Enid Blyton: A gay sign to simple Peter McKay

The deranged, alcohol-sozzled homophobe Peter McKay – masquerading as the Mail’s Ephraim Hardcastle (banned in Irish editions on the grounds of irrelevance) – casts an aspersion on Radio 4's Today host James Naughtie for admitting to reading Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books as a boy. McKay writes that Naughtie’s co-host Ed Stourton affected “astonishment” at the revelation – “Being posh, class-conscious Ed will have remembered they were once considered ‘common’ by grand families.” He then adds that perhaps Ed thinks Jim’s literary tastes were once “effete”.

I don’t think so. Why, only yesterday - as chance would have it - I was reading an Orion interview with one of Stourton’s close friends, Nicholas Coleridge – MD of Conde Nast and the world’s worst novelist – who confesses to reading “200 Enid Blytons” as a brat. You don’t get much posher than Coleridge this side of the royal enclosure - and as we all know, birds of a feather flock together. And while Coleridge maybe a little effete for party posing purposes (makes one seem ageless) he is a confirmed cock-cunter. So, I suggest McKay finds another superstition in his gentle vendetta against "posh Ed".