Only a fool would mess with James Blunt. As his Twitter followers know, he has a sharp wit, and, as befits a former officer in the Life Guards, he is always ready for a fight. Indeed, the grievous suffering around the world caused by his greatest hit, ‘You’re Beautiful’, has been offset to some extent by his snappy tweets, several widely disseminated photographs of him looking a prawn, and a general sense that he can take a joke. Not long ago someone else tweeted as follows: ‘If you receive an email with a link to the new James Blunt single, don’t click on it. It’s a link to the new James Blunt single!’ The singer promptly retweeted it.
Even so, he may have overreached himself with his open letter to Chris Bryant the other day. The shadow culture minister, as you will remember, dared to namecheck the winsome balladeer when complaining, in a very mild way, that the arts were increasingly dominated by people from privileged backgrounds.
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