NO IRRITANT, NO PEARLS:

'The irritant label has stuck. I think it's fantastic': Richard Littlejohn doesn't like gay adoption, but he doesn't like hanging either. And, as Bill Hagerty reveals in a remarkable interview, it's the unpredictability of the left's favourite hate figure that commands such a high profile. (Bill Hagerty, June 3, 2007, The Observer)

Lunch with Richard Littlejohn is not for the faint-hearted - not if it is to be one of those involving what Britain's highest-paid newspaper columnist calls 'a good drink'. Stamina is needed, but the experience is rewarding.

Littlejohn tends to talk like he writes - pugnaciously, often hilariously, while pouring vitriol on the control freaks he believes have damaged Britain. That means, mostly, the political left. Littlejohn is the scourge of New Labour and as such has been branded a right-wing zealot - a categorisation he vigorously rejects. 'Calling me right-wing is lazy,' he protests. 'I think labels are meaningless - as I've said before, it's about right and wrong, not right and left. When people lose the argument or you expose their argument for the hollow, shallow bollocks it is, they just lay it on you. I'm big enough and ugly enough to take all the s[***], but it depresses me. As far as the left in Britain is concerned, if you are not with them on every single dot, comma and iota of their agenda, you're not wrong or misguided - you're evil.'

He is merely limbering up. As lunch drifts towards teatime, his denunciation of the left will pepper the conversation like shot in a pheasant, and most of the scattergun onslaught could be published under his Daily Mail byline, to which much of middle Britain turns each Tuesday and Thursday morning.