Dear Mr Grant,

Mr Orban

I am terribly sorry for putting this message to you through the press. I feel kind of entitled to do so since I have seen many of your films quite many times. You know, you are my wife’s favourite actor. I like the one in which you play the role of the PM but I particularly love that old-sod rock star who almost turns gay at Elton John’s party. I also love the one in which you fall in love with Julia Roberts. My wife just simply couldn’t find the travel bookshop in Notting Hill last weekend. You know she is teaching in England at the moment since we just can’t make ends meet here in Hungary and she is considering the circumstances hopeless. I cannot force her to stay here since she is right. We live in a terrible country where cocksy brutishness and fear ruin and spoil everything. The main source of our impoverishment is that Mr Orban makes the existence of the opposition press impossible – but he doesn’t dare to ban it. I work for a newspaper which has been published for 139 years – which is a real miracle itself. Viktor Orbán figured out that the best way to kill us is not to let companies advertise in our daily paper. What he does with my other employer - Klubrádió - is even more miserable – he does not only make our life impossible, but he is even trying to get the media supervising agency to take back our radio frequencies using shameful tricks completely against the court verdict. ( Now Mr Orbán is trying to overpower the judges, and he seems to succeed in doing so.) 

If you wish, I can visit you in England – since I am going there soon – to have a chat over a cup of tea about the situation of the press in Hungary. I will take my excellent interpreter, who is also your great fan.

Meanwhile, would you be so kind as to let Mr Orbán know your address because he wants to send you a letter about how wrong you were when you judged Hungary and this lovely media fairy garden here. Many people here would like him to get it and publish it asap since our only consolation is laughing out loud at the insane propaganda letters of Orban’s dictatorship.

Iván Andrassew

andrass1952@gmail.com