Quentin Letts

Quentin Richard Stephen Letts (born 6 February 1963) is an English journalist and theatre critic.

He has written for The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, and The Oldie.

Since 1987, Letts has written for several British newspapers.

His first post was with the Peterborough diary column for The Daily Telegraph.

Letts then joined the Daily Mail appointed by the newspaper's editor, Paul Dacre, to resuscitate the paper's own parliamentary sketches, a feature which Letts has said had remained dormant at the title since 1990.

For two years (1995–97), he was New York correspondent for The Times.

A freelance since 1997, by mid-2006, he was contributing regularly to The News of the World and Horse & Hound magazine.

According to Stephen Glover, he has supplied gossip to numerous diary columns.

He wrote a parliamentary sketch for The Daily Telegraph for four years until 2001.

He was the first person to write the Mail's pseudonymous Clement Crabbe column, launched in 2006, and has also been the publication's theatre critic since 2004, again at Dacre's suggestion.

"Look, diaries are very much part of my output as a journalist" he told James Silver writing for The Guardian in 2006.

"To me it's like a plumber mending taps. It's what I do. I send out two or three stories a day. They don't all get published, of course. It's like sending out carrier pigeons, some of them don't make it back".

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 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 purpose of various British institutions.

Marr was recovering from a stroke he suffered in 2013, and Letts later apologised for the remarks.

A 2015 programme in the series, which mocked the science behind climate change, was not repeated after its first broadcast and withdrawn from the BBC iPlayer after the BBC Trust found it to be in "serious breach" of BBC rules on impartiality and accuracy.

Letts told The Times: "It’s a bit Orwellian. There’s an amateurishness to their sinister attempts to control thought".

Letts has published several books including 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain and Bog-Standard Britain, all with his UK publisher Constable & Robinson.

Brandon Robshaw in The Independent described the latter as being "a bog-standard rant about exactly those subjects one would expect a Daily Mail columnist to rant about" and "a waste of everyone's time".

50 People Who Buggered Up Britain has sold around 45,000 copies and was reviewed in The Spectator (a publication Letts writes for) as "an angry book, beautifully written".

His 2015 novel The Speaker's Wife, about Parliament and the Church of England, was described as 'rollicking' by Labour politician Chris Bryant in The Guardian.

Kate Saunders in The Times commented: "Frankly, I adored reading this, but for all the wrong reasons. It is absolutely dreadful from start to finish. And there is nothing funnier than a bad novel by a good writer".

In the print and online versions of the Daily Mail in 2016, Letts described the BBC journalist Andrew Marr as "Captain-Hop-Along, growling away on BBC One, throwing his arm about like a tipsy conductor".

His non-fiction book, Patronising Bastards: How The Elites Betrayed Britain, was published in October 2017 and is an attack on the British ruling elite.

Interviewed on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, he was asked why Paul Dacre, the long-serving editor of one of the best-selling newspapers in Britain (and one of Letts' employers), was absent from the book.

Letts said: "He’s escaped somehow, I don’t know how...", adding: "I’m not a suicide bomber, for God’s sake".

"Lett's put-downs", wrote Roger Lewis in The Times "are hysterical and take the libel laws to the brink".

In April 2018, as part of a review of the play The Fantastic Follies of Mrs Rich, an adaptation by the Royal Shakespeare Company of the 18th-century comedy The Beau Deceived by Mary Pix, Letts suggested that actor Leo Wringer was miscast as the nobleman Clerimont.

Letts wrote that Wringer was "too cool, too mature, not chinless or daft or funny enough" to play the character, whom Letts saw as "a honking Hooray of the sort that has infested the muddier reaches of England’s shires for centuries."

Letts continued:

"Was Mr Wringer cast because he is black? If so, the RSC’s clunking approach to politically correct casting has again weakened its stage product. I suppose its managers are under pressure from the Arts Council to tick inclusiveness boxes, but at some point they are going to have to decide if their core business is drama or social engineering."

On 26 February 2019, it was announced that Letts would return to The Times.

On 1 September 2023, Letts returned to the Daily Mail.

The son of Richard Francis Bonner Letts and Jocelyn Elizabeth (née Adami), he was born and raised in Cirencester and for a while attended Oakley Hall Preparatory School, which was run by his father.

He boarded at The Elms School in Colwall on the Herefordshire side of the Malvern Hills.

His education continued at Haileybury and Imperial Service College, before he won a scholarship to Bellarmine College, Kentucky (now Bellarmine University), which he left after a year.

He returned to England and worked as a barman and part-time local journalist in Oxford, before going to Trinity College, Dublin (TCD), where he edited a number of publications including Piranha!, Trinity's satirical newspaper.

He graduated with an MA degree in Medieval and Renaissance Literature.

At Jesus College, Cambridge, he gained a Diploma in Classical Archaeology.