Handicapped
Sir: The trouble with the obnoxiously acerbic Auberon Waugh ('Against the disabled,' 21 March) is whether to take him seriously or not. If he is, in fact, a handicapped person (and has been designated, as he says, 100 per cent disabled since 1958) he has my sympathy. Some, of course, would argue that he has been handicapped from birth, considering that he sprang from the loins of a writer no whit less disagreeable than himself, That, however, is to be uncharitable — and beside the point, which is, to protest against his patronising sneers at the wheelchair army ‘, . no more and no less than another strident pressure group . . . ' One can take Spectator 4 April 1981 these poisoned darts when Mr Waugh 1$ aiming from his Private Eye blowPiPe. When he dips his Spectator quill in that same vitriol, to write on so sensitive subject as physical disability, he goes beyond the bounds of decency.
Eric Stevens
203a High Street, Barnet, Hertfordshire
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