Autobiography by Morrissey

'Misinformed, mischievous or malevolent?': Morrissey at Glastonbury in 2011. Photograph: Ian Gavan/Getty Images

It came upon a midnight clear. Or just after anyway, if you downloaded the ebook or queued in one of the several bookshops that opened at the witching hour just for the occasion. Morrissey once sang "there's more to life than books you know". True. But you wouldn't think so from the palaver that this particular music memoir has engendered. There have been fabulously wrong-headed pronouncements about its "TS Eliot-style" stream of consciousness format. TS Eliot never let his consciousness stream, and neither does Moz. What they mean is that there are no chapter breaks and that the breathtaking, almost insolently bravura opening pages are far, far more vital, lyrical and poetic than we have any right to expect from a pop singer's biography.

Then there is the matter of it being afforded Penguin Classic status, which has brought a huge and po-faced harrumph from the professionally offended in the literary establishment. It is, darling, a joke. A joke incidentally, that some of his shelf-mates in the Penguin Classics section, Joyce and DH Lawrence, say, would have relished.

There is more than a touch of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man about the brilliant opening chapters concerning his early life in the working-class streets of Stretford. There's a hint of Dylan Thomas, too, as well as Les Dawson and Adrian Mole. "Family life is chaotic and full of primitive drama as everything is felt intensely. There are no electronic distractions and everything is felt face to face. We are stuck in the wettest part of England in a society where we are not needed, yet we are warm and washed and well fed." This is the lodestone that he mined brilliantly in early Smiths classics such as The Headmaster Ritual writ large; he even slyly nods to his own lyrics from time to time. Some of the digressions are so odd as to be touching. There's a critique of the animation style of Captain Pugwash and a lengthy, earnest discussion of Peter Wyngarde's acting style: "he might occasionally rush into a following line without a punctuated pause (enjambment) but… he leads the way as the governing centre of Department S".

His baffling affection for the New York Dolls is in the public domain but we do learn some genuinely fresh stuff, such as his teenage love of poetry. Some of his verse enthusiasms we might have guessed at – Betjeman and Stevie Smith for instance – but others are a revelation; Auden, Robert Herrick, Housman. He quotes a stanza of the latter – "How often have I washed and dressed/and what's to show for all my pain/let me lie abed and rest/ten thousand times I've done my best/and all's to do again" – that could come straight from the lyric sheet of the first Smiths album.

It can't last of course. And it doesn't. It all starts to go wrong when, for us at least, it all started to go right, with the formation of the Smiths. On page 148, writing of an early rehearsal, there is perhaps the most tin-eared, embarrassing description of their music I have ever read. "The Smiths sound rockets with meteoric progression… bomb-burst drumming… combative bass-playing". One is reminded of that old axiom about artists being the least perceptive critics of their own work. Morrissey seems to have understood the Smiths less than we did.

The Smiths' career is dealt with in a manner that manages somehow to be both sketchy and wearisomely exhaustive. Chart positions are quoted endlessly as if crayoned in a schoolgirl's diary. There are a litany of slights, real and imagined. Scores are settled with depressing, mean-spirited regularity. Julie Burchill gets it in the neck. Geoff Travis of Rough Trade is painted as a sort of hippy Pol Pot: "Our skinny white bodies are lowered into the Rough Trade cauldron." If you know anything about the music biz you will know that this is as ludicrous a phrase as "the 1,000-year Reich of Oliver Postgate". Manchester music mogul the late Anthony H Wilson is mocked as "Meat fed Wilson". Be assured that anyone who has ever enjoyed a sausage bap or whose waistline is less than sylphlike incurs Moz's wrath regularly. Mind you, his description of the Hacienda nightclub crowd as "pork-pie chubbos" made this reviewer chuckle.

The generalised petulance reaches its nadir with 50-odd pages about the famous 90s court case brought by Smiths rhythm section Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke for unpaid earnings. It is simply too sad and dull to recount at length but suffice to say that the nastiness vented on Rourke and Joyce would seem to make the regularly discussed reunion unthinkable. Occasionally, he is just plain wrong, as when he states that there was an NME meeting in which the "unnameable" editor – it was Danny Kelly – declared that the paper should "get Morrissey". I was the deputy editor at the time and part of a small but vocal faction who fought Moz's corner and I can tell you, dear reader, that no such meeting ever took place. Misinformed, mischievous or malevolent? Who can say?

Two relationships, one with Jake Walters and one with Tina Dehgani, are described with affecting tenderness. "For the first time in my life the eternal 'I' becomes 'we', as, finally, I can get on with someone," he writes of Jake and he discussed having a child or, as he puts it, a "mewling miniature monster" with the latter. More of this would have been welcome. This is, after all the man who sang "It's so easy to laugh/It's so easy to hate/It takes guts to be gentle and kind."

"Get stewed," wrote Philip Larkin, "books are a load of crap." Autobiography is certainly not that, but it is as exasperating, coruscating, thrilling and deflating as its creator.

