Tony Palmer and Princess Anne

Sir: Tearing oneself away from the fascinating subject of whether Tony Palmer has had sex, or, indeed done anything more fatiguing than putting pen to paper, your columns would seem the most appropriate place to express pleasure at the success of Princess Anne and Doublet this weekend.

To be royal and win something on your own merits and not because of who you are must be Particularly difficult; I wonder what Weighs so heavily on Mr Palmer, and why he calls his column ' Notes from the Underground ' ? A — quite justifiable — inferiority complex, perhaps.

Martin Folkard 67 Beaulieu Avenue, Sydenham, London SE26

From General Sir Clement Armitage

Sir: I have read with disgust the offensive article in your issue (August 21) attacking Princess Anne.

This is a wicked and shameful attack on an innocent girl who cannot defend herself. It is also an indirect attack on the Queen and the Royal family Is the Princess expected to be different from any other girl of her age? Of course she had feelings natural to her sex. You should be ashamed of yourself for publishing such rubbish. I challenge you to give publicity to this letter.

Clement Armitage Hownington House, Lechlade, Glos From Alderman Cecil F. Baker, JP

Sir: I was sorry to see that you Published a piece on Princess Anne. In my view it was offensive, ,10 Poor taste, and interesting possibly to some adolescents.

It is a pity so much of the press in these days seems to be taken up with sex, and has such a schoolboy attitude towards it. I have always regarded The Spectator as a journal which sets higher standards.

Cecil F. Baker 15 Hyde Gardens, Eastbourne

Sir: I repeat: Tony Palmer must go or Your readers will. Or do you like having to eat crow in issue after issue because of the incompetent writing of this very stupid to man? The only alternative is Lo get a sub-editor who knows how to wield an effective blue pencil.

Anthony Walker Box Cottage, Selborne, Alton From Sir Grahant Sutton Sir: Your defence of the article on Princess Anne that it was not an attack" misses the real point. There is a long tradition of open criticism of Royalty in this country and, provided it is fair, no one can object. Quite apart from the fact that no young woman, whether she be of royal blood or not, should be subjected to the kind of innuendo that this article contained, the Main objection is surely that this Style of writing is more appropriate to a sleazy girlie magazine than to The Spectator.

Journals of opinion are necessary in a free society and I think that The Spectator is the best that we have However, it is not inex

pensive and so regular readers have the right to expect that it will not become cheap. What seems to be wanted now is more vigorous application of editorial power to see that standards of writing are maintained. Otherwise many of us may consider that 15p a week is too dear.

Graham Sutton Hafod, 4 The Bryn, Sketty Green, Swansea Sir: In your own chivalrous desire to protect your contributor, Mr Palmer — and a frequent chore that must be — I think you may have unwittingly missed the main point to which some of your readers, including myself, have taken exception.

This was not so much Mr Palmer's 'attack' on someone who cannot effectively retaliate, but what Mr Cosmo Russell has accurately described as "the inexpressible vulgarity" of that grubby article on Princess Anne. To compare that pointless and witless offering with some earlier magazine article criticizing the Queen's hair style and dress sense is surely irrelevant.

The Queen may have been "highly amused" by the article you recall, but neither Princess Anne nor anyone else who might have been substituted as the butt for Mr Palmer's crude comments in his contribution from the Underground could possibly have read that particular article with anything but distaste verging on nausea.

So many improvements have been made to The Spectator during your editorship that I had no hesitation in becoming a subscriber once again. But if you cannot induce Mr Palmer to crawl back to his underground retreat with all speed you will lose at least one of this year's regular readers. Gerald Pawle Mawnan, Cornwall Sir: Tony Palmer's use, or misuse, of fragmentary biological terms shows quite clearly that he hasn't had any either! Is he too young or too old to know what sex is?

N. K. Ledd Churchill College, Cambridge Sir: Re Princess Anne: probably not. One wonders — has Tony Palmer?

Bernard F. S. Harte The Dover, 687 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10022

Palmer and Rantzen

Sir: That a medium so rich in Its possibilities as your paper should have enfeebled itself by employing such as Tony Palmer is quite beyond me. See his article September 4, P.355. H. Lubbock Adhurst St Mary, Petersfield, Hants Sir: I do not know Esther Rantzen, nor have I met Tony Palmer. I have never watched an Esther Rantzen television show, nor, until last week, have I read an article by Tony Palmer. Indeed, so scant is my experience of them that I am tempted to the conclusion that I have little, of a personal nature, in common with either of them unless it is the quaint willingness to display my inadequacies in public.

May I, therefore, be believed when I say this axe I am holding above my head has been ground by nothing more bigoted than a sense of fair play in the arena of activity in which we all three find ourselves? Am I to assume that my editor and my so-called colleague Palmer are unaware that the lowest, cheapest and dirtiest form of journalism is to repeat and explore, in malice, a suggestion that you suspect, and say you suspect, is untrue?

