Sam Leith: An open letter speaks volumes about its sender

The ostensible audience may be the addressee but the intended audience is the sender’s many presumed admirers and well-wishers — the very knowledge of whose scrutiny is boastfully presumed to make the addressee crumble for shame
7 October 2013
WEST END FINAL

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It is a baleful sign of the state of the first-class post that nobody seems confident entrusting their thoughts to a folded sheet of Basildon Bond any more. In the past few weeks we’ve seen so many open letters you’d think the natural arena for human communication was now the news pages of the daily papers.

In the past, open letters were generally the preserve of people with a very overdeveloped sense of their own importance, and you sent them only when a) you were highly unlikely to be able to obtain the address of the intended recipient (“Dear Vladimir Putin...”) and b) you were pretty much certain that the intended recipient would tell you to stick your well-meant advice right up the old poop-chute.

But now, deprived of all other means of communication, perfectly sensible people such as Ed Miliband and Sinead O’Connor are falling back on writing open letters to those in whose moral wellbeing (Paul Dacre, Miley Cyrus etc) they take an interest. Richard Dawkins now does little else but write open letters to world religions.

This is no good for anybody because writing open letters doesn’t half make you look a pill. If you imagine a Venn diagram in which sanctimony, bullying and self-advertisement overlap, the open letter — however well-meant —emanates from the triple-shaded area right in the middle. Many of us know the story of the Skibbereen Eagle, an Irish local paper that with splendid vaingloriousness warned the German Kaiser in 1914: “The Skibbereen Eagle has its eye on you.” A few years back I got a solemn press-release from the JCR of a Cambridge college announcing that they’d passed a motion condemning the Iraq war — but I was running a diary column at the time, so they had the gravity of it about right.

We’re in this territory. Do open letters work? If their intention is to persuade their recipient of something, you’d have to say not. They fail the sincerity test. The ostensible audience may be the addressee but the intended audience is the sender’s many presumed admirers and well-wishers — the very knowledge of whose scrutiny is boastfully presumed to make the addressee crumble for shame. More often they will simply weep with laughter. Miley, certainly, found it pretty easy to tell Sinead to go boil her head.

This column, incidentally, interrupts me halfway through writing an open letter to my next-door neighbour asking him to stop practising his John Cougar Mellencamp tribute act after my bedtime. (The open letter to Islington council about the dog poop outside Paddy Power is already on its way to Reuters.)

All I can say is that the sooner we get the GPO sorted out, and the status quo ante restored, the better we’ll be all round.

Simon sure is a popular guy

Simon Cowell’s friend Sinitta has broken her silence to reveal the “inner secrets” of Cowell’s so-called “harem” — the group of female friends with whom he likes to be photographed going on holiday.

“We Don’t All Sleep With Simon” is the headline. Call me old-fashioned but I think you’d struggle — much as this might grieve Cowell — to find anyone whose assumption had been the opposite.

Paedophiles wouldn’t go near Twitter

“Twitter has put itself on a collision course with David Cameron by resisting demands to raise significantly the £5,000 it contributes to combat child porn,” we’re told, “even though it is set to be valued at £8 billion.” How perfectly absurd. Twitter could be valued at £800 billion, and that would have no bearing on the appropriate contribution for it to make to the Internet Watch Foundation’s fight against child pornography.

Child pornographers, as far as my dim understanding goes, aren’t really big on Twitter. Remember how that stuff is, like, extraordinarily illegal? The people exchanging it are generally trying to avoid attention and remain anonymous. They scuttle through the deep web via the Tor network. Twitter broadcasts to the world. To post images of child abuse on Twitter (“@EvilPaedo check dis out LOL”) would be to beg for arrest. If it’s really happening, Twitter should if anything be charging the IWF commission.

Truth of the prison diaries

Jailed after taking her then husband Chris Huhne’s speeding points, Vicky Pryce has done what’s traditional for all public figures who do time: she’s produced her prison diaries. It now goes: St Paul, Boethius, the Marquis de Sade, Oscar Wilde, Antonio Gramsci, Martin Luther King, Jonathan Aitken, Jeffrey Archer and Vicky Pryce. What will strike most of us, other than the fact that investigation of her Tardis-style handbag on admission turned up (“a tenner here, a £20 note there, the odd £50 note, and a few fivers I had been given as change..”) £1,490 in cash — is that everyone she met seems to have been “lovely”. Wouldn’t you work on being lovely if you knew there was a high chance of your input into a public person’s bird finding marquee treatment in the Mail on Sunday?

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