Sir: John Mortimer has a comfortable house on the Berkshire
Downs which was built by his father and which presumably he inherited. He and his fellow writers, including Peter Jay, do not understand the aspirations of ordinary people who they rarely meet and may also want to own their OW n houses. As an illustration — in the next-door village there was a row of former council houses, most of which have been bought by the tenants; at the time of the election every house that had been sold had a blue placard staked outside it. It is this simple factor that ensured the return of the hated Thatcher regime and will go on doing so.
John Mortimer was at Harrow with me before the war. We met again in some club, not too respectable, after the war When he recognised me, but I did not recognise him, and he invited me to a Party. Subsequently about 35 years ago, he did my first and only divorce, briefed by my mother's old solicitor from whom he Obtained most of his briefs in those days. It was a fairly straightforward affair and was only a formality, and demanded no great legal histrionics. Subsequently, we have met twice in London restaurants in when he has cut me dead.
When I asked a fellow barrister and QC for an explanation for this behaviour, he said that John Mortimer suffered from inverted snobbery. Can this be the simple explanation for his socialism?
J. M. Rampton
Easton Lodge, Easton, Norwich
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