Laurie Penny is an astonishing woman. Actually no, astonishing isn’t correct, astonishment suggests I’m impressed by her and that very much isn’t the case. I guess strange might be a better word.

Yes.

Laurie Penny is a strange woman.

So with this strangeness in mind I think it’s fair to say, I don’t share her world view, I do however admire very much her ability to blithely ignore her own insults in favour of taking mortal offence when someone else raises their voice in protest or returns fire.

Regardless of whatever the word might be that I’m searching for, it’s safe to say that I just don’t get her. She creeps me out. She has weird, eldritch ways.

Still, there’s no law against people being creepy or weird or eldritch. Or deceitful. But watch this and make your own mind up.

In the video above she insinuates that David Starkey – who I’m ambivalent about at this point – is xenophobic and racially prejudiced, which does seem a little bit strong. Further to that she then goes on to ask Mr Starkey – apropos of nothing – where he’s domiciled for tax purposes.

Class war! She’s obsessed with tax avoidance!

The answer by the way, rather disappointingly for her I suspect, is the United Kingdom.

Things get interesting at this point though, Starkey, clearly having had enough of her bullshit drops quite the bombshell. To which Ms Penny – as he so beautifully enunciates – responds in a rather bizarre fashion, taking every opportunity to evade any response that would reveal the truth.

There’s much shocked spluttering, outrage and rambling prevarication, which ultimately leads to her deciding that its all too much and that, whilst she does have an answer, she’s not going to tell anyone because they’ve all been simply beastly.

Later on though she rather oddly decides to say she doesn’t take kindly to being personally attacked, after, having, well, just personally attacked Professor Starkey. Wow.

This is all followed by Ms Penny spewing forth a quite hefty amount of confused gibberish in which she at one point even manages to paraphrase Dennis from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

What is the point of this woman?