Letter: Perry's `new voices'

SIR Peregrine Worsthorne's indignation at having been sacked from his column on the Sunday Telegraph after more than 30 years with the paper is understandable ("Language, truth and Dominic", 20 December), but he might have remembered that it was during his brief spell as editor in the mid-1980s that the serial despatch of a whole department of journalists was set in train.

First the radio critic was fired, then the film critic, then the music. Too late, it dawned on us, we were all going to be discarded, in my case after 26 years in the television chair. Only the ballet critic, Nicholas Dromgoole, survived, because his name was last on the hit list, and before it could come up Perry himself was deposed. The bright young "new voices" who replaced the rest of us were mostly gone and forgotten within a year or two.

PHILIP PURSER

Towcester, Northants