In conversation with Quentin Letts

He is one of the most acerbic observers of UK politics in the British media, but he’s much more than just a parliamentary sketchwriter. Letts is a complete workaholic and when he’s not in the press gallery, he’s usually to be found at the theatre. I decided to find out what makes him tick.

ID: Is your role as a sketchwriter primarily to entertain?
QL: It’s a form of reporting. I’m a witness in one respect. Entertainment of readers is important and I give them a cartoon view of what’s going on in their legislature.

The actual goings-on in Parliament are pretty neglected in the mainstream press now. This is a bit of problem for sketchers. We used to be the icing on the cake. But now we stand there alone. I think that’s regrettable.

Why did you get into sketchwriting? Was it something you had an ambition to do?
I got into it because Simon Heffer went on holiday. He went on a sabbatical from the Daily Telegraph at a time when things for Margaret Thatcher were looking a bit dicey. Heffer went down to Australia to do an Ashes tour. Max Hastings, then editor, decided to try out various people. I was the one who got chosen after those trials. I was there when Thatcher was being toppled and one couldn’t have asked for a more exciting time to start as a sketchwriter with Geoffrey Howe making his speech and Mrs T going “I’m enjoying this”. I think Simon has always suspected that, had he been there, he could have saved Margaret.

A sketchwriter can wield extreme negative power in politics − a bit like Spitting Image did, caricaturing someone to the extent that their whole reputation is damaged.
It’s not just negative power. You can take up an issue. For instance, I got involved in trying to promote a medal for veterans of the Suez emergency. That was quite good fun. You can also show interest in particular subjects. The sketchwriters were quite early in showing excitement about phone hacking.

Also, I would say that satire is far less powerful than people think. Look at how Ali G really skewered a particular type of urban idiot who wants to more black than he is.

That has been completely powerless because those people were unaffected unfortunately. They almost saw it as praise. We sketchers were having a real biff very early at the whole expenses thing, and the uselessness of much of what was going on under Speaker [Michael] Martin.
It took ages for our attacks to have any effect and, in the end, I don’t think that what happened when it was exposed was anything to do with us. It was a natural impetus of the politics. So I’m not sure how powerful we are.

Simon Hoggart of The Guardian has a right go at the Conservative MP Michael Fabricant. In quite an affectionate way but…
That turned Fabricant into a personality, which is good for a politician. You say it’s negative if we keep going on about a particular person but politicians do benefit from a character.

I guess most politicians rather liked being on Spitting Image. Do politicians come up to thank you?
They come up to thank us to show how brave they are. For instance, Eric Pickles plays up to his caricature. He encourages us to see him as ‘Uncle Eric’, the biggest sausage roll in town. He benefits from that. It establishes him as a figure in the public’s imagination and that makes him a more formidable force. It gives him a voice and makes him harder to sack.

To what extent do sketchwriters operate as a herd or cartel?
We always used to go to the same things but now with so many more select committee inquiries, there are much richer pickings. We quite often go to completely different events and there’s not a chance to have a huddle afterwards.

What’s your response to politicians who think you’ve overstepped the mark? Are there occasions when, in retrospect, you feel that you did?
I have thought once or twice I’ve gone too far but, on the whole, I think sod ‘em because the attacks normally reflect something I feel very strongly about.

I don’t just attack out of spite. If I go on the attack, it’s because I feel seriously about what I do. If I have a go at people it’s because I feel they’re misbehaving or they’re not doing as well as they might or we deserve.

For instance, I feel really strongly that John Bercow is not right for the Speakership. It should be occupied by a person with really strong, admirable principles, which he very easily forewent when he saw his career might benefit. Bercow is a gold-standard careerist and I don’t think that’s admirable.

How influential do you think you are on some politician’s reputations? Do you sometimes think, ‘Oh God, I can’t write about this again, the readers are going to get bored’?
The readers sometimes want more. Certainly with Bercow I get a few readers saying: “Lay off him, you’ve overdone it.” But I get more saying: “Keep at it.” It’s a difficult judgement. We have more of an influence on people on the way up. If all sketchers decide suddenly that Grant Shapps is a really lively prospect that may well get noticed by the Whip’s Office. I’m not sure if we all gang up on someone [already established] like Caroline Spelman that really works because other things come into play, don’t they?

Do you have MPs desperate to climb the greasy pole alert you to a speech they might be about to make?
If they send you a copy of their speech you can always ignore it. Sometimes they may be a little bit over-eager. On the whole they leave me alone anyway. Simon Hoggart meets politicians more than I do. Matthew Parris certainly did, and made many more speeches on the circuit.

Simon Carr [of The Independent] has close links with one or two politicians and gains quite a lot of knowledge from them. I’m very bad with politicians. I find it much harder to be honest about them once I’ve got to know them. You get too friendly with them.

