Jack monroe challenged on twitter

[KarlWrenbury]

Maybe by a sock puppet account Etc but yes- how are they still not making ends meet after all this time ?

You're welcome.

I was unfair.

And thank you for the 💐

Re the toaster etc. This reminds me a lot of my ex who would swear black was white, to my face, with the evidence to the contrary right there in front of him. If I said he was lying, he'd get very, very angry and/or self-pitying that I would be so cruel and insulting as to call him a liar. Sometimes, when I tried to get to the bottom of it and ask him what was going on, he'd say he wasn't lying because that was how it felt to him and he was just expressing his feelings!

So "I don't have a toaster" could be an example of this as in "I'm so skint I feel like I don't have anything at all" and so something like that pops out (excuse the pun!). It doesn't bear much relation to reality but feels to the person as if they are not being dishonest. They are just expressing how they feel, and the fact that it contradicts a reality that others can observe is not their problem IYSWIM.

My ex really didn't seem to think he had "lied". It was as if whatever he said, he then believed, even if it made no sense. Like JM he considered himself faultlessly honest.

Of course I don't know if that's what's going on here but it is so familiar, and it can happen.

JM co-parents with the boy’s dad, so has half the week without the child

JM has a regular income equivalent to a £30k salary ON TOP of any freelance income

The kitchen is well equipped, in good repair. It’s cluttered because of all the stuff they’ve bought so it’s not World of Interiors material but it doesn’t resemble the kitchen of people I’ve met living in actual poverty

and I think several other people have pointed out that quite a lot of credit was taken for things that miiiight not have been JM’s own work on the ONS thing…

They are getting a hard time at the moment and I feel bad for them BUT they have been taking money from people who in all likelihood could have been worse off than them.

They have done some positive things over the years but if people have been giving money due to misrepresentations that's really not OK.

If they stop asking for money this whole thing might go away? Or can at least keep doing the "good" they strive to do?

What did JM actually do re ONS?

What she did do was get a bit upset when her local asda didn't have some cheap rice in and decided it must be true everywhere (or something along those lines).

She is extremely talented at writing angry tweets that people mistake for 'doing work'/

THIS!! The changes to the ONS were in the pipeline for months before Jack latched onto them. They were nothing to do with her. Smart price rice (and Smart Price products in general) hadn't disappeared from the shelves. In fact, some was actually found in the Asda where Jack says she shops. She just doesn't understand supply and demand.

As for the Vimes Boot Index, Jack's own version of the ONS...give me a break. She wittered on about that for a couple of weeks then it was quietly dropped and forgotten. Yet still there are people out there who think it actually exists!

They have done some positive things over the years

Except she really, really hasn't. She's underprepared in TV interviews with the politics of a sixth former (and that's being generous). She tells people they can live on £20 a week, which is a Tory idea if ever I heard one. She doesn't signpost anyone towards benefits services because she allegedly has PTSD from her time on benefits (if that ever really happened). She doesn't really have any ideas about what can be done to lift people out of poverty because she's too busy cosplaying an impoverished single mum and if she admitted that she's earned quite a few bob over the last ten years, the paypal/Patreon grift would be up.

All she really does is tweet 'fuck the Tories' or words to that effect every so often and that's enough for people to think she's somehow a good person who's doing a lot of good.

She hasn’t yet produced the piece of work she was doing with regards to the ONS. This was a piece of “work” she spontaneously decided to do by the way, nobody asked her, the ONS had pretty much already done it. She did lots of tweeting about it though and rattled her tip jar plenty to get some gullible mugs to fund her pissing about tweeting a lot about it. Alas… no sign of this body of work ever being completed.

She’s the non-resident parent, her child spends 1 night a week with her.

Her kitchen is a reasonably nice kitchen in an (in her own words - “lowball estimate”) £800k house, a large house for a 1 person household, which she rents for £1500 a month.

She’s far from poor, far from living on the breadline. She’s a grifter.

Absolutely this.
She's fooled a lot of people and all the time has being living quite comfortably on grifted money, lots of it from people who are actually on benefits.

It's the merging of two different things though

• yes poverty campaigning is excellent. Yes the meal plans and support for others is also great. She has done good things.*

No, living on the edge with poor mental health isn't great.

Neither is the fluid story of her poverty, income sitch and back story.

Many of us go through a tricky patch. We don't all take to twitter begging for financial support or else we'll have to get a job or move out of a house we can't afford

Loads of minor celebs have normal jobs too. That's life.

