16 JUNE 2001, Page 32

Parliamentary gaffes

From Mr Christopher Silvester Sir: Petronella Wyatt's credentials as a scholar of parliamentary lore are wanting (Singular life, 19 May).

Ms Wyatt wrote that 'Robert Peel, according to O'Connell, had a smile like the handles on a coffin', which would have been a nonsensical image. What O'Connell actually said was, 'Peel's smile: like the silver plate on a coffin.'

She also wrote that Pitt the Younger 'wanted to talk of nothing but imaginary threats to civil obedience. Once he brandished a dagger that he claimed had been found as part of a stash of weapons belonging to revolutionaries. Sheridan riposted, "Where's the fork?"' In fact, Sheridan's riposte was directed towards a vulgar display by Edmund Burke. In 1792, during the French Revolution, an order to buy three thousand daggers from a Birmingham armourer had come to Burke's attention. He borrowed a sample dagger from the secretary of state and during a speech in the Commons flung it down on the floor saying, 'Let us keep French principles from our heads, and French daggers from our hearts!'

Christopher Silvester

London W10