It’s not often we get the chance to heap praise on the words of a Sun employee, so let’s hear it for Dylan Sharpe, who this week may just have penned a masterpiece, a classic of its genre.
It all came about following the re-emergence of the Sun’s Page 3, an affair that was confusing enough in the first place before Sharpe (the Sun’s head of PR) waded in to tweet pictures of a topless Page 3 girl to the likes of Kay Burley, who covered the story, and Harriet Harman, who is a woman. Sharpe was forced to apologise for his actions – actions that surely anyone who’s ever felt the urge to send a picture of lovely Nicole, 18, from Eastbourne to a shadow cabinet minister can relate to – and in doing so came up with one of the most sublime self-pity statements in recent memory.
Certainly, Sharpe’s retelling of his experience displays an eye for human torment that means his story can perhaps only truly be understood when placed in context beside the brutal Ceaușescu government or the death camps of Cambodia. By 10am of the day following his tweet, Sharpe explains how he had gained “500 followers, a hate campaign and a parody account”. A parody account, you say? Does this unhinged mob have no limits regarding human decency? By 11am things spiralled to the extent that “the Huffington post had written an article about me and how horrible a human I was”. Eventually this vile mob got so out of hand that Sharpe says he had to leave Twitter “for a few hours”. And who can blame him? As Sharpe painfully notes in the opening of his statement: “You may also know me as ‘c*ckwomble’, ‘c*nt’ or ‘creepiest guy on Twitter’” (being a family newspaper, we are forced to go with the last one … actually, can we go with cockwomble instead as it’s well funny?).
Self-pity statements of this kind are undergoing something of a purple patch at the moment. There was Gary Keery, the guy who runs Cereal Killer cafe in east London and wrote an angry Facebook message about the fact a journalist had turned up at his gaff with a question that wasn’t: “Why does your imported Cap’n Crunch taste so great with caramel milk?” Then there was the enraged RBS banker who penned approximately 87,000 words about the fact Russell Brand’s campaign against the global banking industry had inadvertently caused his takeaway paella to get cold (“What mattered to me at the time wasn’t bonuses; it was my lunch,” he declared, demanding what was rightfully his – piping hot Spanish cuisine – like some kind of 21st-century Frederick Douglass).
Penning words that strike deep into the human heart like this is a skill no mere mortal can achieve. There needs to be an ability to claim victimhood for something nobody’s blaming you for (Keery decided that a question about gentrification was blaming him personally for poverty in east London). You need to effortlessly alienate the few people who might still have your back (Cockwomble refers to a “proper journalist” from the Independent). And, if all else fails, you must never act like anything other than a complete and utter adult baby – a device Keery perfected when he signed off his letter “Yours Sincerely, Gary Keery (the worst person in the world).”
Strike this balance right and you might just get thousands of morons RTing you with things like “Perfectly put”, “How to win an argument” and “That showed them” written in front of them, regardless of the fact you’ve somehow failed to string even a single letter of logical argument together.
