Enemies within

Fifty People Who Buggered Up Britain, by Quentin Letts

As readers of the Daily Mail know, Quentin Letts leaves no turn unstoned. His withering parliamentary sketches have left the blood of wounded politicians over the walls of Westminster. Wearing his theatre critic’s hat, he swims against the prevailing tides to tease dramatists and directors, and for good measure he is the ventriloquist who pulls the strings of the choleric Clement Crabbe.

Nobody is better equipped to nominate the 50 people who have damaged this country most grievously in the past five decades, and he discharges his duty with flair and tracer precision. There are obvious targets, and six prime ministers (including Margaret Thatcher) are duly called to account; but the joy lies mainly in reading about the less likely selections, from Jeffrey Archer to Tim Westwood, whose buggering-up could be termed cultural.

Archer we know all about. Westwood will be unfamiliar to many, though the offence for which he is indicted is all too familiar to those who live in our cities. The son of a bishop, Westwood has chosen to affect ‘a disfigured, urban-aggro way [of speaking] that is unintelligible to the broad mass of British society’. Accordingly he is employed by the BBC in ‘a bid to be thought trendy, a “me-me” plagiarism of a damaging culture from another land’. A hit, a palpable hit!

Other thrusts also pierce their targets. Alastair Campbell is arraigned for his fanaticism, which, as Letts notes, is not a British trait. Paul Burrell is a mincing rat, Peter Bazalgette an unrepentant vulgarian, Alan Titchmarsh a preening ninny, Princess Diana a repository for false emotion, John Prescott plain stupid. John Birt and Greg Dyke, Ed Balls and David Blunkett all go down the long slide together.