James Blunt has been honing his skills of the sharp-tongued retort in the training room of Twitter for the last five years, and now he's taken it onto the pitch, with a red-blooded, forensically-skilled takedown of MP Chris Bryant.
READ ALSO:
If Chris Bryant had realised just how many antagonists Mr Blunt chews up before breakfast, he perhaps wouldn't have aimed his bow in this particular direction - name-checking the former Army officer turned balladeer in his list of "posh people from privileged backgrounds" currently crowding the cultural scene.
James Blunt tells Chris Bryant MP that his posh background has held him back in the industry
“I am delighted that Eddie Redmayne won [a Golden Globe for best actor], but we can’t just have a culture dominated by Eddie Redmayne and James Blunt and their ilk,” is what he actually said.
Now, James Blunt has put down his guitar and picked up his pen to call Mr Bryant a "classist gimp" among other things, and point out that his posh-sounding background has actually held him back in the industry. Starting with...
You classist gimp. I happened to go to a boarding school. No one helped me at boarding school to get into the music business. I bought my first guitar with money I saved from holiday jobs (sandwich packing!). I was taught the only four chords I know by a friend. No one at school had ANY knowledge or contacts in the music business, and I was expected to become a soldier or a lawyer or perhaps a stockbroker. So alien was it, that people laughed at the idea of me going into the music business, and certainly no one was of any use.
That he was actually signed to a record company in America, where they don't care about such things.
Oh, and that...
"It is your populist, envy-based, vote-hunting ideas which make our country crap, far more than me and my shit songs, and my plummy accent."
Don't hold back James. And he didn't, signing off with a final flair...
Up yours,
James Cucking Funt
Chris Bryant has now responded to James' letter (which you can read in full at the Guardian), but James is no doubt ready with a few more salvos.
In his response (which has been published in full here), Chris stands his ground, writing:
I’m delighted you’ve done well for yourself. But it is really tough forging a career in the arts if you can’t afford the enormous fees for drama school, if you don’t know anybody who can give you a leg up, if your parents can’t subsidise you for a few years whilst you make your name and if you can’t afford to take on an unpaid internship.
When he spoke recently to HuffPostUK on his latest album going platinum, the subject of his perceived 'poshness' inevitably came up. His thoughts...
"Well, the only thing I can say is I hear your voice, and I don't judge you on it." *HuffPostUK pulls Kermit face
Here are some more examples of Le Blunt in action...