Quentin Letts Aftershocks

My piece on Quentin Letts’s campaign to get the Lyric’s funding withdrawn went a bit viral in early December. The link got retweeted on Twitter something approaching 1300 times and was shared a few hundred times on Facebook. I was in touch with a couple of newspapers during the day and was due to debate the role of the critic with Quentin Letts on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, but he pulled out.

It was an interesting - and occasionally unsettling -experience, having a piece go viral. I really had not intended to make that kind of splash before writing it. I thought the piece would sneak into the public domain via the blog, be read by a handful of people, and then disappear. But the extent of the rage was remarkable. To me, even more remarkable was that I saw not one single comment anywhere in defence of Quentin Letts. Seriously, not a single one. When something goes viral on Twitter, after a few hundred mentions you always start getting aggressive responses, insults, sneering, but this time nothing but shock and anger at Letts’s campaign.

I don’t suppose it will do much to change his position. As I say in the article, he’s a troll, not a critic, and his position is to stir up liberal outrage and send traffic to the Mail. At least I don’t think I did that, since I don’t link to the Mail anywhere in the article. But he’s just doing his job.

There were a few articles written that touch on the miniature storm.

• This piece by Alan White in the New Statesman.
• Another by Julie Robinson for lastminutetheatretickets.com’s blog.
• And Matt Trueman’s Noises Off column for the Guardian theatre blog covers it well.