SINGER JAMES BLUNT has written a blistering open letter to an MP who accused him of being “too posh”.
Labour’s shadow culture minister Chris Bryant was discussing the issue of diversity in the arts when he name checked Eddie Redmayne and James Blunt as examples of privileged performers dominating arts and culture.
I am delighted that Eddie Redmayne won [a Golden Globe for best actor], but we can’t just have a culture dominated by Eddie Redmayne and James Blunt and their ilk.
Now Blunt has fired back in an open letter in which he lists the myriad ways his background worked against him when it came to pursuing a career in music.
The singer calls Bryant “a classist gimp” and called him “prejudiced”.
I happened to go to a boarding school. No one helped me at boarding school to get into the music business. I bought my first guitar with money I saved from holiday jobs (sandwich packing!). I was taught the only four chords I know by a friend. No one at school had ANY knowledge or contacts in the music business, and I was expected to become a soldier or a lawyer or perhaps a stockbroker.
He also describes being “scoffed at” for being too posh in the music industry and criticises what he sees as Bryant’s play for votes.
And then you come along, looking for votes, telling working class people that posh people like me don’t deserve it, and that we must redress the balance. But it is your populist, envy-based, vote-hunting ideas which make our country crap, far more than me and my shit songs, and my plummy accent.
Blunt further accused him of possessing a “narrow-minded” and “self-defeating” attitude.
Perhaps what you’ve failed to realise is that the only head-start my school gave me in the music business, where the VAST majority of people are NOT from boarding school, is to tell me that I should aim high. Perhaps it protected me from your kind of narrow-minded, self-defeating, lead-us-to-a-dead-end, remove-the-‘G’-from-‘GB’ thinking, which is to look at others’ success and say, “it’s not fair.”
And then, to really hammer the point home, he signed the letter, “Up yours, James Cucking Funt”.
For his part, Chris Bryant has said that he has responded to James Blunt and is currently busy defending his comments on Twitter.
This might be our favourite interaction:
