Quentin Letts – Let’s Not Consider Reality

The word has gone out from the legendarily foul mouthed editor of the Daily Mail to his obedient hacks: political reality requires redefinition. The method is to exhume the tired canard about Labour engaging in “class war”, despite their being the ones at present keeping out of that argument. But Dacre’s dutiful “parliamentary sketchwriter” Quentin Letts (let’s not) has gone over the top in support.

Harry Potter and the Gobshite of Arslikhan

“Ditch the class war Ed, the real aliens in British politics are red not blue” whines Letts at the start of his turgid rant, telling anyone who will listen that Labour, and particularly Mil The Younger, are calling Young Dave and the Rt Hon Gideon George Oliver Osborne, heir to the seventeenth Baronet, “toffs”. They are? Well, no they aren’t, but some of them are calling them “Martians”.

Really? No, not really: Ken Livingstone – for whom Letts reserves a special helping of bile – has unveiled a poster depicting Cameron and Osborne, along with occasional London Mayor Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, as aliens with blue faces. Letts has himself translated this as “Martians” and then said that a big Labour boy did the translation and ran away.

And Quent is serious about how jolly rotten this poster is. “Is the Labour Party serious about saving this country from the disasters it helped create? Or it is just good at the character assassination stuff?” which is real brass neck. Letts is all about character assassination, admitting “You may have noticed that I am not always polite about our beloved tribunes”, which is understatement personified.

“Not always polite” is putting it very mildly indeed. Letts, Zelo Street regulars will know, is the one who called Sally Bercow a “scuttle-jawed doxy” (“doxy” is Old English slang for “prostitute”) after calling her a “spouse of ill repute” and a “slapper”. Not always polite? Gratuitous, misogynist, defamatory, sexist and downright abusive, more like. And still full of crap.

This is, after all, the hack who thought there was an English Parliament (wrong), couldn’t be arsed doing five minutes’ research before ranting about why many motorway service areas are in public ownership, dutifully made up a malicious story about former Coronation Street star Pat Phoenix just to kick Cherie Blair, and invented a characterisation for Lib Dem MP Lynne Featherstone.

So when this obnoxious toady scatterguns politicians he doesn’t like with abuse in order to try and talk up Young Dave and his fellow jolly good chaps, readers need to bear in mind that the bringer of this alternate reality is standing in the draughtiest of glasshouses, and is actually more desperate than any of those he characterises, such is his willingness to jump through Dacre’s hoops for more cash.

And he has the gall to suggest others are prostitutes? Pull the other one.