MR PORTER considers the lessons we can learn from the late, great journalist’s works.

“I don’t have prejudices against anybody,” Mr AA Gill told an interviewer – this one, actually – back in 2008. “I have opinions, based on a lifetime’s experience.” This might come as news to those who only know Mr Gill as the bespoke-suited bon vivant whose stinging restaurant reviews once led to his ejection, along with his dining companion Ms Joan Collins, from one of Mr Gordon Ramsay’s exacting establishments. But, as Lines In The Sand, his final collection of journalism – published just a few weeks after his death from cancer, aged 62 – makes clear, Mr Gill’s opinions actually held prejudice, piety and pretension to account, whether they came in the form of the West’s abject response to the refugee crisis, the sepia-toned delusions of Brexiteers, or the shortcomings of a plate of veal kidneys en brochette.

Mr Gill is nothing if not a supreme stylist, and there are some delicious takedowns here: an interviewee’s claim to be one of the most influential people in Denver is, says Mr Gill, “a bit like being one of the most fashionable people in Swindon”; a review of Morrissey’s Autobiography leads Mr Gill to brand the erstwhile Smiths singer “the most ornery, cantankerous, entitled, whingeing, self-martyred human being who ever drew breath. And those are just his good qualities.” But, appropriately for someone who was emphatically not one of life’s sippers – he was a recovering alcoholic and enthusiastic smoker, who continued to recite the names of his favourite cigarette brands (“Weights, Guards, Navy Cut…”) while walking in his native Scotland, long after giving up – Mr Gill’s overriding message throughout these pieces is that experience should be gulped down, pleasure embraced, and conformity shunned. Nowhere is this clearer than in a 2013 piece where he journeys to Cleethorpes (“not as nice as it sounds”) to observe binge-drinking culture; far from siding with his “finger-wagging” police commissioner minder, he lauds the “totally muntered” youth, whose free-spending exploits, he contends, are actually keeping the town solvent.

Mr Gill brings an equally solicitous ear to bear on the stories of those marooned in the “dystopian Glastonburies” of the modern refugee camp, zeroing in on those twice marginalised, whether they be transsexual migrants from El Salvador adrift in Mexico, or the Muslim Rohingya minority from Burma, forced to flee to Bangladesh after suffering persecution, he adds with a note of bitter irony, “at the hands of Buddhists, of all people”. That same tone of mordant outrage is present in a chillingly prescient 2009 piece, where Mr Gill attends “Trump University” – actually housed in the kind of New Jersey hotel where you might get together with “a Nazi memorabilia free-trade association” – to be lectured on the art of “positive passive cash flow,” ie, venal real-estate deals, alongside would-be “students” displaying “a demeanour… of squandered hope that had been marinated and pickled into a cynical anger.”

“There’s a basic human need to tell someone what we saw, where we’ve been,” Mr Gill writes, and his dispatches – opinionated, experienced – are told with eloquence and elan, from war zones and home counties camp sites, to, finally, the cancer ward, where he muses on tumour euphemisms: “The images are all very masculine – golf balls, cricket balls, bullets, grenades. No-one ever says, I’ve got a cancer the size of a fairy cake.” Elsewhere, he writes of Lord Snowdon: “His immensely sympathetic eye was often a surprise to people who knew only his waspish tongue.” There could be no better epitaph for Mr Gill himself.

Lines In The Sand: Collected Journalism (Weidenfeld & Nicholson) by Mr AA Gill is out now

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