My sister-in-law once had a dog that could not be left on its own in the house for more than five minutes without defecating all over the floor and walls in an apparent panic that they might never receive human interaction ever again. This image vividly springs to mind when discussing Joey Barton's desperate attention-seeking behaviour, the crucial difference being that I would much rather see that dog on television than be disgraced by Barton’s on-screen presence.
Perhaps this is the reason, Joey, that you are not getting the punditry work that you feel entitled to, rather than it having anything to do with giving the floor to the insightful, eloquent options TV channels prefer.
Perhaps producers feel that actually, they don’t want to give airtime to a man who responds to criticism by threatening violence, as he did to Gary Neville; unleashing unprompted transphobic tirades, as he has continually done; and somehow painting one of the perpetrators of a racist attack in which a young man lost his life as having been hard done by, as he recently did on a podcast.
You can speculate about Barton’s mental state all you like, as Jeremy Vine did by suggesting the former footballer may have suffered some kind of brain injury. You could note that Barton’s latest spiral into hateful discourse comes hot on the heels of him being removed from his job as Bristol Rovers manager in late October.
But it’s entirely beside the point now.
Sometimes, people are worthy of censure and recrimination, and ITV were right to stand by their female pundits in the face of Barton’s comparison to serial killers Fred and Rose West. (Quite aside from the obvious abhorrence of that comparison, Barton seems to have a rather dimmer view of criminal behaviour committed by people who aren’t related to him).
And sometimes, it reaches a point when the best thing you can do is ignore them. To say so here only after outlining the many ways in which Barton has been so loathsome is rank hypocrisy, of course, and only serves to give him and his hateful tirades more of the publicity he clearly so desperately craves.
For this is a man, now, who will say anything and write anything he thinks will provoke a reaction; an unfocused whirling dervish of offensive remarks who does not actually care whose side he is on, on the one hand deriding critics as being fascists while simultaneously railing against the woke left.
His only hope, he knows deep down, is to try to appeal to others like him: people who have been left feeling disenfranchised, when the reality is that everyone else just finds them unbearable. There is no need for system political conspiracies to be involved in your banishment from the discourse when the real explanation is just that everyone thinks you’re a terrible person.
Whether or not he gets the social media ban that his comments surely deserve, the best thing we can all do now is leave Barton alone in the house bark, snarl and crap his own furniture, without feeling the need to ever open that front door to regard the hideous environment he's creating around himself. You can’t reason with a defecating dog, and it’s a waste of time even trying.
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