Stephen Fry the Telegraph

Stephen Fry in outspoken attack on 'shiny faced, arse witted, human cockroach' Telegraph writer Tim Walker and 'joyless, unlovable' Peter Hitchens

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By Angela Haggerty, Reporter

September 22, 2013 | 8 min read

Stephen Fry has hit back at “shiny faced, arse witted” Telegraph journalist Tim Walker after he published a blog questioning whether Fry writes all of his own tweets.In Walker’s blog, published on Friday morning, he described watching Fry in conversation with Andy Serkis in a restaurant while apparently tweeting at the same time.“It has always been taken for granted that the actor, writer and ‘wit’ writes all his own musings about life himself, but I spied him at The Wolseley restaurant in St James’s on Thursday, deep in conversation with Andy Serkis, the actor, who starred as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.“I can’t be absolutely sure,” he went on, “but it appears that Fry was emitting ‘tweets’ as he spoke to Serkis.”However, Fry responded to the allegation in a colourful blog post, claiming some of his charity tweets were pre-prepared in consultation with the charity to enable them to deal with the sudden burst of website traffic his six million plus following can produce and ensure style and tone was correct.“My PA went to extreme lengths, when this creep from the inner ring of Satan’s rectum called ‘to check the facts’ (HA!) to explain that, as is clearly stated on my website, I will often tweak the wording of a charity tweet that I am asked to make if it’s a bit stilted or not in my style but otherwise - every day, on my diary, through the magic of syncing - there will be some tweet reminders for me placed there, naturally after I have been consulted and have approved the charity or cause.“@ThatTimWalker, this sneering and disgusting insult even to the reeking heap of disgraced ordure that is the British press, was told all this very clearly and patiently by my distressed PA who, knowing the British print media, was all too aware that this noxious boll-weevil would go ahead and print insinuating drivel whatever she said.”While Walker made no mention of seeing Fry with a phone at the restaurant, Fry insisted the Telegraph journalist had watching him take his phone out to tweet during his conversation with Serkis.“Indeed, apprised of the truth, he still managed to extrude a semi-literate gossipy turd about seeing me at a meeting with Andy Serkis and witnessing me taking out my phone and tweeting,” Fry continued. “I was complying with two charity tweets that my diary alarm pinged me to make. If I’m late, the charities might waste money that they have paid to whoever is hosting their server cluster so that it can take the extra traffic. That wouldn’t occur for a second to a (clearly digitally illiterate) gossip-monger. “No, no. From this he hopes his pitiful readership will infer that I am not master of my own twitter account but somehow in hoc to … to whom? We can be completely exact about what happened when he was at the same restaurant as me and watched me tweeting.”Fry went on to describe Walker as a “human cockroach” and recounted an incident with Peter Hitchens and Christopher Hitchens’ memorial service in April last year after Walker claimed in his blog that he’d “even buttonholed the journalist Peter Hitchens and then tweeted a rude comment about him.”The tweet – “The sad element was Peter Hitchens, thought bro might have at least a 10th of the wit, charm & intelligence. Just a joyless Daily Mail clod.” – was later deleted by Fry.“Walker concludes his vicious little paragraph firstly by telling an outright lie: that I ‘buttonholed’ my dear friend Christopher Hitchens’s brother at the luncheon after Christopher’s memorial service in New York,” Fry retorted. “Not true. I could see Peter Hitchens in the doorway of the Waverly Inn, standing utterly alone (as he does intellectually, morally and socially amongst his brother’s friends) and, taking pity, I just came up to chat. He responded so rudely, so vilely and with such lack of human decency, that I couldn’t but tweet at the extreme difference between two products of the same parents. Probably a misjudgement on my part. I make many. “But then Peter Hitchens is proportionately as joyless and unlovable a person as his so deeply missed brother was joyful and loveble and I was upset at such charmless rudeness. And I was, I freely admit, a little drunk. Which is just what Christopher would have wanted me to be.”But then the story took a further twist when Peter Hitchens responded to Fry’s comment in his Mail On Sunday blog on Friday, where he described Fry’s behaviour at the service as “boorish” and refuted Fry’s claim that he’d been “standing utterly alone” when the incident happened.“The idea that Mr Fry wanted to show ‘pity’ for me is absurd, especially given his obvious sensitivity to criticism, demonstrated by the whole piece in which this passage occurs,” wrote Hitchens.“And so he appeared without warning, forced his company on me when he could easily have guessed it wasn’t wanted, interrupted my conversation, introduced himself as if I mightn’t know who he was (such modesty), and said, as I recall, that he thought we probably disagreed. I confirmed this, and said quite evenly and without rancour that I knew who he was, and that I didn’t like the way he behaved. He wanted to know why not. I told him. “As for being ‘joyless and unlovable’,”he concluded. “I’ll leave that to those who know me best to decide. I can only say that I was not overjoyed to have Mr Fry’s company forced on me, and that I was not in any way seeking his love, let alone hoping to charm him. That does not necessarily mean that I am joyless and unlovable, nor even that I am charmless. I may be all of these things, but Stephen Fry wouldn’t ever know.Fry and Walker then thrashed it out, appropriately, on Twitter.

Row: Stephen Fry published a colourful blog post

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