Twitter Sir: I do believe the Spectator's mascot, Auberon Waugh,
has been muddling up his Spectator and Private Eye copy of late, culminating in last week's mountain of silly trivia concerning his recent entanglement in the Eye case. What began as a bright, racy column has deteriorated in recent weeks into an undergraduate-style gurgle of bartalk.
It is thoroughly disappointing to reflect on this lowbrow and irrelevant twitter when one considers what good stuff Waugh can come up with. Let's keep the coarse language, excessive slander and cheapjack wisecracks to a level where they can hit home. Spread them around and you sink the ship, certainly a ship like the Spectator. And Waugh is being wasted like that, quite aside from missing his chances.
In passing, it is a common failing among columnists (I fear I am one myself), when facing their typewriter for the umpteenth time, that they forget how little interested their readers really are in their views, their peccadilloes or whims, per se. (A notion know Waugh tries to disprove.) What they actually seek is their own views or possibly novel ones lucidly or wittily expressed. Not at all the same thing. It's a hackneyed old saying that journalists only write for themselves—and each other. Let's try a little harder to disprove that, shall we, Auberon ? Anthony McCall-Judson
24 Fernshaw Road, London SW10
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