Swim cancelling Hyde’s TV show ‘World Peace’. Hyde famously recorded an approach for comment with Bernstein where he mocked him, saying amongst other things that Buzzfeed was a pathetic outlet and that Bernstein would never, ever be published in…the New York Times.

I can only imagine the smugness he must have felt when he signed his contract for The Gray Lady; knowing that his former interlocutor remains a marginal Vlogger. I hope, one day, to see my own rivals so reduced, my mouth filled with champagne, theirs with ash.