Why Anna and Martin should agree to keep the argument private

As celebrity spats go, the stand-off between Anna Ford and Martin Amis is in the heavyweight division.

While C-listers have always traded trivial insults through the gossip columns and more recently the twin evils of Twitter and Facebook, most are inconsequential stuff.

However, the row publicly brewing between the former newsreader and the respected novelist has a degree of gravitas the likes of Katie Price, Lily Allen and the permanently-at-odds Gallagher brothers could only aspire to.

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The war of words began innocuously enough when Amis wrote an article for the Guardian newspaper in which he complained his views on women and euthanasia were constantly being represented in the press by journalists determined to stir up trouble whenever he has a new book out.

Any hopes he had for a sympathetic reaction were dashed when Ford, having read the piece, decided to pen her own response for publication.

"I thought: Oh, for heaven's sake, there's Martin whingeing again. He really ought just to stop. It annoyed me so much I decided to write a letter. It's a For Heaven's Sake letter, really."

It was in truth much more than that. It was a very detailed personality assassination. Advising Amis to take a "closer and more honest" look at himself in relation to others, Ford soon warmed to her theme.

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"It seems to me that if you're going to be a controversial writer, then you have to expect people to have an opinion about you, and you have to take the rough with the smooth. It's this unattractive, immature whingeing that really gets me. He just ought to stop."

Had 66-year-old Ford, who famously threw a glass of wine over former Conservative MP Jonathan Aitken after she was sacked from TV-am, confined her criticism to Amis's professional behaviour, the row may have ended there, but she didn't. The letter accused the author – a friend of her late husband, the cartoonist Mark Boxer, who died in 1988 of a brain tumour – of narcissism, and exposed what for Ford are clearly some still very raw wounds.

According to Ford, Amis smoked over her late husband's deathbed and had only made the visit with the journalist Christopher Hitchens to "fill time" before catching a plane. "You wrote," she added, "a piece about your feelings and tears as you left. I saw no evidence of these."

Before signing off, Ford landed a killer blow by claiming Amis had since neglected his duties as a godfather to one of the couple's two daughters.

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As the vultures gathered, Amis initially tried to maintain a dignified silence, saying he would prefer to speak to Ford personally. His attempts to contact the widow of his late best friend must have proved unsuccessful, as yesterday the 60-year-old author of Money and London Fields went very publicly on the defensive. He described Ford's "surprise attack" as both "ungenerous and self-defeating" and said it had made him wonder "how long all this has been brewing".

In his own open letter in the Guardian, he insisted that he had not smoked in Ford's husband's room, that he had been "overwhelmed" by the time he reached his car and that far from squeezing the visit into a busy schedule he had, in fact, caught a plane the next day. Amis did acknowledge that he had been a poor godfather to Ford's daughter, Claire, who was made "abruptly fatherless" and said he would be "writing to her to offer my apologies and regrets", but forgetting he was supposed to be turning the other cheek, he also launched a blistering counter-attack.

"I wonder how it serves Mark's memory, or warms his ghost, to suggest that his two devoted friends (I and Christopher) behaved with such implausible callousness," he wrote. "What sane person 'fills time' at a deathbed?

"We both loved him, and still mourn him. Many did and many do. He was a powerfully delightful man."

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We've come to expect celebrity chefs having a pop at their rivals at every opportunity, and where would we be without the latest instalment in the ongoing soap opera which surrounds Brangelina and Jennifer Aniston? But in the case of Ford and Amis, you can't help but wonder whether their very personal grievances would have been better sorted out in private.

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