Quentin Letts - Career

Career

Since 1987 Letts has written for a number of British newspapers. His first post was with the Peterborough gossip column for the Daily Telegraph. For a time in the mid-1990s he was New York correspondent for The Times. He was the person behind the Daily Mail's Clement Crabbe column for a period, and has been the paper's theatre critic since 2004 and is also a political sketchwriter. He lists his hobbies in Who's Who as "gossip" and "character defenestration".

A regular target of the latter trait was the former Speaker of the House of Commons Michael Martin whom he nicknamed "Gorbals Mick". This term is often seen as offensive, as "Mick" can also be used as a sectarian term of abuse towards Catholics of Irish descent, and Martin is not from and has never lived in the Gorbals, a poor area of Glasgow.

Peter Wilby of The Guardian has asserted that an article by Letts about Harriet Harman was misogynistic. The same paper's theatre critic, Lyn Gardner, observed of a 2007 review by Letts' of a stage adaptation for children of Looking for JJ: "I think that this is the first time I've heard of a theatre critic arguing for censorship and demanding that a play should be removed from the stage".

Letts was invited to present an edition of the BBC current affairs programme Panorama broadcast on 20 April 2009, which dealt with the growing criticism of the influence of health and safety on various aspects of British life. He has also been a regular guest on BBC programmes, such as Newsnight, Have I Got News For You and This Week (with Andrew Neil). He presents a programme on BBC Radio Four called "What's the Point Of?" in which he questions the use of cherished British institutions.

Letts has written three books, the bestselling 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain, Bog-Standard Britain, and Letts Rip! all with his UK publisher Constable & Robinson. In Bog Standard Britain he attacks what he sees as Britain's culture of mediocrity, where political correctness has, in his words "crushed the individualism from our nation of once indignant eccentrics". 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain has sold around 45,000 copies and was reviewed in The Spectator as "an angry book, beautifully written". In a published extract, he argued that 1970s feminist writer Germaine Greer may, by asserting female sexuality, have given rise to the modern phenomenon of "ladettes", and that this encouraged men to behave badly to women, thus doing the cause of equality a disservice.