Why have parliamentary sketches survived in newspapers when parliamentary pages haven’t?
They are about character, which is universal. They aren’t about policy. They are verbal cartoons which means they are caricatures and a little bit unfair. They are cruel sometimes. They are imaginative sometimes. What I write isn’t always the absolute factual truth but I hope it has a wider truth sometimes.

How does your day pan out? When do you have to submit your copy by and how long does it take you to write?
It varies. Normally my deadline is about 6.30pm because then I’m driving off to the theatre. It’s 666 words every day – the mark of the devil – and it takes me varying times. The shortest I’ve done it is under half an hour. After the general election, when Cameron got into Downing Street – he got there at about 9pm – I had to file by about 9.30pm, so it was a bit sweaty.

Have you ever had a day when you haven’t had any inspiration at all?
[Laughs] Frequently. You have to chisel it out. Some days it’s fairly noticeable too! ‘Oh, gosh. It’s going to be impossible today. Welsh Questions is going to be the best of it.’ Or a Westminster Hall debate on chewing gum on pavements. But actually those specialist occasions can provide something far more writable than PMQs, which becomes more difficult by the week.

What differences have you noticed in PMQs? You’ve been covering it for over 20 years.
At the moment there is less greasing than there was under Tony Blair. At the start of Blair, the sycophancy was in plague proportions. I would cut down the frontbench involvement.

If you look back to PMQs in the early 1970s, which was roughly a comparable time in terms of the politics, it was less partisan and the prime minister would be expected to know far less detail. I am amazed by how much detail David Cameron carries around. If the prime minister makes the smallest mistake on detail, everybody shrieks as though the world has ended.

Ed Miliband has identified that as his weak spot, hasn’t he? That Cameron’s not a details man.
It is absurd to expect a prime minister to know every detail. One of the most interesting PMQs was when Blair and Hague were at it. Hague tried to trip up Blair over Lords reform.

It was the day that Lord Cranborne had fallen out with William Hague. Blair, brilliantly, immediately turned it around and showed Hague to be weak on that issue. That was really the moment that Hague was finished. And so that’s when PMQs becomes interesting, when you suddenly see the resourcefulness of the politician rather than their ability to cram facts into their head.

Has Ed Miliband improved at PMQs since he started?
He’s improved a lot but not necessarily as a result of his own performances. His handling of phone hacking went down really well with his own party. As a result, the troops are behind him and that makes the difference.

What’s your proudest description of a politician?
God knows! I was quite pleased with the way I bigged up Peter Tapsell because he should be easily mocked by us sketchwriters. But actually he’s magnificent and I’ve enjoyed standing up for him. I suppose I was quite quick out of the traps in attacking both Michael Martin and Bercow and I don’t regret having done that.

Conferences are obvious material, aren’t they?
Oh god, I loathe conferences. You think at the start of it, ‘This is going to be like going on a cricket tour.’ Instead, they are very tiring. You think you are going to sketch a certain event. But, actually, you go out early in the day and you sit through a tremendous amount of material and take far too many notes and end up using a tiny bit. You over-harvest.

The worst thing is the spectacle of all that hideous braying and boozing lobbyists pouring champagne down politicians’ throats. I come back from theatre reviews sometimes after midnight, cold sober, to find hotel-foyer scenes straight from Hogarth.

It’s the fringe meetings where the action is generally.
Not really for sketchers. We cover the loonier element making platform speeches and the big set pieces. So in the days of the Blair/Brown fights, Gordon Brown’s speech on the Monday was always a must-sketch. Then you’d get Blair’s repost on the Tuesday. At the Tory conference, you normally want to see William Hague at the start of the conference to see how he goes down with the blue rinses – badly last year after the bedroom story.

At the Lib Dems there is that enormous transsexual with the purple hair and sandals who is a reliable tour de force every year. [Laughs.]And there is a game among the sketchwriters to see who can get the first mention of sandals into sketches at Lib Dem conference.

Funnily enough, the fringes are always a little bit too specialist and a bit mad. Perhaps that makes them sound as though they should be good but they are too policy heavy.

Do you think the conferences have lost something since they stopped going to the seaside?
Undoubtedly. I don’t like going to Manchester or Birmingham where I feel very much that we are trapped in a police cordon. It has also accentuated the smallness of the political world. I don’t like it. You just feel completely remote from humanity. The seaside had the uplifting elements at least.
I don’t think they are going to go back any time soon.

No, they are all bloody snobs. It was the Blairites who led the charge to Manchester, wasn’t it? The Cameroons are also so impressed by urbanites they feel they can’t go to poor old Blackpool.

