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50 who ‘buggered up Britain’: a Daily Mail
man lets them have it
50 People who Buggered Up Britain.
By Quintin Letts.
Constable £12.99
QUENTIN Letts is the rising star of the Daily Mail, a parliamentary sketch writer and an unorthodox Tory who livens up that collection of the near dead and Madame Tussaud rejects on BBC TV’s Question Time.
True, he may be too clever for his own good, but in his new book he turns his boyish boisterousness and blunt scout’s knife into 50-plus people who he believes have steadily eroded the values of his England.
Among them, the cleric who caused the alteration of the Book of Common Prayer – a very meddlesome priest; the head of Starbucks; the MP who piloted health and safety legislation through Parliament; and Julia Smith, who inspired EastEnders. He often rasps, but often stings.
Here be villains, knaves and fools and Letts – the ringmaster – cracks his whip and marches them around with all their faults and foibles into the big tent. There they go, from Jeffrey Archer to Harold Wilson.
Ed Balls, Gordon Brown’s protégé and his wife Yvette Cooper are bureaucrats without heart. Dr Beeching wrecked our rural railway system and is given a posthumous raspberry. John Birt, when he shifted the news at 9 to 10 o’clock, caused an imbalance in English life, which Letts can never forgive.
Tony Blair and the disgrace and dishonour in his role in the Iraq war followed, by his lavish self-enrichment, brings to the fore the puritan and cavalier Letts. Decimal currency was James Callaghan’s unwanted gift to the UK. Predictably, Alistair Campbell is the converse of all things bright and beautiful, a devious hate-figure.
Mick Martin, the Speaker, is as “thick as cold custard”. A bad metaphor, my dear Letts – it’s not that thick.
John Prescott is “an ape, a snake, a sour sneering, snarling jackal” – and all in one menagerie “who licked the plate of privilege clean”.
Charles Saatchi’s artistic taste is for filth, violence, phallic obsession and controversy at any cost.
Margaret Thatcher? Well, the miners’ strike and her pursuit of the trade unions did lasting damage to our country: “Her political character had an ugly, vengeful side”. There goes his ticket to the long-awaited state funeral.
A timely, if abrasive close up of the movers and shakers.
May Quintin The Good continue to use his scatter gun.
ILLTYD HARRINGTON
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