Camilla Long

Camilla Elizabeth Long (born 18 June 1978) is a British newspaper columnist for The Sunday Times.

Quotes

2010–2018

• I'm quite relieved that Nigel Farage MEP has only one testicle. When the former leader of the UK Independence party (UKIP) had the other removed in 1987 because of cancer, the doctors offered him an artificial replacement to give him "greater social confidence". But to watch him screaming at Herman Van Rompuy as he did last month, saying the European council president had the "charisma of a damp rag", tearing around with a loudhailer on his campaign to oust John Bercow, the Commons Speaker, from his Buckingham seat, working "100-hour weeks", inhaling whole packs of Rothmans and choffing down hundreds and hundreds of pints, I dread to think what he would be like with ... two.
  • "Nigel Farage: Brimming over with bile and booze", The Sunday Times (20 March 2010).
  • The Ellipsis used in the last sentence are not an omission.

• Actually, I'm feeling a little exhausted by the constant badinage — chatting with [Piers] Morgan is like endlessly throwing a stick for a demented borzoi, back and forth, back and forth, to the extent that after one particularly long and tiring session, I finally call him a tosser. He is thrilled: "Ha, ha, she cracks!" he says.
  • "Piers Morgan: Don’t you know who I am?", The Sunday Times (12 September 2010)

• The only genuine flash of insecurity comes halfway through the interview when I remember to congratulate him on his performance in Shame. But embarrassed? No, he is assured, confident, smooth, an actor of talent and depth. And I couldn’t help but notice he has an enormous penis, too. Would he have done the film if he was less well-endowed?
  "Ahhhh." His eyebrows shoot up. "That’s kind of you to say. I didn’t have any references to measure it against. I figured it was average."
  Average? Come on. "No! I’m serious. I don’t check out..." Other men at the gym?
  "I don’t really go to the gym," he shakes his head. "Obviously I figured I didn't really have a small penis. Would I have done it if I didn’t have whatever-sized penis? I didn’t think about that."
• Personally, I like his playful recklessness and feel quite certain that he would willingly show me his penis, given slightly different circumstances and a bucket of champagne. Stupid me for not asking — he admits, "I like getting naked".
  • From an interview of the actor Michael Fassbender, as cited in "Dirty pretty thing", The Sunday Times (22 January 2012)
  • In a 15 May 2012 interview with men's magazine GQ, Fassbender was asked about the interview with Long: "The first thing she said to me was, 'So, what does it feel like to have a big cock?' That was her opening question." After being read the second extract, he said: "I don’t think I would touch her with a barge pole."

• The novelist Rachel Cusk has written a book about the collapse of her marriage which is, quite simply, bizarre.
• Cusk herself seems extraordinary — a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish. She tramples anyone close to her, especially [second husband Adrian] Clarke, whom she has forced to give up his job in order to look after the kids.
• Perhaps the nastiest attack is reserved for someone outside the family: a description of a one-legged landlady who fails to provide Cusk with hot and cold running lattes on a riding holiday in Devon.
• She rips into her latest meat with all the poison and vigour of her earliest memoir, A Life's Work, an excoriating account of pregnancy and motherhood she wrote in 2001. She was flamed then by the critics for her self-absorption and fearlessness — and there's plenty to get the blood circulating in this book, too.
  • "Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation by Rachel Cusk", The Sunday Times (4 March 2012)
  • Long's review of Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation received the Hatchet Job of the Year award from Omnivore, an online magazine, in February 2013 for the best worst review of the preceding 12 months.

• What have we done to deserve a man who slept with 2,000 women telling us what to think about politics, and a man who addresses the nation through his teddy telling us what to think about class?
  Some people say judge a society by the way it treats its women. Others say judge a society by the way it treats its prisoners. I say judge a society on the people it offers as its greatest thinkers.
  Our society’s leading public intellectual has admitted mistreating women and is famous for sticking a Barbie up his bottom on stage, so make what you will of that.
  • "Hush, Russell. I won’t be told what to think by a prancing perm on a stick", The Sunday Times (26 October 2014)
  • Revolution, the book by Russell Brand, had recently been published. The reference to "his teddy" is to artist Sir Grayson Perry whose childhood teddy bear is part of his public persona.

• As the ceremony started and magic finally began to seep in, it became clear what sort of magic this was: it was the full panto, rabbit-out-of-the-hat, balloon-animal type of magic, rather than the divine right of kings.
  • "A hair’s breadth from It’s a Royal Cockup... and so brilliantly British", The Sunday Times (20 May 2018)
  • From an account of the Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on 19 May 2018.

