Marina Hyde

Marina Hyde (born Marina Elizabeth Catherine Dudley-Williams; 13 May 1974) is an English journalist and columnist. She joined The Guardian newspaper in 2000, and writes on current affairs, celebrity, and sport in her columns. Early in her career, she worked for The Sun newspaper.

Quotes

2009–2022

• Entitled "My View", it sees the Satanic Slut attempt to gain some sort of purchase on this latest Jonathan Ross "outrage", the details of which I literally cannot be bothered to even look up, let alone confect horror over. The world can now be divided into people who genuinely think caring about this crap is important, and people you might wish to know socially.
• Georgina, Georgina, Georgina... In the name of all human sanity: please just let it go. They were total scumbags, but it's over. O-V-A-H.
  • "Today in Jesus Wept: the Satanic Slut speaks. Again", The Guardian (26 January 2009)
  • Referring to Georgina Baillie, the female victim in the October 2008 Russell Brand Show prank calls row. Baillie's "My View" article was written for The Sun newspaper. Hyde was critical of these comments in 2023 (see below).

• Before we go any further, I'm warned that any criticism of Assange will land me in the doghouse with those somehow still able to take him 100% seriously, and may even cause a section of commentators to suspect I am part of some Guardian plot against him. The reality is a thousand times less intriguing, alas, and may even land me in the doghouse with the Guardian.
  • "Please-take-Assange-to-Stockholm syndrome. It's the diplomat's disease", The Guardian (8 February 2013)

• And so to Sweden, a country Assange regarded as so perilously likely to FedEx him to the US that he travelled there frequently until he was accused of rape in it.
  • "So that settles it then – everyone’s to blame except Julian Assange", The Guardian (5 February 2016).

• I don't really care for the phrase "sowing division" as far as [George] Galloway is concerned. "Sowing" implies a sort of precision to the planting, when in fact Galloway just sprays division around like some porphyric roué who can't be bothered to find the urinal.
  • "George Galloway doesn't 'sow division'. He sprays it everywhere", The Guardian (2 July 2021).
  • Former Labour (and Respect) MP Galloway came third in the 2021 Batley and Spen by-election, but the Labour Party only narrowly retained the seat.

• The rapturous standing ovation at the end of Liz Truss’s conference speech looked straight out of a future Netflix documentary from the cults strand. Outside the sect’s meeting hall, the party is polling an average of 25 (TWENTY-FIVE) points behind Labour. Inside, the people were clapping like they’d just heard a really charismatic argument about why it’s important to marry teenage girls, shun dissenting family members, and build gun turrets round their compound.
  Truss’s government is now too weak to implement its maddest plans and too ideological to implement its most sensible. Last night it emerged that the government has blocked a public information campaign to help people save money on energy – and, by extension, to conserve usage in the face of suggestions that rolling blackouts could be in the post for this winter.
  Apparently Truss regarded it as too nannying, despite it having been drawn up by her own business secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg (a 53-year-old who admittedly still has a nanny). One cabinet minister reportedly said "the public is smarter than you think". Unfortunately, Liz Truss isn’t. If we do reach the blackout scenario, the failure to plan or use foresight will be blamed on Vladimir Putin.
  • "Liz Truss has found her feet – as a leading UK conspiracist and No 10 whiner-in-chief" The Guardian (7 October 2022)
  • Published shortly after the end of the annual Conservative Party conference which had been held in Birmingham.

2023–present

• Yet discounting the minority of republicans, British public opinion appears to have divided the king and queen consort and his sons and their wives into two categories: "obviously tortured and damaged and miserable but enduring it for their whole lives out of duty" (good) and "obviously tortured and damaged and miserable but saying so out loud and at length" (bad). What a sad state of affairs that all seems, though it’s always amusing to read frothing online comments from people whose personal understanding of duty extends to the tax on booze.
  Above all, this epochal saga reminds us that there is more than one way to look at that chilling term for the monarchy, "the institution". We might pity the institution’s inmates and escapees, or be horrified by them, or turn a blind eye to the inherent coldnesses and cruelties of their existence. But we are, at the dawn of 2023, part of the society where the majority thinks that it’s probably the best place for them.
  • "It’s Prince Harry in One Flew Over The Windsors’ Nest. Just pity those he left behind" The Guardian (10 January 2023).
  • Following the publication of Spare, the memoir by Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex.

• Liz Truss is now eluded by two major types of growth: economic and personal. The past few days have seen the former prime minister break her welcome silence with what her allies call a series of "interventions". The one intervention that doesn’t seem to have happened is the type where they sit you down and give you the hard truths about your behaviour. That treatment oversight has resulted in a spectacle of lavishly preposterous blame-shifting and self-delusion.
• [B]oth the previous two prime ministers – Truss and Boris Johnson – are at this game. We live in an era where people who have got all the way to the highest office in the land now hilariously claim structural discrimination against the fact that, after varying amounts of time, they just weren't good enough. When both of these chancers left office, they had not simply passed their best-before date – they had sailed beyond the use-by date and moved formally into the realms of biohazard. Yet instead of bucking the f up and accepting this, they have turned into the political equivalent of "incels" – involuntarily rejected by the people who determine whether or not you get to be prime minister, and bleating about it in self-reflection-free style on every available forum.
  • "Britain, we had a thing with Truss and Johnson but it was toxic and we were right to end it. Just walk away" The Guardian (7 February 2023)

• Courtesy of the Daily Mail, Johnson has just accepted the position of "newspaper columnist", an extremely silly job, which in large part involves implying you'd do it better if only they'd give you a turn running the country. As far as Boris Johnson is concerned, surely we have tested the central premise of that one to destruction.
  • "Are Tory MPs as deluded as Boris Johnson? It’s a tough act to follow, but they’re doing their best" The Guardian (16 June 2023)

• For a certain type of mournfully uncool man on the left, Russell Brand was quite the excitement. You only had to watch their little faces in his presence – lit up at being fleetingly indulged by the kind of guy who would probably have bullied them at school.
• And with my 2023 head on, rather sickening alarm bells began to ring, because I knew – I knew – that I wouldn't have centred anything I wrote about it on Georgina Baillie. ... Dear 2008 Marina: you think you’re being clever but you’re being horribly obtuse. Get your head out of your arse. It doesn't matter whether or not they heard it, it’s still hideous and they have every right to think it’s absolutely unacceptable for the BBC to have aired it.
• I am mortified to see I reacted to this by saying she should stop banging on about the whole thing.
  • "The brave victims of Russell Brand’s misogyny deserve full support. This time, let's get it right", The Guardian (19 September 2023).
  • The article Marina Hyde mentions was actually published on 26 January 2009 (see above).