LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Letters from Kingsley Ands, Nigel Lawson, H. D. F. Creighton, Sir Robert Barlow, Dame Harriette Chick and others,
The right of reply
Sir: Mr Roberts is so steeped in inaccuracy that he can misreport me twice over in the very act of defending his newspaper against charges arising out of having mis- reported me. Seeming to think that he is thereby satisfactorily answer- ing those charges, he quotes a sentence from my article (30 January): 'It is true that those last two paragraphs [of the letter he refused to print] do set out my main grouse,' but fails to add the vital qualification that immediately followed: to print only those two paragraphs, as he offered, would have robbed me of a 'further and, in one way, more important point,' that the Mandrake piece in ques- tion was guilty, not of an isolated lapse, but of a 'pervading incom- petence'. I can tell that Mr Roberts has seen that part of my article, be- cause he misrepresents it towards the end of his letter. A proper look at what I said will show that I attributed 'pervading incom- petence' to the Mandrake piece, not to his newspaper as a whole, which I find in many respects an admirably competent organ. There's no harm in him. It's just that, like his Mandrake re- porter—who, as far as one can tell, inisreported me in a perfectly friendly tone—and like so many other people concerned with the dissemination of news, he can't follow two consecutive sentences. Kingsley Antis Lemmons, Hadley Common, Barnet, Herts
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