Product Description

Which 50 people made Britain the wreck she is? Which 50 idiots did it? From ludicrous propagandist Alastair Campbell to the Luftwaffe's Hermann Goering and his allies, it's time to name the guilty men and women. Quentin Letts sharpens his nib and stabs them where they deserve it, from tennis player John McEnroe to TV gardener Alan Titchmarsh, the dumbed-down buffoon who put the 'h' in Aspidistra. Margaret Thatcher ruptured our national unity. The creators of East Enders trashed our brand over high tea. Here, he argues, are the people who made our country the ugly, scheming, cheating, beer-ridden bum of the Western world. Here are the fools and knaves and vulgarians who ripped down our British glories and imposed the tawdry and the trite. In a half century we have gone from end-of-Empire to descent-into-Hell. How did this happen?Whose fault was it? Letts' outrageous pen portraits, some comical, some steaming with anger, include royalty, politicians, artists and even the man who invented the mini-roundabout. Readers will be invited to draft alternative lists. But can any of them be quite as politically incorrect as this?The complete 50 are: Jean and Gareth Adamson; 'Anonymous'; Jeffrey Archer; Kenneth Baker; Ed Balls; Peter Bazalgette; Richard Beeching; John Birt; Frank Blackmore; Tony Blair; David Blunkett; Rhodes Boyson; Gordon Brown; Paul Burrell; James Callaghan; Alastair Campbell; Anthony Crosland; Richard Dawkins and Charles Simonyi; Princess Diana; Andrew Dismore; Greg Dyke; Sir Alex Ferguson; Maurice 'Maus' Gatsonides; Tony Greig; Edward Heath; The Very Rev Ronald Jasper; Graham Kelly; Graham Kendrick; Sir Denys Lasdun; Dame Suzi Leather; John McEnroe; Stephen Marks; Michael Martin; Alun Michael; Rupert Murdoch; John Prescott; Nicholas Ridley; Geoffrey Rippon; Charles Saatchi; Sir Jimmy Savile; John Scarlett; Howard Schultz; Julia Smith; Janet Street-Porter; Margaret Thatcher; Alan Titchmarsh; Harold Walker; and, Helen Willetts. On Princess Diana: 'The woman was a liability, a souffle of false ideas, a super-model with all that that entails. She was the glamorous tool of cleverer men, a plaything for the powerful, a delusion worshipped only by the impressionable'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22982 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Review
[Quentin Letts] discharges his duty with flair and tracer precision...an angry book, beautifully written
-- The Spectator, 8 November 2008

About the Author
Quentin Letts is parliamentary sketch writer and theatre critic for the Daily Mail. A regular broadcaster on radio and television, he was formerly New York correspondent for The Times and gossip columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He recently presented Radio 4's series 'What's The Point Of?' He lists his recreations, in Who's Who as 'gossip' and 'character defenestration'. This is his first book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Jeffrey Archer Long before Tony Blair even thought about ennobling any of the Labour Party’s donors, there was talk of how John Major stamped his feet up and down on the carpets of 10 Downing Street and insisted, in the manner of Violet Elizabeth Bott until he was nearly sick, that Jeffrey Archer be made a peer. It was as bad a piece of work as Major did during his premiership and it was an early sign that places in the Upper House of Parliament were being handed out like spaces in an executive car park. Much criticism has been fired at Blair and the Labour Party for demeaning the House of Lords. Rightly so. But this flaky combo was not the first to push dodgy friends towards the Upper House. The Archer appointment was equally troubling. That the Lords did not really take off as a political scandal until 2006 – some fourteen years after Archer first settled his bottom on the red leather benches – shows how long the British Establishment is allowed to get away with rank rum behaviour before being shamed into higher standards of conduct. Jeffrey Archer should never have been allowed anywhere near the Lords. He was a political liability. In his earliest days as a politician he was spotted by a laconic, slightly mournful man of the world called Humphrey Berkeley MP. I knew Humphrey a little and he had a nose for trouble. He recognised Archer as just that. His warnings to the Conservative Party went unheeded. Archer’s wild unsuitability for a Life Peerage might seem obvious now but it was also obvious to many people in 1992. There was no shortage of well-placed types who told John Major that ‘Lord Archer’ was a bad idea. The shadowy committee which at that time approved nominations for the Lords shed its normal discretion when the name of J.Archer came before its members. It was not uncommon, as a Fleet Street journalist during those months, to find oneself being shepherded into a corner of the Palace of Westminster’s cloisters to be told off the record that ‘the committee was most unhappy’ and ‘the committee had asked Downing Street if it was really sure about this nomination’. And yet Archer, this scandal-flecked clown with the resilience of an India rubber ball, bounced through the trouble and straight through the stained-glass windows of the double doors which lead into the House of Lords. Maybe it was his money. Maybe it was his optimistic enthusiasm. Maybe there was another reason. But he was given that most coveted of baubles. There he remains, despite having been convicted of perjury in 2001. The fact that he retains his seat in our legislature after serving time in prison is a smaller matter. In a way he is rather better qualified now to bring something of value to the House’s discussions. Parliament needs authoritative voices and Archer certainly has some expertise now in the area of penal reform. But that is rather beside the point. He should never have been there in the first place. It needs to be said that Archer is not an entirely bad man. He has a mercurial effervescence which can be attractive – and must especially have appealed to a Prime Minister who was surrounded by cautious nay-sayers who, he may have felt, looked down upon him. Perhaps the more the senior civil servants and the Cabinet colleagues said, ‘John, you really must drop this idea of Jeffrey going to the Lords,’ the more, perhaps, the idea appealed. Who can say why John Major supported Archer? But this serial fantasist, amusing company but a toxic political colleague, would have been questionable as a recruit for a gossip column, let alone for the revising chamber of our Parliament. There are times when snobbery is justified and this was one of them. Archer’s crassness, his boastfulness, his social mountaineering, his pushiness, his sheer, screamingly obvious dodginess, were traffic signs to his character and should have prevented him getting as far as he did. The moment he made it in to the Lords should have been the moment our system realised that something needed doing about admission procedures to the Upper House. Having become a producer of best-selling fiction Archer was rich. Moreover, he was generous with money. By splashing it around socially he lured journalists who should have known better. He showed how easy it is, by offering free drink and the thought of access to glamour, to subvert the British elite. At the Conservative Party conference most years, and in central London, in his south bank flat overlooking the Thames, Archer was the most flamboyant host. Invitations to his parties – champagne and shepherd’s pie, a questionable combination – were greatly cherished by the impressionable and the disreputable. Lesser men and women fluttered towards Archer like moths towards an outside light in summer. The perjury that undid him, however, showed he was not entirely a figure of fun. It related to an infamous 1987 libel case against the Daily Star at which Archer won £500,000. The editor of the Star, who consequently lost his job, later died of a heart attack. Some said that he was broken by the case – the case in which Archer lied. It was also a case in which the presiding judge, a viciously uneven beak called Mr Justice Caulfield, held up to the jury the sainted figure of Archer’s wife Mary. ‘Your vision of her probably will never disappear,’ said Caulfield, breaking the convention that summings-up should not be biased. ‘Has she elegance? Has she fragrance? Would she have, without the strain of this trial, radiance? How would she appeal? Has she had a happy married life? Has she been able to enjoy, rather than endure, her husband Jeffrey? . . . Is he in need of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel round about quarter to one on a Tuesday morning after an evening at the Caprice?’ It was later reported that Mary and Jeffrey Archer were hardly sleeping together. Mary Archer could have clarified matters at the time of Caulfield’s summing-up. She did not. No further questions, m’lud.

