AFTER the recent efforts to canonise George Best, the 25th anniversary of his death appears to have spawned a similarly-misguided campaign to sanctify John Lennon (So what did John Lennon mean to you?, December 8).

Talented songwriter though he may have been, saint and prophet Lennon was not.

As colleagues have testified, Lennon was always egotistical and often cruel. He constantly belittled Brian Epstein, the Beatles manager, who later committed suicide, and he abandoned his wife, Cynthia, and young son, Julian. He poked fun at people in wheelchairs, and when the band split he overplayed his own contribution to the Beatles' success, while denigrating that of the equally-talented Paul McCartney.

Out of their 1960s context many of Lennon's compositions now sound silly and infantile. His advocates like to promote Lennon's Imagine as an uplifting peace anthem loved by all. It isn't. Some see it for what it is: a dirge of a tune overlain with lyrics so banal, trite, and mawkish they would be an embarrassment in a Year Eight poetry assignment.

Politically and culturally Lennon had nothing original to say. He simply jumped on any passing bandwagon of the Sixties counter culture: hallucinogenic drugs, Vietnam, going to India to "find" himself, promoting the case of James Hanratty, later found correctly to have been guilty of murder.

Sad, aging hippie types like to claim Lennon as the "voice of a generation".

He wasn't. He was the spokesperson for a disaffected, white, middle-class, me-first, youth subculture, whose place in the history of the Sixties has been massively overstated.

Stephen Dalby,

Irwin Avenue,

Heworth,

York.

Updated: 09:11 Tuesday, December 13, 2005