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Morrissey, you're a fraud | Carole Cadwalladr

Morrissey in concert in Seattle in March 2013. 'He is the very definition of old news,' writes Carole Cadwalladr. Photograph: Mat Hayward/FilmMagic

If you think there's been a tad too much coverage of the newly released autobiography of a 54-year-old expat who was a culturally relevant force sometime back in the last millennium, then you are, perhaps, showing your age. You're under 40, perhaps, or over 50. You were not yet born, or still at the toddling stage, or had – what's the word? – oh yes, "grown up" by the time the Smiths burst on to Top of the Pops. You think the media's obsession with Morrissey's book is a bit weird.

It is a bit weird. And I say that as somebody who was a teenager at the time. Who learned all the lyrics to the album The Queen is Dead and over-identified with the whole doomy, solipsistic, "if-a-double-decker-bus-should-crash-right-into-us" maudlin adolescent angst that is at the heart of all Smiths songs.

And then I grew up. The last time I considered Morrissey an interesting or in some way relevant public figure was sometime back around 1992. He doesn't matter. He is the very definition of old news. And yet there he is splayed across all news outlets, front pages, bulletins, Twitter streams etc, which says far more about the people who dominate our news outlets and run our country than it does about Morrissey.

In a week in which the social mobility guru Alan Milburn published a report that described a growing intergenerational divide, the result of policies that are impoverishing the young at the expense of the old, the cult of Morrissey offers a small but significant clue as to why this might be so. It's the fortysomethings, mostly male, mostly white, who identified with Morrissey's tales of outsider woe a billion years ago, who are now running the country and controlling the nation's media, filtering experience through their eyes and returning it to us as news and policy briefings. Even David Cameron at Eton found common cause with the subjects of those songs: the dispossessed, the marginalised, the unlucky, the alone.

And those people are still with us. In greater numbers than ever. It's the 40-plus cohort who have changed. Not all of them; there are plenty of struggling fortysomethings out there. But many of those who live in London or the south-east, which includes pretty much all MPs, who had the sort of jobs that enabled them to buy houses – when they were still homes for people to live in rather than an international asset – are as comfortably off, myopic and self-absorbed as Morrissey.

The Morrissey generation is running the country, and even if they came from Preston or Hull or Lanarkshire, and shared a background not unlike his, they are now closer, in just about every way – security, capital, lifestyle – to the likes of David Cameron than some young lad from Manchester.

The oppressed have become the oppressors. They're just not owning up to it. All teenagers feel like victimised outsiders at some point. That's why young people keep on rediscovering Smiths tracks from nearly 30 years ago, gratified to hear their own pain articulated and reflected back at them. The difference is that this generation (or at least that vast part of it whose parents can't gift them a deposit for a flat and/or their tuition fees) is actually being victimised.

Friday's news that rents rose nationwide by 9.2% last year was as nothing compared to Thursday's news that British Gas prices are set to rise by exactly the same amount. You probably didn't even hear about it because, while 36% of the population rents, almost no one in public life, in government, in the media does.

Do the effing sums, someone. Anyone. A politician, perhaps? Hello. Paging the Labour party. Is there anybody out there? Because 9.2% of average annual rent – £9,084 – is a damn sight more than 9.2 per cent of average energy bills. British Gas customers – that is eight million households – face an average increase of £123 a year. Bad, but nothing compared with the £835 increase a year for the 8.3 million households in rented accommodation – £835! And that applies across the country, though if you live in London or the south-east, it could be more like double that.

That average rent increase? It needs to be found out of an average household income after tax of £16,034. How, exactly? Where? And Help to Buy? You could rename it Help to Put Rents Up Even Further. It could be retitled Help to Make Poor People Poorer. Help to Make Young People Even More Fecked. Because house prices are intimately linked to rental yields and this is just more disaster in the offing.

The British Gas news affects the Morrissey class; the rent increase won't. And even for people who do worry about these things – the Labour party, supposedly – they've got the focus completely wrong. It's not the energy markets that require state-sponsored intervention, it's the artificial inflation of house prices by government-designed policy.

Sod Morrissey, a bitter, old hasbeen who a couple of years ago told the Guardian that "it's a relief to feel relaxed in more places than just one" (he has homes in Los Angeles, Rome, Switzerland and Britain) and who called the Chinese a "subspecies" for their treatment of animals.

The class that he now represents – a middle-aged, capital-rich, metropolitan elite – doesn't give a toss about you. They've proved it in every way it is possible to prove.

Where's the new Morrissey? When will we hear from him, or her, or them? When will working-class, young people realise they are being robbed blind and that there is not a soul in power who represents their interests? Rise up, young people, because you have nothing to lose but your disenfranchised future and an extra grand a year in rent. "There's ice on the sink where we bathe," sang Morrissey once upon a time. "So how can you call this a home/When you know it's a grave?"

That's you, that is. Write a sodding song about it. Or failing that, have a revolution. This isn't a Thomas Hardy novel. You're not actually destined to be screwed over by the lord of the manor and left to die on a neolithic rock. It's politics, not fate. Eff off, Morrissey. And all who sail within him.

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