Feuds are futile: just ask Elton John and Madonna

Telegraph

13-04-2025

Guelphs and Ghibellines, Montagues and Capulets, Sir Elton John and Madonna… In drama and poetry, feuds tend to reach a Shakespearean conclusion that involves corpses all over the stage, or a Dantesque vision of quarrelsome fellow citizens literally and metaphorically gnawing at each other.
In celebrity-land, however, the proper culmination of a lengthy feud is a big old hug-and-make-up. So it was last week, with Sir Elton, resplendent in white samite, clasping Madge in a forgiving embrace – both of them looking straight to camera, rather than at each other.
The discord seems to have started in the early 2000s when Elton accused Madonna of lip-syncing and dissed her theme song for the 2002 Bond film, Die Another Day, suggesting that the studio could have hired Lulu or Shirley Bassey instead ('or maybe I'm in that league'). It was downhill all the way from there, with harsh criticisms from Sir Elton's side met with haughty rejoinders by Madonna's people, who announced that she didn't 'spend her time trashing other artists'.
Their reconciliation may have looked a touch performative, but it did at least contain a spark of the genuine respect felt by one considerable talent for another. The recent 'rapprochement' of Meghan Markle (sorry, Sussex) and Gwyneth Paltrow, perhaps not so much.
The origins of the alleged falling-out between the grandes dames of Montecito seem obscure. Perhaps Gwyneth's remark to Vanity Fair magazine, that she didn't 'know [Meghan] at all. Maybe I'll try to get through their security detail and bring them a pie' didn't go down well. All good now, though: Gwyneth's recent Instagram video scotching the rumours featured a vignette of Meghan eating pie in a manner possibly intended to suggest irony.
What exactly constitutes a feud? The OED defines it as 'a state of bitter and lasting mutual hostility'. Mere schoolyard invective – as in Elon Musk's recent description of President Trump's trade adviser, Peter Navarro, as 'dumber than a sack of bricks' – doesn't constitute a feud (although it might start one).
'Everyone knows how futile a feud is,' wrote the poet and novelist Michael Crummey. 'How ridiculous and useless and nearly impossible to resist. A feud is as primal and irrational as falling in love, which is why there's no talking to people involved in one.' It is a thought that must occasionally have occurred to the mother of the fractious Gallagher brothers.
But all passion has a tendency to cool over time, and participants in even the most bellicose feuds often find themselves, like hostile versions of the deluded lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream, waking from their enchantment of loathing and settling their once irreconcilable differences with an awkward exchange of courtesies.
(Admittedly, when Salman Rushdie and John le Carré eventually concluded their feud with just such a relapse into good manners, the Puckish provocateur Christopher Hitchens was disappointed: 'One's job… when seeing the embers begin to cool, is to blow on them as hard as possible.')
But hatred is costly to sustain. Like love, you have to work at it. But unlike love it withers rather
than nourishes the spirit. Better, like Madonna, Sir Elton and the grumpy Gallaghers, to hug awkwardly and consider a harmonious collaboration.
Bad review
The snappily titled Digital Markets Competition and Consumers Act recently passed into law. Fake reviews will be banned, which is certainly a good thing. But the ubiquitous demand that we rate every purchase and experience has increased to the point of absurdity and beyond.
The sinister potential of reviews inspired 'Nosedive', the 2016 episode of Black Mirror in which a young woman's life falls apart as her personal ratings drop. Frank Skinner's Radio 4 comedy series, One Person Found This Helpful, takes a less dystopian approach, but still underlines the surreal aspect of reviewing every banal feature of our lives.
I recently bought some cats' litter tray liners, and I have since been relentlessly pursued with demands to review them. My failure to comment on the cat's sanitary arrangements has provoked a blizzard of reminders and unsolicited emails, to the point at which, in sheer self-defence, I'm tempted to post a review after all: porous.