Julie Burchill and George Monbiot were taking bites out of each other on the radio this morning I know, I know, but it's August and the BBC has space to fill like the rest of us. We need to give the Miliband will o' the wisp a break.
The occasion was the publication of Burchill's newly co-authored book, Not in my Name: a Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy. Its targets include George Bush- and Amy Winehouse-bashers, old feminists who attack young women for doing what they used to do (I think she's talking about you, Germaine) and greens.
Hence the presence on air of Monbiot, who was defending the movement down the line from the protest against E.ON's planned new coal-fired power station in north Kent. He wrote about it with such energy in his Guardian column this week.
I have my issues with Monbiot as a campaigner, but he's always an interesting columnist, even when wrong. He recently took me to task for not supporting his attempt to arrest Bush-ite John Bolton as an Iraq war criminal in a news report I wrote of the incident from the Hay festival.
That was daft. I'm still not convinced, either, that we can avoid coal-fired power stations, though he effectively mocked official wishful thinking about clean-coal technology (they return the jibe against some renewables). Either way he's usually stimulating.
Burchill's politics have always been less coherent. Last time I took stock she was still a working-class Bristolian who combined communist loyalties with enthusiasm for Israel (hence the pro-Bush stance) and a contempt for posh people who tell the masses what to do - people like Monbiot, in fact.
She's a terrific phrasemaker and controversialist. As she has flitted from magazine to magazine, newspaper to newspaper and back again (the Guardian included), she has acquired loyal fans and loyal enemies too, people who read to mock. Personally, I don't read Burchill; life's too short. I only wish the British education system had not let her slip through the net at 16; such a waste.
Today I was on Monbiot's side, no contest. In her oddly childlike voice (she has just turned 49) Burchill complained that greens are "supremely unsexy", obsessed with rubbish and the breeding habits of the poor while being "filthy adulterers with four or more spawn themselves".
That's a typical Burchill broadside, by the way, and Monbiot called it a "lazy and ridiculous stereotype ... The idea that we are all po-faced, hair-shirted posh people is ridiculous." Before I could shout "Oh yeah?" at the radio, he explained that social classes D and E are often more concerned about the planet than the A and Bs. So says ICM.
Burchill fought back, she always does. Now that it's economically unacceptable to tell the working class what not to do - is this true and what did she mean? - the posh lecture them against taking cheap foreign holidays and eating cheap food, she said. There is a germ of truth in this, though it is basically nonsense, too. Bad food hurts poor people most. So will climate change.
At one point Monbiot conceded that he was upper-middle class - "I went to a public school [Stowe]; in another life I will endeavour to be born to a different set of parents" (his dad is a top Tory - but was cheerfully forthright. I thought he won.
Right at the end of the exchange, Evan Davis asked JB if she was ever hypocritical - aren't we all, he mused? No, she replied. "I have done some bad things, but I have always boasted about them afterwards." GM countered: "Here is a woman who owns 20 times as much as I do and she slags me off for being rich."
We should leave it there, except for a footnote. Many of JB's critics dismiss her as a vain and foolish self-publicist who makes easy, crowd-pleasing attacks on soft targets. But it's placing herself at the centre of every drama which most troubles me.
I realise writers do it - great writers, average writers, even hacks, even me - but you have to do it sparingly, don't you? By chance Saturday's FT arts section carried a cover story by William Leith, a journalist who has made a career of writing about his shaving habits, his girlfriend, his inner turmoil.
"Why do I write about myself? This is a question people often ask me ..." the piece begins. Fifteen hundred words later we conclude that Leith finds himself more comfortable writing about himself than the outside world.
His new book, by the way, is called Bits of me are Falling Apart. I immediately emailed a Leith-monitoring friend of long standing to make sure he didn't miss this important development.
All this is part of a marked trend towards unattractive self-absorption in the media - all forms, from FT to Facebook. But by comparison with Leith, Burchill is a woman of austerity and self-denial with a world view to boot.
