Cruelty to grandmothers

It has taken ten years of dedicated Observer reading for me to notice how many of the very best things in it are written by one person - Lynn Barber. She may look like a snooty dowager from a weak 70s sitcom but from her interviews with a vast range of subjects she seems to be unshockable and completely fearless.

She breaks all the rules of a good interview by inserting herself and her own opinions into them to a pathological degree, but this results in a level of open disgust with some of her subjects that is all too rare in these access-driven times. Having spent a happy couple of hours wading through her archive at the weekend, it's almost hard to pick favourite moments. Perhaps making professional do-gooder Vanessa Redgrave cry by telling her she doesn't give a monkeys about people in Kosovo? Or getting Lembit Opik to describe an evening with his Cheeky Girl sex doll "discussing the concept of whether a perfect circle can exist in reality or whether it's only a conceptual construction"?

Both candidates, but it's hard to better these two:

1) Harriet Harman - from 1998 but pure savage gold. "If I were Tony Blair, I would keep her as a tasty morsel to throw to the lions much nearer the next election. It is quite useful for a prime minister to have the odd thick, docile, acquiescent minister to do the unpopular work of government."

2) Marianne Faithfull - "Marianne, in a black mac and fishnet tights, is sprawling with her legs wide apart, her black satin crotch glinting between her scrawny 55-year-old thighs, doing sex kitten moues at the camera. Oh please, stop! I want to cry - this is sadism, this is misogyny, this is cruelty to grandmothers."

Faithfull claimed after the interview that she behaved so badly because Barber asked her if she'd ever had it off with a dog. Barber denied all, but I bet she did.