29.My Wiki Hell

Rachel Reeves and I have more in common than our Christian names...only I can do NOTHING about it

As the words issued from my mouth last Friday I thought, help, I hope nobody spots me pot and kettling! Or clocks the sheer hypocrisy of what I’m saying!

I should explain: we were doing a wash-up on the Budget in the first hour of my LBC show. Now, as I think most would agree, nobody is more proud of her budget and her status as the First Female Chancellor than Rachel Jane Reeves. Not even her Mum and Dad.

Anyway, her constant reminders that she is the First Female Chancellor, whilst also decrying misogyny and mansplaining, have somehow penetrated the epidermis of a prickly nation. She has also annoyed, in particular, her Uncle Terry. Oh yes. Her mother’s brother was fast out of the traps last week to declare the Wednesday effort “the worst budget of his lifetime” (Uncle Terry is 73), a complete shower; and to declare his Oxford-educated niece nice but hopelessly out of her depth, sans the experience to manage £1.5 trillion pounds, piss up and brewery were the words that sprang to his mind, etc etc.

Uncle Terry was, if you think about it, following in a long tradition of English chauvinist pigs. Mutatis mutandis, his tirade to the Sun most called to mind Samuel Johnson’s deathless put-down that “a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

But still, we all saw where El Tel was coming from, didn’t we? His niece, Rachel Reeves, Labour MP for Pudsey since 2010, talks about her achievements as if we must pay her special credit and mind because it is a she who has soared over all these various barriers to scale the dizzy heights/climb the greasy pole. She has not in any sense been appointed Chancellor because of her sex, no no no, but despite it.

We must always hold this truth foremost in our minds whilst parsing her performance and blessed “choices” in “her budget” that she is very proud of.

So when I mentioned Rachel Reeves for the first time in that opening hour on LBC, I made a great show of correcting myself when I said “the Chancellor.” I stopped histrionically and said, “Our FIRST FEMALE Chancellor,” in a voice intended to accentuate my shuddering disdain. It was only then that I realised that the VERY FIRST LINE of the journalism section in my own Wikipedia entry reads, and has read since Jimmy Wales created the fine free online encyclopaedia we all use every day, like this:

In 1989 she joined the staff of the Financial Times, becoming the first female graduate trainee at the paper, where she wrote about the economy.

Now, given that my five years at the FT is basically when I peaked and my career has been on the downhill slide ever since, whenever I give a talk or allow someone else to bung together a bio there it is.

I am, or was, the First Female Graduate Trainee At The FT.

It is the best anyone can find and it’s always up there. I have even had to perfect a “first female graduate trainee at pink ’un” face but I do wince slightly as I sit on the podium because let’s face it, I was a graduate trainee sometime in the last millennium.

And here we come to the rub.

Rachel Reeves could stop saying “First Female Chancellor” tomorrow but there’s absolutely nowt I can do to extract the offending words from my own Wikipedia entry. Let me tell you what happens if you even try to correct something, as I once did in 2013 and have never dared to since, as I honestly think I’d be shadow-banned, or at least go to prison.

This is what happened. Someone was interviewing me at an event and said, “and Rachel, you didn’t complete your degree, why was that,” in an interested way as if I was going to tell them about that I’d joined the French Foreign Legion as a student or something. “But I did,” I protested. And later I asked why they’d said that, and they said “it was on your Wiki page” looking embarrassed. Someone had tinkered with my entry and said that I’d left Oxford before Finals. As I worked my socks off, barely slept, and managed a 2:1 (very humiliating I know: in retrospect I should have probably left the permanent impression I’d had a breakdown, or got a Gentleman’s Third).

Given the hours I’d put in over the Thucydides and Herodotus (IN GREEK) in a cold house near Folly Bridge, I wanted to correct the record. So I tried to edit my own entry simply to say that I got a degree.

And then all hell broke loose.

Someone who sinisterly describes himself as Orange Mike emailed me accusingly as if I was guilty of plagiarism, or failing to pay my rental licence on my house, or improving my CV, or worse. It made me feel terrible. As if I’d lied under oath. It was most shaming. Orange Mike sent me these stern warnings.

“Please do not write or add to an article about yourself, as you apparently did at Rachel Johnson. Creating an autobiography is strongly discouraged – see our guideline on writing autobiographies. If you create such an article, it may be deleted. If what you have done in life is genuinely notable and can be verified according to our policy for articles about living people, someone else will probably create an article about you sooner or later (see Wikipedians with articles). If you wish to add to an existing article about yourself, please propose the changes on its talk page. Please understand that this is an encyclopedia and not a personal web space or social networking site. If your article has already been deleted, please see: Why was my page deleted?, and if you feel the deletion was an error, please discuss it with the deleting administrator. Thank you. --Orange Mike | Talk 00:19, 7 May 2013 (UTC).

Given this experience, there is no way that I can change a word of my bio. I don’t dare. I’ve tried other ways to amend the record: I pay a sub monthly, I’ve raised it with Jimmy Wales, I’ve asked my agent - nothing works. Even though in theory Wikipedia boasts says “anyone can edit” in practice that means “anyone apart from you or anyone who knows you.” You have to submit to the wisdom of crowds.

As things stand, then, my entry is both inaccurate - there is no such degree as “Classics” at Oxford - and totally out of date. Plus the main photograph makes me look like a drunk pterodactyl. And this is my official biography, mind, that will be the basis for AI, Grok, blah blah, bios on speaker pages, not to mention any obituary.

Oh well.

“Sister of Boris and FT’s First Female Graduate Trainee dies” it is.

It could - DO NOT MESSAGE ME OR COMMENT ON THIS - yes, it could be a lot worse.