This collection of Richard Littlejohn’s journalism was reviewed recently in The Guardian by a man who admitted he hadn’t even opened the book, let alone read it. He’d just looked at the photograph on the cover. Charlie Brooker concluded: “I can smell it in my brain, even when it’s a photo. It smells like someone breaking wind in a pair of cheap nylon trousers while eating a scotch egg in a hot car passing the Tilsworth Golf and Conference Centre on the A5 near Dunstable.”

And there you have it: the middle-class left’s atavistic loathing of Britain’s most successful and highly paid columnist, all the snobbery (the cheap trousers, the scotch egg) and the disdain for Middle England (golf, Dunstable) and the implied contempt, shared with the Guardian reader, that nobody could be expected to actually read the book.

Well, I’ve read it and, worryingly, Brooker’s peremptory description isn’t far from the truth, at times. Littlejohn has a penchant for the most woeful, clunking, meat-headed satire, within which the predictable targets are attacked in the most predictable manner. Such as Muslims, gypsies, homosexuals, women, speed cameras and town halls that wish to “ban Christmas”: “There’s no carol service, / In High Wycombe, Bucks, / The council’s decided, / That Silent Night sucks, / In Scotland, St Andrews, / Where Mars Bars they batter, / Our Mary’s a dipso, / And Christ’s a brown hatter.”

Oh, spare us, please, matey. There’s page after page of this sort of stuff, wholly free of insight and – worse – devoid of humour, unless you possess the IQ of a shrubbery. How would the second world war have turned out if modern diversity training had been in force? We’d have lost! We’d have given in! You couldn’t make it up!

But then, just as the smell in that hot car is beginning to suffocate, Littlejohn, in his nylon trousers, winds down the windows and reminds us why his talents are so highly valued. The anecdotal passages – Littlejohn meeting Blair, Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, Charlie Whelan – are brilliantly written, full of dry wit and acute observation, self-deprecatory and charming. He is a terrific judge of character, able to spot a hypocrisy from a thousand paces, with a genuine moral sense of right and wrong, and never worrying too much about offending the rich and the powerful. There is a quite beautiful vignette of Mr and Mrs Gordon Brown, at home, which Littlejohn recounts with a quiet incredulity. Gordon invited some Mail on Sunday journalists over to watch England play in the last World Cup. As Littlejohn puts it: “He (Gordon) sat there, sipping local, lo-carb lager, about 3ft from the screen, pretending to support Becks and the boys against Trinidad and Tobago . .. we all have our own match-day check list – Kettle Chips, cold beer, phone off the hook. How many of us turned to our loved ones and said: ‘There’s something missing here. I know, let’s get the chaps from The Mail on Sunday round.’ Only a politician on the make would think to invite a newspaper to watch him watching the football ... how daft does he think we are?”

Wonderful stuff – if only there was more like it and less of the wearying, asinine “satire”.

LITTLEJOHN’S BRITAIN by Richard Littlejohn

Hutchinson £12.99 pp367

Buy the book here for the offer price of £11.69 (inc p&p)

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