It is usually taken as a given, for better or worse, that the Grand Old Men of English letters tend to move, if not necessarily to the right, to an accommodation with conservatism and the status quo as they grow older. It is, after all, harder to rail against the establishment when you have been weighed down with CBEs, honorary doctorates and the adulation that comes from being a much-loved writer. However, nobody seems to have told this to the novelist, polemicist and one-time enfant terrible Will Self, and the results have been, depending on your perspective, either disappointing or bleakly amusing.

Self has published an extraordinary 7,000-odd word open letter to Andy Burnham on his X account, as part of what he calls his ‘Sitreps’. (We are promised that they will culminate in a book called The Will Tower which will be published next month, and which seems to be half-Tower of Babel and half-The Watchtower.)

During the course of his diatribe, inspired by the Arday situation, Self demands a full public inquiry into the Cambridge professor’s death and blames various media figures, all of whom he names and (attempts to) shame.

Some are of this parish, including Madeline Grant and Melissa Kite; others,........

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