Quote of the day

"The reason I feel sorry for her is not that she is a journalist, or that she writes for the Daily Mail, I am quite sure she can do without my pompous, patronising sympathy. I feel sorry for her because I know just what it is like to make a monumental ass of oneself and how hard it is to find the road back. I know all too well what it is like to be inebriated, as Disraeli put it, by the exuberance of my own verbosity."

Could that really be Stephen Fry feeling sorry for Mail hack Jan Moir? Weirdly, yes - and to say she made a "monumental ass" of herself doesn't really do justice to the contents of her original column on Stephen Gately. That said, he only does so after referring to the column as "that epically ill-judged piece of gutter journalism" remarkable for "its malice, stupidity, incoherent illogicality and crass insensitivity"...