Fletters to the Guardian 2022 & the first of 2023
Each year around this time a correspondent e-mails me details of those who have most letters published in the Guardian in the year just gone.
An edited summary is below. The correspondent tells me that as recently as 2020 22 Fletters were published. That of course was a time of lockdowns so perhaps more time was available.
Anyway I continue to write letters to the Guardian which are sometimes published. This may come as a surprise to those who tell me they used to read my letters. I still write, but do they still read.
Finally once again its mostly if not entirely men, with or without beards. Progress in history can sometimes be very slow
I take particular note of your “frequent flyers”, namely, correspondents who have multiple letters published. The winner this year (Letters Page 2022) is a bright spark from Devon with 12 letters*. The runner-up with 11 is the UK’s most epistolary narrowboat “Gordon Bennett”. In third place with 10 letters each come a Liverpudlian and a bearded regular (who has been ill this year and is now hopefully fully recovered. In 2020 you published 22 of his letters). A Fr comes next with 9 followed by three frequent flyers with 8 apiece – a figure equal to this year’s entire output from Hebden Bridge.
*Toby Wood points out that he also had 12 letters published in 2022
First Fletter of 2023 (10th January 2023)
Jonathan Freedland is right that the debacle of the 15 rounds of voting it took US Republicans to elect one of their own number to preside over the House of Representatives underlined that they are a party not of political power but of disruption. Just like the Liz Truss interregnum here, however, the disruption has a purpose. It is certainly not to govern in the interests of ordinary people. Rather it is to secure political and financial benefits for their friends and allies.
Keith Flett
Tottenham, London
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