Minor hack and TV presenter Lowri Turner has angered my good friend nmj, and others, with a couple of pieces she knocked out last week in which she wrinkles her nose at the Indian parentage of her own daughter.

Turner, who has two sons by a previous marriage, gave birth to her daughter shortly after she, and her husband, who is of Indian descent, went their separate ways. As the photograph shows, Turner’s Welsh genes make her – lucky girl! – the very incarnation of Caucasian racial purity, and she chose the pages of The Guardian and the Daily Mail to lament the fact that her daughter would only ever aspire to such ethnic perfection. Or, to be exact, to lament how terribly awkward it is for her to be lumbered with “a tiny, dark-skinned, dark-haired girl. To say she stands out is an understatement.”

Hedging her naked racism, not to mention a disturbing and tragic dislike for her own daughter, with the odd apologetic murmur, Turner nevertheless decides “grief” is le mot juste to sum up the three short months since the birth – as if the child had been stillborn. Her cab-driver bigotry and Hyacinth Buckett snobbery would be funny, were the whole sordid transaction not so deeply sad for Turner’s daughter. For her, one suspects reading these articles, as one day she surely will, is going to be the least of her troubles. Enduring the ambiguous feelings of her own mother, on the other hand…

UPDATE

Wellity, wellity, wellity, what have we here? I wanted to see if our racist mother had had anything to add to her confessional, so did a quick Google on “lowri turner racist” and found this gem from last week’s Mail on Sunday: TV presenter Lowri Turner announces split from husband No.2

“Turns” out that the photo which adorned her bigoted rant against her own daughter’s ethnicity came from an earlier shoot designed to “announce” her marriage last year to the girl’s father, Nicol Batra. Conspicuous by his absence from the “I hate my brown baby” photo, he had popped up in the picture on the “split” piece a few days earlier. Note, as you look at the photo, Turner’s I-want-a refund bleat that hubby “didn’t look Indian”. Note also the proud way she cradles her bump with her right hand, blissfully unaware of baby’s hideous disfigurement.

It all gets better when you read the “split article” Money quotes? It’s all killer, no filler:

• “Do I want to talk about it? Not really.” No, just write three lengthy, lucrative articles in the national press;
• “Her first marriage to veteran newspaper journalist Paul Connew, 55, ended when she was in the first trimester of her pregnancy with the couple’s second child, Merlin.” Notice a pattern here?
• “Embarrassingly, the couple, who also have another son, Griffin, seven, had married in spectacularly showy style in 2001, securing a lucrative glassy magazine deal in the process.” Obviously an uncharacteristic lapse into shameless, selfish self-promotion.
• “Their equally public – but exceedingly bitter – divorce came less than two years later with Connew citing Turner’s unreasonable behaviour for the collapse of the relationship.” No shit?
• Turner met Batra in a bar, and approached him three weeks after they exchanged email addresses.