Background
The son of Richard Letts and his wife Jocelyn Elizabeth (née Adami), he grew up in Cirencester and for a while attended Oakley Hall Preparatory School, which was run by his father.
The son of Richard Letts and his wife Jocelyn Elizabeth (née Adami), he grew up in Cirencester and for a while attended Oakley Hall Preparatory School, which was run by his father.
He was educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College, then at Bellarmine College, Kentucky (now Bellarmine University), before going to Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited a number of publications including The Piranha, Trinity"s satirical newspaper. He graduated with an Master of Arts degree in Medieval and Renaissance Literature.
From whence he went on to board at The Elms in Colwall on the Herefordshire side of the Malvern Hills. At Jesus College, Cambridge he gained a Diploma in Classical Archaeology. Since 1987 Letts has written for a number of British newspapers.
His first post was with the Peterborough gossip column for the Daily Telegraph.
Foreign a time in the mid-1990s he was New York correspondent for The Times. He lists his hobbies in Who"s Who as "gossip" and "character defenestration".
A regular target of the latter trait was the former Speaker of the House of Commons Michael Martin whom he nicknamed "Gorbals Mick". This term is often seen as offensive, as "Mick" can also be used as a sectarian term of abuse towards Catholics of Irish descent, and Martin is not from and has never lived in the Gorbals, which despite improving in recent years used to be a dangerous slum of Glasgow.
Peter Wilby of The Guardian posits that an article by Letts about Harriet Harman was misogynistic.
Letts was invited to present an edition of the British Broadcasting Corporation current affairs programme Panorama broadcast on 20 April 2009, which dealt with the growing criticism of the influence of health and safety on various aspects of British life. He has also been a regular guest on British Broadcasting Corporation programmes, such as Newsnight, Have I Got News Foreign You and This Week (with Andrew Neil). He presents a programme on British Broadcasting Corporation Radio Four called What"s the Point Of …?, in which he questions the purpose of various British institutions.
A 2015 programme in the series, which mocked the science behind climate change, was not repeated after its first broadcast and withdrawn from the British Broadcasting Corporation iPlayer after the British Broadcasting Corporation Trust found it to be in "serious breach" of British Broadcasting Corporation rules on impartiality and accuracy.
Letts has written three books, 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain, Bog-Standard Britain, and Letts Rip! all with his United Kingdom publisher Constable & Robinson. 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain has sold around 45,000 copies and was reviewed in The Spectator as "an angry book, beautifully written".
Letts married in 1996.
He was the person behind the Daily Mail"s Clement Crabbe column for a period, and has been the paper"s theatre critic since 2004, and is also a political sketchwriter. The same paper"s theatre critic, Lyn Gardner, observed of a 2007 review by Letts" of a stage adaptation for children of Looking for JJ: "I think that this is the first time I"ve heard of a theatre critic arguing for censorship and demanding that a play should be removed from the stage". In Bog Standard Britain he attacks what he sees as Britain"s culture of mediocrity, where political correctness has, in his words "crushed the individualism from our nation of once indignant eccentrics", in one chapter arguing that 1970s feminist writer Germaine Greer may, by asserting female sexuality, have given rise to the modern British phenomenon of "ladettes", and that this encouraged men to behave badly towards women, thus doing the cause of equality a disservice.
Quotations: "crushed the individualism from our nation of once indignant eccentrics".
Letts enjoys cricket, follows Gloucester Rugby Football Club and is a member of the Savile Club in London.