A combination of his gradually deepening alcoholism, legendarily outrageous behaviour when, frequently-inebriated, and his habit of making derogatory and increasingly reckless remarks about senior politicians in his newspaper columns led to his forced retirement from the civil service in 1953 after enraging a less urbane, sophisticated, literary (and much less tolerant) minister than he'd enjoyed before, when that minister became aware that he was the unnamed target of multiple columns satirising a particular politician's intellect in savage terms. One column described that the politician's reaction to any question requiring even a trace of intellectual effort as "he great jaw would drop, the ruined graveyard of tombstone teeth would be revealed, the eyes would roll, and the malt eroded voice would say 'Hah!'" (He departed, recalled a colleague, "in a final fanfare of fucks".)