Letter: The art of the political insult through the ages

Simon Kuper’s opening shot (“Welcome to the age of insult, you snowflake”, Magazine, FT Weekend, May 30) is that we are in the age of insult but it is more the age of the one-liner or even the single word.

Think of Norman Tebbit saying that his fellow Conservative and prime minister John Major had a “mulishness of a weak man with stupidity” or Neil Kinnock, the then Labour leader, calling Lord Tebbit “a wart on a carbuncle”. When questioned about it, he retorted: “Yes, flattery is one of my vices.”

But surely the golden age of the political insult was the 1880s.

Benjamin Disraeli, for example, proclaimed that William Gladstone “was a sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and glorify himself”.

Michael Thomson Perth, UK