Last week something of a spat broke out between Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker and the Daily Telegraph’s comment crew over Brooker’s depiction of David Cameron as a “reptilian demon”. The initial venom was released by Brooker in a preamble to a piece on BBC budget waste. Graeme Archer of the Telegraph responded with a broad attack on the rhetoric of the political left in its “anti-arithmetical counter-reality”, prefacing his assertions with the fact that he was tired and had recently seen a poor woman in the street.

Brooker responded with a Twitter campaign reaffirming Cameron’s lizard-hood. At this point Tom Chivers, a more senior Telegraph commentator, waded in with a sycophantic repost, conflating Brooker’s lizard-mongering with a range of contemporary and historical political insults; some similarly ludicrous, some funny, and some that are really quite disgusting - most notably, Jeremy Clarkson’s remark calling Gordon Brown a “one-eyed Scottish idiot”. It’s unfair to put Brooker’s lizard shtick in the same category.

Chivers goes on to tell us that “you don’t read [Brooker’s] columns for considered political debate: you read them for well-crafted insults”, and here he misses the point. While Brooker’s lizard campaign doesn’t tell us much about David Cameron, or indeed the state of right-wing politics, it does tell us something about the way we process what we see in the media. Calling David Cameron a lizard is not a well-crafted insult, it’s a deliberately poorly-crafted insult.

When I read the initial article, I thought that Cameron calling BBC cuts “delicious” was an indulgence of Brooker’s poetic license. I looked it up and I learnt something. It made me think more about Cameron’s rhetoric, and this is where the value lies in the satirical blurring of fact and fiction. It does what good comment pieces should do: make us question what we know, check our sources, and challenge prevalent opinions.

Calling Cameron a lizard is an abstraction whose heightened absurdity makes us question the absurdity of other rhetorical figures that the media presents us with. This has always been the role of political satire, and it’s important that this doesn’t get lost in Chivers’ catch-all, boys-will-be-boys, if-you-can’t-take-the-heat-get-out-of-the-kitchen justification for bigotry. 

While I didn’t find Brooker’s initial article very funny, it doesn’t change the way I view David Cameron because it has very little to say about David Cameron. It’s actually more at the expense of David Icke, propagator of the Babylonian Brotherhood theory of reptilian world domination, than David Cameron. In fact, the headline was promptly taken up by the pitiable Icke and posted on his website.

Chivers’ argument echoes many an anti-PC commentator, saying: if you don’t like it don’t read it, but don’t try to limit my freedom of speech. This is the line taken by Jeremy Clarkson himself, and was bandied around a lot at the time of his “one-eyed Scottish idiot” witticism. Again, this misses the point, which is not that Jeremy Clarkson should be prevented from expressing his opinion, but that when he does, he sounds like a cunt.

However, as Chivers tells us, “offensiveness is in the eye of the beholder”. What I personally found most offensive in the whole exchange was Graeme Archer choosing the verb “schlep” to describe a woman walking in a predominantly Jewish area.