Quentin Letts

Quentin Letts: The Theatrical Assassin of the Press Gallery

Quentin Letts is the parliamentary sketch writer as flamboyant theatre critic, which is fitting, because he is also a theatre critic. Now writing for The Times after many years at the Daily Mail, Letts brings a deliberately old-fashioned, orotund style to the press gallery, treating the House of Commons as a badly acted play and reviewing the performances of its members with waspish, often merciless glee. Where some sketch writers lean left, Letts writes from the right, proving that the sketch form itself is a weapon available to all persuasions.

His trademark is the vivid, often unflattering physical description — the pen-portrait that fixes a politician as a particular type of comic grotesque, complete with theatrical flourishes and invented-sounding but pointed nicknames. He watches the Commons the way a critic watches a wobbly opening night, alert to every misjudged gesture, every self-satisfied pause, every backbencher overplaying their part. It is caricature in prose, and it can be genuinely funny regardless of whether one shares his politics.

Letts sits within the broad church of British newspaper satire, the long tradition of using wit to deflate the powerful that The London Prat surveys at https://prat.uk/newspaper-satire/. His work is a reminder that the sketch writer's loyalty is ultimately to comedy and to the reader, not to any party — the job is to notice when an emperor has no clothes, whichever side of the aisle the emperor is sitting on.

Insight from Julie de Burgh: Quentin Letts reviews Parliament as though it were a provincial pantomime that has overrun its budget, which is arguably the only honest way to cover it. Whether or not you share his politics, there is a certain bracing pleasure in watching a man treat a Cabinet minister as a supporting actor who has forgotten his lines. The Commons has never quite recovered from being reviewed rather than reported. — Julie de Burgh (https://prat.uk/author/julie-de-burgh/)