“IT’S a fair cop.” With these words, the writer Bevis Hillier confessed that he was the Betjeman hoaxer who duped the poet’s latest biographer into publishing a spoof love letter.

The Sunday Times reported last week how AN Wilson had included in his new book a letter purportedly written by Sir John Betjeman to a mistress.

The biographer had failed to notice that the first letter of each sentence spelt “AN Wilson is a shit”. Hillier was the main suspect, but until now has denied being the hoaxer.

The letter was the culmination of a sharp feud with Wilson, mainly pursued over the pages of bitchy book reviews.

Hillier, who spent 25 years researching and writing his own magisterial three-volume biography of Betjeman, finally decided to act when Wilson managed to bring out his book not much more than a year after his publishers had announced it. “When a newspaper started billing Wilson’s book as ‘the big one’, it was just too much,” said Hillier, 66.

The letter, which was sent to Wilson last year as he was researching his book, appeared to come from a woman called Eve de Harben, who enclosed what she said was a passionate love letter written by the married Betjeman in 1944 to a wartime work colleague, Honor Tracy.

De Harben said she had got it from her father, an old friend of Tracy. Wilson had not seen the insult hidden in the letter. Nor had he noticed that Eve de Harben is an anagram for “ever been had”.

But why did Hillier, seemingly a mild-mannered man who had won the Gladstone Memorial Prize at Oxford and gone on to edit The Connoisseur, an antiques collecting magazine, want to dupe Wilson? Initially, he had been angered by a review of his second Betjeman volume, which came out in 2002 and was described by Wilson in The Spectator as “a hopeless mishmash”.

It was the flattering announcement of Wilson’s book last year in a national newspaper, however, that finally pushed Hillier into hatching his plot. “I wanted the acrostic love letter to spell out ‘AN Wilson is a shit’ and then built sentences around that,” he said. “I also needed to ensure it seemed valid.”

For authenticity, Hillier included phrases such as ‘Tinkerty-tonk’, which he knew Wilson would recognise as one used by Betjeman in the 1920s.

After The Sunday Times revealed the hoax last weekend, Hillier composed a short sequel which he was going to send to Wilson. “It said, ‘My French letter has leaked’,” revealed Hillier. “In the end I decided against sending it since it was perhaps one letter too far.”

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