If she kept her personal life out of it and stopped the bragging, begging and contradicting herself people would just admire her work. But she seems to need the attention

*and makes money off that. But not as much as she needs and she won't admit she isn't just a charitable saviour

More people have signed up to her Paetron as a result of all the awareness about it. Now at 788 members.

If you look at the community comments the earliest one is from April 2017. Now it will have taken a while to grow to 788 but still the account has been around in some form or another for 5 years.

Wish I could start a Paetron up. Wonder what I'd offer?

yes poverty campaigning is excellent. Yes the meal plans and support for others is also great. She has done good things

Sorry, but I disagree. Her meal plans are actually bollocks. She makes the food using the massive stockpile she has in her fridge and freezer, using her store cupboard herbs and spices. Someone on benefits is unlikely to have all the spare food she has stashed away, and I've never heard of a single person who's followed one of these meal plans, because they wouldn't work for anyone else.
The £20 a week food shop was for Twitter content and a pat on the head from her followers.

Also, drawing attention to people in poverty is great. Making yourself the face of poverty when you're getting at least £2500 from Patreon subs, as well as money from ad campaigns and royalties from your best selling cookbooks and god knows what else is not.

Well Jack's patreon offers pretty much nothing soooooooo...

Is it like posh onlyfans?

I've long suspected JM is penny-wise & pound-foolish.
She can figure out ways to stretch pennies well, but can't budget well to achieve financial security when she's got a big chunk of money.

I don't condemn her for that, btw. It's not uncommon problem.

No. And if she could hold her water and not tweet every trip, purchase, paid gig, personal trauma and grudge, she'd get away with being bang average at recipes because shouting about poverty would be enough.

But she can't stop dropping herself in it and then blaming everyone else for noticing. Followers, well, they follow. They're gonna notice you don't know the truth from your elbow, you need adoration and have a ridiculous saviour complex.

In all honesty I thought they kickstarted the ONS thing. I certainly hadn’t heard there were plans to change it before they got involved.
i have no idea what the living arrangements are with her son. For all we know the dad may be living on the bones on his arse too.
Jack isn’t the most polished presenter and as for their arguments being sixth form level, that’s harsh. They don’t hold themselves out to be particularly intellectual.
Who knows what the truth is but I do know how challenging it is to be a freelancer. You never shake off the feeling of insecurity. And if you have had tough times that never really leaves you either. I know people who are very wealthy by most people’s standards but still feel poor, because that’s how they began. It’s hard to explain if you’ve never been through it .

Do you have an explanation for her many lies, or do you think her lies are okay because she's a freelancer?

Very well said.

But most freelancers aren't tweeting lies about their personal lives and rattling a begging plate at the same time.

If freelancing doesn't pay the bills , you get a job as well. You don't lie and publish woe is me tales about how hard done by you are when last week you were having £100 haircuts and trotting off on a massive holiday.

There's people out there who work in normal, average paid jobs who genuinely give up their spare time to help others, run charities, youth clubs, food banks and put in real graft and hours. They aren't shaking a tin in people's faces and threatening to sue anyone who has the temerity to remember they tweeted last week about spending £1000s on shite and having Tiffany jewellery

Her meal plans are actually bollocks. She makes the food using the massive stockpile she has in her fridge and freezer, using her store cupboard herbs and spices. Someone on benefits is unlikely to have all the spare food she has stashed away, and I've never heard of a single person who's followed one of these meal plans, because they wouldn't work for anyone else.

I agree with this but would also say - I loved her first cookbook & used it loads when DC were smaller. It suits the way I like to eat & the DC quite liked it then. Now they are teens / preteens & my 2 DSs can't cope without meat in a meal 🙄 & won't eat any of her recipes.

The only thing is - she nearly turned me off cumin for life. Everything has bloody cumin.

And also ... the 'fake' recipes like aubergine burgers & so on, just don't work. They must never have been properly tested.

But I did get great ideas re soups, her tomato sauce is the one I always make, with a few tweaks, her breads are good. But yeah, hardly revolutionary in terms of helping those on v low incomes.

I think the first book was written when she was with Allegra - although I might be wrong - but it would go some way to explaining why the recipes are better than her subsequent offerings.

She’s an absolute bloody charlatan. And has far too many people fooled. Awful awful woman.

@ArmWrestlingWithChasNDave nobody knows for certain what’s true and what isn’t. I’m just not going to join the pile on.