Patrick Kidd moves to senior writer role after Quentin Letts takes over political sketches

Patrick Kidd has moved to a senior writer role at The Times and will continue as diary editor after Quentin Letts took up the newspaper’s political sketch writer job which Kidd previously held.

Kidd has described himself as a “sketch writer of things other than politics” since Letts (pictured) arrived at the paper.

It was announced in November last year that Letts would join News UK titles The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun after 18 years at the Daily Mail where he wrote parliamentary sketches and theatre reviews.

Letts also writes book reviews and features for the Times. He has as a column in The Sun and writes theatre reviews for The Sunday Times.

The Times confirmed Kidd will remain as diary editor and a senior writer working across the paper. Kidd told Press Gazette he was “flattered and humbled” by reader comments praising his tenure as political sketch writer.

In his last parliamentary sketch for The Times, Kidd wrote: “Some love to give MPs a bashing. I’ve tried to see them not as my victims but, as the historian Peter Hennessy puts it, exhibits in a rather curious museum.

“As I head off to another place (on the paper, not the House of Lords, much as I’d make a great bishop) I wish them well. I may have teased but I never hated.”

Letts is a supporter of Brexit who authored the book “Patronising Bastards: How the Elites Betrayed Britain”. He left the Mail not long after new editor Geordie Greig, the former editor of the Mail on Sunday, took over and softened the paper’s Brexit stance.

In a statement on his move, Letts said: “It is a privilege to write for any newspaper, doubly so when it is as central to British public life as The Times, The Sunday Times or The Sun.

“I have had 18 busy and happy years at the Mail but am now excited to be venturing forth – and particularly to be returning to The Times, having been its New York correspondent several moons ago.”

Picture: News UK