26 FEBRUARY 1994, Page 29

Clumsy me

Sir: Your columnist Auberon Waugh has amplified a piece of clumsy phrasing in my Observer article on Stephen Milligan's death (Another voice, 19 February). I wrote that there were three things that made it harder to poke fun at the manner of his death: his squint, the early death of his mother and that he was not gay. I was sniping at an oafish and entirely unsubstan- tiated headline in the Daily Mirror — 'Tory MP dies in gay sex riddle' — and did not mean to imply that it would be all right to poke fun if he had been homosexual. No one sexual orientation has an exclusive hold on the bizarre — a truth that is, I am sure, close to Auberon Waugh's heart.

John Sweeney

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