Customer Reviews

Some of his 'targets' are very poorly chosen.
Letts' book comes from an interesting perspective; acerbic and amusing pen pictures of those who, as the title tells us, have not made such a positive contribution to our national life. All well and good if the target is a pompous and hubristic politician whose words and actions fail to match, or some greedy business person who puts profit above humanity. But to target someone because of how they look or the way they speak is not only cruel but cheap and lacking in imagination.

In places, the book is amusing but too many pieces have a sense of the school bully about them. Picking on someone whose only apparant failing, according to Letts, is that they are on TV or that they choose to dye their hair is childish. Such writing becomes a cheap shot and as such, lacks any credability.

There is a smug attitude to much of Letts' writing. This is a pity because those targets deserving of scrutiny also deserved more of the authors attention at the expense of those who simply annoy him.

Disappointing
I love a good, light-hearted rant - who doesn't? - so I had high hopes for this book, having recently gone through a couple of Charlie Brooker's finest.

And what a let down it proved to be.

Wielding a clever turn of phrase is usually a good thing, but in this case it feels less like an intelligent use of the English language, and more like a smug way of belittling the proles, who could never hope to master or understand such eloquent diction. This has the effect of almost completely preventing the reader from "warming" to the author, and therefore finding it fairly difficult to sympathise.

Secondly the humour, which is distinctly lacking - yes, there are some clever and amusing sections, but for the most part it's just fairly unremarkable, which is a shame.

Thirdly, the whole thing is just far too political - and I mean that not in the sense of making fun of and ranting about those in the political spotlight (and therefore marking themselves as fair game), but because of the barely concealed political leanings of the author. One of the selected fifty is baroness Thatcher - surely one of the prime examples of an individual to whom the title of the book applies. Sadly, the pages devoted to her read more like a defensive Conservative PR document than a red-blooded rant. To put this into perspective, the next individual in the list is Alan Titchmarsh, which seems slightly unfair on poor Alan!

It isn't often that I struggle to finish a book, but on this occasion I really had to try, and sadly, the effort invested in reading from cover-to-cover was in no way justified by the enjoyment derived from it.

I'd give this book one star - there is the occasional laugh, but you have to work very, very hard to get there.

Not clever. Not funny. Rather dull, I'm afraid
There is nothing like a witty book that pokes fun at pomposity and points out inconsistencies and vanities with ascerbic logic. Sadly this IS nothing like the book I have just described, rather it is in itself an excercise in pomposity and vanity and whilst there is much acid, it is almost logic-free. This book is basically about people whom the author doesn't like, and rather than expose what it is about some of these people that apparently has 'buggered up Britain', Letts makes comments about physical appearance, generalises wildly and reveals his own prejudices.
I really wanted to enjoy this book, as there are many delicious targets he could have chosen, but it does not seem that the intention here was to be witty and clever as much of it is a rather boring peronal rant.