James Blunt’s sense of entitlement is so palpable you could wear it as a hat

Only a fool would mess with James Blunt. As his Twitter followers know, he has a sharp wit, and, as befits a former officer in the Life Guards, he is always ready for a fight. Indeed, the grievous suffering around the world caused by his greatest hit, ‘You’re Beautiful’, has been offset to some extent by his snappy tweets, several widely disseminated photographs of him looking a prawn, and a general sense that he can take a joke. Not long ago someone else tweeted as follows: ‘If you receive an email with a link to the new James Blunt single, don’t click on it. It’s a link to the new James Blunt single!’ The singer promptly retweeted it.

Even so, he may have overreached himself with his open letter to Chris Bryant the other day. The shadow culture minister, as you will remember, dared to namecheck the winsome balladeer when complaining, in a very mild way, that the arts were increasingly dominated by people from privileged backgrounds. It’s true: they are. It would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise. But Blunt objected forceably when mentioned in the same breath as Eddie Redmayne and all the other OE actors, journalists, novelists and artists, not to mention Mumford & Sons. ‘Dear Chris Bryant,’ he wrote. ‘You classist gimp. I happened to go to a boarding school. No one at boarding school helped me to get into the music business.’ And so it went on, the type of letter you tap in late at night after a few glasses of something, and then try to persuade yourself not to send before you can have another look at it in the morning. Blunty detailed his struggle against public indifference and state school-bred hostility with a sense of entitlement so palpable you could wear it as a hat.