Miss Rantzen, whatever her gifts, cannot be held responsible for what the forked tongues of jealous BBC personnel utter against her, not what her working companions say or do not say to Tony Palmer in the lavatory. Miss Rantzen may be good, bad or indifferent at her job. But Mr Palmer is a pig at his. Sally Vincent 67 Peel Street, London, WS.

Sir: During the course of his attack on poor Esther Rantzen (September 4), Tony Palmer uses a revealing phrase about her 'pausing . . . to display a prominent set of dentals. The noun dental can, of course, only he used of the sound produced by applying the tongue to the teeth; but though semi-literate in Mr Palmer's context, it is easy to see why he chose it. Dentals ' suggests ' dentures ' and to ascribe dentures to a young woman is automatically to detract from her attractiveness.

No doubt Mr Palmer would have preferred to hear Enid Bagnold questioned more closely about her literary aims and achievements. But in a programme like She and She, the television interviewer is obliged, surely, to put the kind of questions that the average viewer would like to put himself. Since Miss Bagnold is an outstanding example of someone who has aged happily and handsomely, what is so absurd in asking her what it is like to be old?

Television may indeed be, as Mr Palmer claims, "potentially the most educationally creative force ever invented." But it is naïf to imagine that that is why the majority of people watch it.

What is the alternative to people like Miss Rantzen? People like Mr Palmer — asking distinguished guests to their programmes when they last had it off before com menting on their dentals ' and other physical imperfections? Francis King 55 Sydney Street, London SW3

Television personalities

From Dr John A. H. Wylie Sir: I beg to thank you most warmly for Mr Tony Palmer's robust and timely condemnation of ' Miss R., of that personality ilk ' Would, however, that such idiotic displays were always screened late at night and, being recognizable beforehand in Radio Times by their casts and credit, easily avoided in consequence.

Unfortunately, the BBC never seems to weary or exposing its relatively discriminating and longsuffering audience to increasing doses of rather silly people it presumes we want to see and hear or

considers otherwise to be good for our immortal souls. Even an undemanding, but not infrequently instructive, programme, Going for a Song, has of late been marred, more often than not, by strident and vapid actors and actresses squandering valuable time as " customers" of quite withering ignorance and banality; occasionally helped out by supposedly tele visiopoeic " personalities " like Andrew Faulds MP, who only add a measure of truculent facetiousness.

I will, if I may, sir, take this opportunity to express appreciation of the delicate splendour of much of the Corporation's drama and my abiding gratitude for those fine and varied programmes, all too rare indeed, but always exquisite, produced by such masters of 'their craft as Anthony de Lotbiniere, Julian Jebb and Patrick Garland.

Whilst the stark vulgarity of many a wasteful affront, which in It's a Knock Out achieves it preposterous apogee, can be contemptuously ignored, it is impossible, unless one is to miss much of value the BBC has to offer, to avoid exasperating and supercilious omniscience. This odious demeanour is affected in unpleasing voices by too many of the commonly slick and trivial resident front-men and reporters of current affairs, documentary programmes and, or so I am given to understand, certain sporting events. An unedifying mélange is rarely improved by the sameness of source and the dreary predictability of the views of most of the hired commentators. Since these men and women are not usually of an excellence, of which the Corporation has shown it can avail itself if it wishes, the whole spectacle is distastefully reminis7 cent of ' jobs for the boys.'

Finally, why, oh why, are itinerary pearls repeatedly cast before such porcine wayfarers as Johnny Morris and Ian Nairn? From the former all one can expect is a level of commentary supposed, albeit erroneously, to be appropriate to mentally defective children. Nairn, by contrast, is proffered as a cultivated and authoritative connoisseur when, in fact, he is an insensitive bore and an ignoramus. The last point was balefully emphasised in the Sunday Times by Maurice Wiggin, usually a perceptive and helpful critic, who, whilst he displayed a touching loyalty to his gauche and bumbling co-columnist, rendered a conspicuous disservice to responsible criticism.

John A. H Wylie 9a Portland Place, Kemp Town, Brighton

Peter Fleming

Sir: As an Oxford contemporary of Peter Fleming, I was pleased to see Sir Rupert Hart Davis's letter correcting the mistake made by my friend Christopher Sykes in his moving article, and that Sir Rupert also gave a correct list of Peter Fleniing's Oxford attainments. However, he omitted to add that Peter Fleming was a member of the Bullingdon Club. For that Club to elect a man who was a President of the OUDS and the Editor of the Isis was In those days unusual, if not unprecedented, but in the case of Peter Fleming not surprising. Bickham Sweet-Escott Prince! 'House, Dedham, Essex.