11-06-2025
‘Sir!' Frederick Forsyth wrote sizzling letters to the Telegraph for 30 years. Here are the best
It has been a long time since the Letters desk's fax machine saw daily action. For years, though, it continued to stand guard, awaiting the salvos of one correspondent in particular: Frederick (sometimes Freddie) Forsyth of Hertfordshire (later Buckinghamshire). In a busy life – working as a journalist, helping MI6, even penning the odd novel – Forsyth also found time to be a voluminous letter-writer to The Telegraph. A trawl through our archive indicates that, over 30 years, he made about 150 appearances. A pretty respectable hit rate.
He was not, by and large, a writer who got stuck into debates on the correct way to boil an egg, say, or the waning strength of English mustard. (He did once enter a discussion about cars, in 2015: 'When I spent the year 1963-64 as Reuters' – and the West's – sole correspondent in East Berlin, I had a Wartburg. It was a disgusting pink colour but it was compulsory.') No, he was a thunderer, and he was very good at it: robust and mordant, with wafer-thin patience for (to use a favoured phrase) 'blithering incompetents'.
Here, then, are a few of his greatest hits – beginning with his first letter to the paper, on the theme to which he returned most frequently over the following decades.
Forsyth was an unyielding Eurosceptic. But after the referendum – which he had long demanded – he became an equally trenchant critic of our leaders' efforts to extricate Britain from the EU.
It came from a place of care, but Forsyth found himself routinely exasperated by the Conservative Party – and two of its members in particular.
In truth, for Forsyth, no Tory leader could measure up to the Iron Lady. (And, as far as she was concerned, no thriller-writer could hold a candle to him.) When she died, he was dismayed by the reaction.
While it's possible to detect a begrudging admiration for Tony Blair's election-winning powers, Forsyth was deeply sceptical of the New Labour project, its high priests and its footsoldiers. (Siôn Simon – regularly arraigned – was MP for Edgbaston from 2001 to 2010.)
During those bizarre days in 2020, Forsyth was unpersuaded by the government's injunction to 'stay at home'.
Forsyth's final contribution tackled the biggest subject of all. And on the question of assisted dying, he was as forthright as ever.
He was a true giant of the Letters page. We won't be able to replace him. The fax machine has been stood down.
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