2023–present

• [On lockdown and social distancing during the pandemic restrictions] It was fine. [...] I'm actually not that sociable, you know? I hate people. [...] That was a joke, for the record. [...] No. It's actually not a joke. It's not a joke.
  • From an interview, as cited in "Camilla Long on cancel culture, her Twitter suspension and the royal 'goatf**k'", Press Gazette (12 January 2023)

• It's weird when someone close to you is arrested. It's as if they’ve been deleted: there’s a stream of text messages as normal, and then there isn't. You think, at first: oh, he hasn’t got reception. Then you think: well, he can't still not have reception. Hertfordshire isn't Lapland. Where is he? For an hour I thought Ben had had a car accident and was unconscious in hospital or dead.
  • "Police can’t spot a rapist in their ranks, but they’ll bang up my partner for taking a snap" The Sunday Times (22 January 2023)
  • Long's partner, a photo-journalist, was arrested during Just Stop Oil protests on the M25 (London's orbital motorway) in late 2022. He was paid damages for unlawful arrest and false imprisonment. The "rapist in their ranks" was David Carrick, a former Metropolitan Police officer convicted of rape on 28 charges in the week prior to the publication of this article. He was later imprisoned for life.

• You look at the litany of moaning and showboating — never more on display than last week at the empty fawnathon over poor Volodymyr Zelensky — and think: MPs are so out of touch with what ordinary people want, they’ll be giving themselves medals next.
  And that, as it happens, is exactly what some MPs are proposing.
  To say I howled when I read the recommendations in a new report about "supporting MPs at their point of departure from elected office" is to understate how horrifying and revealing it was.
  • "So you’re an MP who isn't a cheating, lying, narcissistic showboater? Have a medal" The Sunday Times (12 February 2023)

• Why does Stanley Johnson even want a knighthood? ... Scan his CV and you will see how incredibly easy life has been for him. He comes from a generation of men for whom jobs, wives, money and houses fell like confetti — knighthoods grew on trees. You can still see the sheer power of this system in, say, the behaviour of Fiona Bruce on Question Time on Thursday, when she rushed to defend Stanley against accusations he'd abused his first wife: friends of his said it was a "one-off", she claimed. "He hit me many times, over many years," is in fact what Charlotte Johnson said not long before she died in 2021.
  • "If Stanley Johnson ‘deserves’ to be a knight, maybe it’s time to scrap the whole system" The Sunday Times (12 March 2023)
  • Stanley Johnson was reported to have been nominated for a knighthood by Boris Johnson, his son, in the former prime minister's 2022 Prime Minister's Resignation Honours.

• I must say, as an avowed lifelong anti-monarchist myself, I find it tiresome when I am lumped in with speaking-clock part-timers like [Steve] Coogan, Jeremy "Donkey Jacket@ Corbyn and the muppets from Republic, whose idea of a protest is off-the-peg Just Stop Oil-style stunting.
  They just don’t get it.
  If you truly want to get rid of the monarchy, it is a full-time job.
  • "Squire Steve Coogan doesn't hate the royals. It's the flag-waving little people he can't abide", The Sunday Times (29 October 2023).
  • On a food podcast, the comedian-actor Steve Coogan described himself as an "anti-monarchist" and objected to "flag-waving plastic-boater people" who he called "kind of idiots because they support a power structure that keeps a foot on the throat of working-class people".

• Why can't women just love having babies? Is it too laughable, parochial, bourgeois not to obsess over your career?
  If there is one thing I wish had been different at my hard, driven, academic school, it's that no one, not a single teacher, said to me: "Look, by the way, there's this thing that might happen in the middle of your life and it's going to be amazing. Make space for it, because it’s going to be a lot, lot better than getting 87 per cent in Latin."
  But no one ever did.
  • "I love being a mother, but Stella Creasy is desperate to make it seem like a curse", The Sunday Times (16 December 2023)
  • Stella Creasy is the Labour & Co-op MP for Walthamstow.

• One young man summed things up towards the desperate, tired end. "Is there any policy you can offer me that would positively impact my life?" he whinnied. The sense of hurt entitlement and rage: me, me, me. Is Sunak a political vending machine? That's where politics is now: give me what I demand at all times.
  • "The great Sunak shaming: please stop this human sacrifice", The Sunday Times (23 June 2024)
  • The previous Thursday evening, prime minister Rishi Sunak (along with other party leaders) had appeared on a Leaders' Special edition of the BBC's Question Time during the 2024 general election campaign.