The Daily Mail sketch writer, Quentin Letts has riled Giles Coren with his attitude to Peter Mandelson.
In a Radio 4 interview last week, Letts compared Mandelson to the pianist Liberace.
The implied homophobia in this comparison annoyed Coren who let rip in his column in The Times last Saturday: "Liberace? Poor old Quentin. Is that really who Mandelson puts him in mind of? Is that what Quentin's unconscious does with a homosexual Cabinet minister? Turns him into a big Italian woofter in a gold suit who died of Aids? I guess so."