Daily Mail columnist brands outed MP ‘Camp Keith’ after sex scandal
Daily Mail columnist Quentin Letts has again been accused of homophobia, after branding outed MP Keith Vaz ‘camp’ and ‘flamboyant’.
Married MP Mr Vaz, the head of the influential Home Affairs Select Committee, was outed by a Sunday Mirror sting yesterday.
The newspaper alleged that the Labour politician had sex with two male sex workers and offered to reimburse them if they bought cocaine – though he made clear he did not want any. He also asked them to bring poppers, which are legal.
There is no suggestion that Mr Vaz broke any law.
Mail theatre critic Quentin Letts has today published a column in which he used a number of homophobic slurs to describe Mr Vaz.
The piece was titled “Camp Keith was always as fishy as an old sardine: QUENTIN LETTS on Vaz’s sordid fall from grace after escort texts scandal”, and repeatedly refers to Mr Vaz as “Camp Keith”.
The piece compared him to “a cut-price Lady Bracknell”, who smelled of “some soapy unisex unguent”.
It adds: “Back in the early 1990s I put his flamboyant bitchiness and garrulous mateyness down to youthful excess and ambition.”
The piece included a picture of Mr Vaz dancing at a diversity event alongside a caption also describing him as “flamboyant”.
Elsewhere, Letts suggests the MP, whose parents are from the Indian state of Goa, “played minority issues for all they were worth (…) a little victimhood ain’t half a useful thing in modern politics”.
Meanwhile, the right-wing blog Guido Fawkes branded Mr Vaz a “nonce” in a cartoon which showed him watching “Strictly Come Noncing”.
Mr Letts previously condemned a “taxpayer funded” National Theatre play that is set in a gay sauna.
Under the headline “A National DISGRACE: Sleazy. Amoral. And paid for by you!”, Mr Letts condemned the theatrical production as “just a seamy, sorry exercise, shorn of morals”, which is “full of men showing us their whatnots, in at least one case semi-erect”.
