Letter: I was neither a young bully nor a south London schoolboy

GILES SMITH wrote an article about myself and Rob Newman ('Filthy, rich, going to pieces', Review, 5 December) which implied that I was involved in bullying at school. Despite Smith having spoken to a 'contemporary', my school was wrongly located in the piece. I went to the Haberdashers' Aske's School in Elstree, not south London.

He then states, incorrectly, that the school revue I helped write was 'vigorously abusive about selected teachers and pupils'. The revue only satirised teachers, an activity I think reasonable; to have ridiculed pupils would have been psychological bullying of the worst kind.

He then quotes an insult to a named person in The Mary Whitehouse Experience Encyclopedia and claims this person was a bullied pupil. He was not; he was, and is, a close friend, who took the insult as the obvious joke which was meant.

David Baddiel

Bradford