Britain's most famous letter writer

I've arranged to meet Britain's most prolific newspaper letter-writer in a café in Islington. He is also London's leading bearded Left-wing activist. Twenty years ago, this would have been a tricky assignment. You would probably have had to stand in the middle of the room waving a name card like an airport minicab driver. Even then you might not have found your man, or been ejected for Bourgeois Individualist Nomenclaturism or something.

In 2001, it's not so difficult. Keith Flett is the only man in Coffee Republic with a beard, and it's a fair bet he is the only true Left-winger too. The café, opposite his place of work, the British Telecom offices at the Angel, is bright and progressive, with chilled club tracks on the sound system and warm muffins on the tables. This is very much a New Labour workingperson's café. Among the blonde women with laptops and suited, tieless young men, Keith stands out.

He has a heavy, tweed jacket, comfy beige shoes, a narrow red tie and his famous beard. He looks 10 years older than his 45 years, has weak, kindly eyes and looks rather like the fat one in Private Eye's Snipcock and Tweed cartoon - though, as we will see, he is more usually associated with another Eye character.

The beard (a full, straggly, garden-gnome affair) isn't exactly famous in itself. But Keith's commitment to facial hair is something of a cause célèbre. His Beard Liberation Front is a campaigning organisation, a vehicle for exposing the smooth-faced absurdities of the New Labour world.

"It's a good day for the BLF," says Keith as we sit down. David Blunkett and Gerry Adams lead the news bulletins, and Keith has already planned two letters celebrating the fact. I check back a few days later. Neither appeared. Flett reckons on an average success rate of just five per cent; but if you've sent 20,000 letters, that means 1,000 of them have been published. He writes to, among others, The Guardian, The Independent, The Mirror, the Evening Standard, the London Review of Books, New Musical Express and What's Brewing?.

"It is a rare day indeed when I don't get a letter from Keith," says Roland Tyrrell, deputy letters editor at The Independent, who rations Keith to just four outings a year. "The really annoying thing about Keith Flett is that he writes such a good letter."

Most letters editors have banned him from their pages at some stage or other; but he keeps on doggedly, filing his 30 or so missives a week, somehow finding time between the conferences, workshops, courses and negotiations that fill his days as a trade-union official and representative of the Tottenham branch of the Socialist Alliance.

His corresponding career began in the late Eighties when he wrote to The Guardian complaining about something Professor Eric Hobsbawm had written. As befits a man of the Left, he has an intense and problematic relationship with that newspaper. He fishes out a private letter from the editor, Alan Rusbridger, taking issue with something Keith wrote to him about peace protests.

There are those who think that Keith, like Private Eye's Dave Spart, is really an invention of some clever journalist. Flettism (Fletulence?) hardly sounds dafter than Spartism, after all, and Keith is a sillier name than Dave. His beardism, the Tottenham thing, his real-ale obsession, his gay rights campaigning, his reedy, right-on voice occasionally heard on phone-ins - it all sounds too much the cartoon picture of a Left-wing dinosaur. Could this be an actor before me, eyeing his latte as if it were a class enemy?

"But Spart is a caricature," Keith protests. "I'm a real person." Why, then, should people confuse the two? "Well, it's to do with er, the fact that, er, somehow, sort of, my picture doesn't appear that often in the media and, it's such a visual culture, er, people assume I've been made up?"

Just to make sure, I keyed in Keith's name on various internet search engines and found enough evidence to prove that he is for real. In fact, he turns out to be a serious amateur historian attached to the University of London, who regularly writes papers on socialist history. Far from being Spartishly inarticulate (except when you ask him to deny that he's for real), he is passionate about good writing and clear speech.

Keith once had a column in a north London newspaper, but it didn't last. His natural medium is the letters page, where underdogs all get to have their day.

Even if his Socialist Alliance wins a landslide at the next General Election, Keith would still prefer to be in a permanently disgruntled minority of one.