Competitive Daily Mail hating: the most tiresome game on the internet

In offices up and down the country, there is one newspaper that invariably goes missing long before the others. It's the one you hear people asking after; the one you see secretaries stuffing into their handbags on their way out the door. It's not the Express, the Mirror or even the Sun. It's the Daily Mail.

Now, you might say that the Mail appeals to the worst side of human nature. That it plays on our jealousies, our insecurities, our most antagonistic impulses. But that, of course, is precisely what makes it so fabulously readable. That, and the fact that the comment pages are packed with some of the best writers in the country. Who in their right mind would sneer at a full-page op-ed by Max Hastings, one of Fleet Street's most distinguished editors? Or the eminently readable Stephen Glover? Who can resist a glance at Ephraim Hardcastle? And who can read one of Quentin Letts' fantastically bitchy Commons sketches and not quiver with delight?

It is, by a considerable margin, the best serious newspaper in the country. (Indeed, one of the reasons the Telegraph's news coverage is so good these days is that the paper is run almost entirely by ex-Mail executives.) And yet, if you spend any time at all on the internet, you'll know that this marvellous organ, this brilliant commercial product, this superbly well-crafted and expertly targeted editorial proposition is the subject of the most appalling daily abuse.

You know the sort of thing. Toe-curlingly unfunny Daily Fail-esque puns. Hijacking of reader polls. Silly references to the paper's politics in the 1930s. Charlie Brooker's Daily Mail Island. Retweets of the endless stream of Radio 4 and BBC2 comedies in which the mere mention of the Mail is enough to prompt titters. That software that allows content from Mail links to be shared but denies the website pageviews. (A scummy strategy thankfully now ended by the Mail's lawyers.) It's getting so bad that several Mail journalists I know now feel the need to apologise when introducing themselves to new people.

Of all the tiresomely self-satisfied rituals played out daily on social networks, competitive Daily Mail-hating is surely the most fatuous and infuriating. But why do the chattering classes hate the Daily Mail so much? The reasons they give - its xenophobia, its materialism, its supposed bigotry - are much less compelling than the real reason: the Mail routinely mocks employees of the BBC, the liberal press and the public sector and makes a speciality out of revealing their salaries and expense claims. That is unforgivable - the Primrose Hill equivalent of what the Catholic church calls the Sin Against the Holy Ghost.

True, the abuse you see on social media is partly thanks to the suffocating influence of humourless literalists as well. In the aftermath of Jan Moir's Daily Mail article about the death of Stephen Gately, which asked tough but pertinent questions about circumstances that may have contributed to his death, Nick Cohen wrote that the manufactured outrage and complaint culture emerging from humourless Twitter mobs threatened democracy and free speech. His warning has not been heeded. Today, things are worse than ever: Jeremy Clarkson was lambasted just last week for making what was clearly a joke about public sector strikers: he was, in the space of 60 seconds, tried, found guilty and executed by the court of Twitter opinion. Any excuse, I thought at the time, for the earnest liberal mob to cry foul when presented with a differing viewpoint and - shock, horror - a sense of humour.

But, really, it's about a small and self-interested group of people ignorant about the real world. For example, Lefties love to pour scorn on the Mail's attitudes to immigration and asylum seekers without the slightest acknowledgement that the paper's readers, who are much less wealthy than their metropolitan counterparts, have just cause to care about an unchecked tide of immigrants packing coastal towns to the gills. It's the Mail's readers who actually live in them, after all. It's they who suffer from the crime waves, watch their communities fragment and disintegrate and see local services stretched to breaking point. It's easy to scoff from a nice bit of Kentish Town, but try living in a nasty bit of Kent.

The tide of snobbery and ignorance bandied about on Twitter on a daily basis, directed at the Mail on account merely of its existence, serves only to underline the intolerance of the Left, its point-blank refusal to engage with alternative points of view and the foul class hatred festering under the surface of their supposedly well-meaning diktats.

In a way, the Daily Mail is a victim of its own brilliant marketing strategy: by appealing to so many middle-class anxieties, it has become shorthand for a whole range of gauche impulses that the snobbish Left likes to sneer at. Mock the Mail and you are mocking the entire value systems of its brassy, aspirational readers - in a manner every bit as mean-spirited as the paper's own supposed attitude.

There's just one problem with all this posturing. In order to sneer at the Daily Mail, you have to know what's in it. That's why you'll hear those Primrose Hill supper conversations punctuated by self-conscious excuses like: "I have to read it for work!" One suspects that these Guardianistas would love to lay the blame on their cleaning ladies, but given that the black market domestic staff who keep Primrose Hill ticking over rarely speak a word of English, that option is sadly unavailable.