So farewell then Simon Hoggart. Like most right-thinking people I mourn the death of the Guardian's great parliamentary sketch writer.
But here are two views you won't read in the hagiographies which inevitably accompany his passing.
One, Hoggart didn't really write about politics. He wrote about personalities. He was at his most amusing when describing the way politicians talked or looked. His most memorable pieces concerned things like the way Sir Peter Tapsell spoke, or Michael Fabricant's wig. Without wishing to sound sanctimonious, I'd rather read someone laying into what politicians do. Satire of the type employed by Private Eye is much cleverer, much more useful and much funnier. We think poorly enough of politicians anyway without someone like Hoggart mocking their personal qualities.
Two, Hoggart has single-handedly killed the Round Robin letter. Ten years ago no Christmas card opening was complete unless accompanied by the exultant shout of "It's a Round Robin!". At which point every sentient being would gather round to read the smug, complacent and vainglorious outpourings of friends and relatives. Hoggart used to publish a selection of these in the Guardian early in the New Year, and latterly produced two compilations, of which The Cat That Could Open the Fridge was one.
My favourite shocker was the one about the writer's offspring who had "spent the summer on a yacht in the Ionian Sea with some other beautiful young people from Balliol, and beat the Poet Laureate's son at Scrabble!"
If you went round with an axe and beat the sender to a bloody pulp, no jury would convict.
Where are the Round Robins now? The public ridicule Hoggart heaped on them as made even the least self-aware keep schtum. We had only two in 2013, one from some very nice people who write in full knowledge of the medium's absurdity, the other from a Lib Dem councillor in Watford who wouldn't know what self-awareness was if it landed on her head from a great height. We are all poorer as a result.