Which 2010 intake MPs would you identify as stars?
Well, old Chuka [Umunna] is suave and very sketchable. I haven’t really turned him over in a sketch but I feel I can’t put it off much longer. [Laughs.]

He is very serious though.
He’s very cautious.

He easily goes into the politician mode – ‘I’m going to be a star one day.’
But he’s good behind the scenes, you sense. Tristram Hunt – I think he’s been rather good in the chamber. Everyone is beastly about him. Rachel Reeves got off to a good start. She’s now started to remind me of Bernard Bresslaw [Carry On actor]. I’m sure it says more about me than her.

She’s very good though.
Stella Creasy is doing quite well. But I wish she’d lighten up a tiny bit. On the Tory side, there’s been all this talk about ‘why should these Cameroon cuties get jobs?’. Well, a very good reason: actually the ones mentioned are often quite good.

So for instance [Anna] Soubry is really mustard hot even though I don’t necessarily agree with her politics. She’s more left wing than I am. Liz Truss, when she stands up in the Commons, invariably makes sense. I am less convinced by Louise Mensch. I think she’s overdoing it on the tweeting. She could probably do with a spell of silence.

How did you get into theatre reviewing?
There was an unfortunate business where the Daily Mail suddenly found that they didn’t have a theatre critic and so asked if I would be interested. I’m jolly glad I accepted because I’m a better sketchwriter as a result of doing theatre.

What parallels are there between the two?
The weak joke is that you go from one form of ham acting during the day to see some real professional acting in the evening. But that’s a little bit trite. In the evenings you can see politics in culture and what’s going on in the wider world. You can make that match up sometimes to what’s going on down at the law factory [Parliament].

What kind of theatre do you most enjoy reviewing?
I most enjoy reviewing political stuff that is not on in the West End. I probably get more of a buzz out of things that are on at the Royal National Theatre (I always call it the ‘Royal’ National which bugs the other theatre critics) and at places like the Royal Court and the Royal Shakespeare Company. I’m not necessarily a man for pom-pom musicals but I do quite enjoy them when I go along.

How many do you do?
Tend to do three a week, sometimes four.

So it’s a huge time commitment.
It keeps me out of the pub in the evenings and it is very interesting. It broadens one’s mind. And theatre is tremendously energising actually.

What do you make of Nick Clegg?
He can be a little shrill in the chamber and he sounds exasperated a bit too much but he’s doing a reasonably good job for his own party. He’s proving a terrible brake on common sense, in terms of policy, but that is what he’s there for. I suspect that Cameron may be giving him a little too much trouser.

Do you miss some of the Labour figures from the past? Mandelson’s disappeared now...
I miss them only in terms of lazily as a writer. But we have to create new characters.

What’s the mix of a good sketch?
You just report what interests you − personal mannerisms, appearance and physical flaws, just like Steve Bell or Martin Rosen. They get their cartoons bought for £150 a pop by the politicians, and we just get slagged off for being sexist. But such is life.

You pick up on little quirks and flaws and you try to explain a bit of what the policy is and the setting and how the politician is fighting the argument in terms of dialectic.

From that you can tell something about the character and savvy of the politician. They are really character studies more often than anything. But sometimes you try to depict the grand theatre of politics. The reason that sketches are interesting to the reader more widely is that they are about manners and the politics of personality and culture.

Who do you regard as the greatest sketchwriters in modern times?
Bernard Levin [of The Spectator] was jolly good. Godfrey Barker always wrote a good sketch in the Daily Telegraph. And Matthew Parris’ sketch on the fly getting caught in Margaret Beckett’s hair was a masterpiece.

Have you ever thought about a political career?
No, never. I would be useless at it. I would not be patient enough with people’s problems. I do admire MPs. After priests, MP know more about our country than anyone else because they see humanity in its troubles and in the round, whereas we journalists don’t. So I do admire them, but that doesn’t mean to say that one shouldn’t criticise them because the way that they behave has an effect on our culture, doesn’t it?

Quickfire

What are you reading at the moment?
Lady Anna by Anthony Trollope.

Do you have a political hero?
Gwyneth Dunwoody.

Favourite country?
Ireland. I lived there for four years in the 1980s.

Favourite view?
The Slad valley in Gloucestershire: Cider with Rosie was based there.

What makes you cry?
One thing is music. Last year there was some haunting Elgar played by a quartet on the stage of the Tory conference in Birmingham during an interval. The horn solo set me off like a garden sprinkler.

Something you wish you’d known at 16?
Use fewer adjectives.

Do you have a guilty pleasure?
The Guardian columns of dear old Polly Toynbee – unintentionally some of the finest comic writing de nos jours. I have a fantasy that Polly and Evan Davis will get it together and rule over us like Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos.