22 SEPTEMBER 2007, Page 19

Fairlie interesting

Sir: In your introduction to Peter Oborne's article 'The Establishment is dead,' (15 September) you say that `the term "Establishment" was coined in The Spectator', and you quote my late friend Henry Fairlie's celebrated article of 23 September 1955, on 'what I call "the Establishment" in this coun- try'. But Fairlie had been anticipated in 1953 by A.J.P. Taylor (as he liked to point out), writing in the New Statesman on William Cobbett and `the governing classes, the Establishment'. Geoffrey Wheatcroft Bath