WILLIE DONALDSON was a man of parts — among them Talbot Church, Liz Reed, Jean-Luc Legris and, most famously, Henry Root, the wet fish merchant and eccentric right-wing bigot who wrote to prominent public figures offering comment, advice and support — often in the form of a one pound note. Root’s outrageous yet deadpan missives succeeded in provoking a range of often embarrassingly positive responses from the likes of Esther Rantzen, Larry Lamb, Lord Grade, Sir David McNee (the then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police), and Root’s personal and political heroine, Margaret Thatcher. The resulting book, The Henry Root Letters (1980), was a bestseller for months.
The Root letters spawned a number of sequels, one of which was made into the television programme Root Into