Even the Guardian gave Jade Goody a front page splash today: At peace – and finally out of the limelight they said. They gave her a full page obit, too. This is surprising, but doesn’t compete with the Sun’s 9 pages of coverage or the Daily Mirror’s absurdly sanctimonious front page:

“MUMMY’S IN HEAVEN NOW.”

What do they mean?

Why do they imagine she is any more in heaven than the several hundred other cancer sufferers who died this week having probably contributed a lot more to the world around them than Jade Goody ever did?

Obviously it’s a tragedy for Goody’s young sons, and for her mother, but that has no bearing on an hysterical tabloid outpouring that is out of all proportion to what she has left to the world.

It was bad enough a month ago to see the Screw’s headline on Goody’s marriage to her mumbling, brawling consort:

‘MARRIAGE OF THE DECADE!’

What?

The Jade Goody phenomenon represents the essence of all that is crass, banal and dishonest in our current tabloid media. A talentless, witless, know-nothing, whose only positive benefit to BB viewers and Sun readers was that she showed them there was someone in the world more stupid and ill-informed than themselves, has become famous for just that. Is this really the path to whatever the Mirror means by ‘Heaven’? What do they feel she has done to merit this sainthood?

Some media commentators, in a scramble not to be seen as unpopulist, were claiming this morning that the public admired her because she’d made money from her spurious fame. While not in the same league of controversial earners as Sir Fred Goodwin, I can’t think that any of her alleged money-making enterprises did anything to better a single person’s existence.

It will be tough on her sons, as it will be on the children of all the others who have died of cancer this week, and of course most of us will feel some compassion for them. But that this individual should have been picked out for such special treatment for no other reasons than her own studied inadequacies, demonstrates the truly bizarre criteria by which the rubbish media (and, today, the Guardian) value this kind of fly-by-night ‘celebrity’.

The Guardian attempts to attribute her lack of knowledge to her schooling. But she could read (I believe), and she could hear. There was certainly no excuse for not knowing, at the age of 19, if Rio de Janeiro was a bloke or a place. Her lack of knowledge was undoubtedly a result of her lack of interest, for her chief preoccupation, at least as demonstrated by dozens of public displays of petulant self-absorption, was Jade Goody. Her very public bullying of Shilpa Shetty wasn’t particularly racist, but it was spiteful, aggressive and opportunistic, with the support of two women almost as dim as she was.

That she shamelessly traded her privacy for a small crock of gold was her decision; the downside was the regular abuse she received, especially from the Sun, who of course, in an utterly unsurprising volt-face, pandered to the absurd sentimentality of their readers by fawning all over her memory. It’s a truly disgusting sight. Wouldn’t you just love to hear what Rebekah Wade really has to say about Jade in private?

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