A treasure trove of anarchic irreverence . . . from the barking mad to caustic wit

BOOK OF THE DAY: Am I Alone In Thinking – Unpublished Letters to The Daily TelegraphAurum, 192pp; £9.99

‘IS IT just me or . . .”, “it’s political correctness gone mad”, “the health and safety fascists”, “I could go on” – are all phrases familiar to the letters editor of a daily newspaper.

Apart from the cliches du jour, the letters editor also has to put up with the illegibly indignant, the barking mad and the great wit who simply has to share his tedious and overly laboured pun with the rest of us. And all that is before you get into the various lobby groups with their dreary screeds (footnotes attached).

Moreover, these saintly people don’t even get a credit: remember it’s “Letters to the Editor” not “Letters to the Letters Editor”.

Perhaps the finest letters page in any newspaper is to be found among the grumpy major generals and the genteel upper-middle class Home Counties types who make the Daily Telegraph's letters page such an unalloyed joy. For Ian Hislop – who has read the letters out verbatim on Have I Got News For Youto the biggest laughs he's ever got, the page is "brilliant"; for Tony Blair the page is "famous".

While the Telegraphdoes, like all newspapers, reflect the news cycle with its choice of mail, it frequently goes way off-message, much to readers' delight. A major talking (writing?) point earlier this year was when readers tracked the mass migration of a swarm of painted lady butterflies from the Isle of Wight to the north of Scotland.

This correspondence was a welcome relief from tales of doom, gloom and “I know it’s probably not politically correct to say this but . . .” The correspondence ended when someone wrote to say that during his naval career he had seen many painted ladies in Singapore whilst on shore leave but “they were not butterflies . . . and some of them weren’t even ladies”.

When the Telegraphbroke the story of British MPs' expenses this year, their letter writers excelled themselves. For the first time in their history, the paper gave over the entire letters page to correspondence about the scandal.

The missives were of the high blood-pressure outrage variety, but most were leavened with a lacerating wit. Such was the quality of the correspondence that the idea arose of publishing a book of unpublished letters.

“Sir, when Madonna moved to England she said she wanted to feel more English. She is shortly to become a single mother with three children from different fathers. Job done, then” gives you some idea of the tone here. Other offerings just state a bald, but still intriguing, fact as in the letter that draws attention to the fact that Jonathan Ross and Barack Obama are the exact same age.

Readers even get to parody the Telegraph's stereotypical demographic.

“Sir, I find it intensely humiliating to be asked by airport security staff if I have packed my own bag. This forces one to admit, within earshot of others, that I no longer have a manservant to do the chore.”

The best of the whimsical, occasionally risque, or just plain mad, letters make up this absolute delight of a compilation. What jumps out most is the sheer sense of anarchic irreverence on display – generally at odds with the rest of the paper’s editorial line.

You’ll find your own favourite section here. For me, it’s the fine acerbic mini-essays on the misuse of the English language.

Telegraphletter writers are obsessed about how the basic rules of grammar are trampled underfoot at most every turn these days. And the double joke here sometimes is not knowing exactly how facetious or literal the letter is intended to be: "Sir, you recently recounted the story of the doctor who embarked on an affair with his receptionist. We read that when he was confronted by the cuckolded husband, he replied, 'Me and your wife love each other.' I am struggling to decide whether I am more shocked by his morals or his grammar."

Brian Boyd is an Irish Times columnist and an irascible contributor to the Daily Telegraph letters page