Taken out of context, João Magueijo’s book is indeed a collection of unpleasant – if not outright offensive – stereotypes about Britain and the British. Resentful comments by Guardian readers are understandable. Yet I think your article (Who said Britons were drunk, dirty and deplorable?, 20 September) misses the point of the book and fails to capture the context of its success in Portugal.

I think Magueijo’s book is not so much a cheap xenophobic picture of the British but rather a satire on ever-present and deeply ingrained self-images of Portugal in Portuguese public discourse. Magueijo himself pointed in the interview to Lord Byron’s disdainful accounts of Portugal in the early years of the 19th century, which are typical of the socio- and ethnocentric travel writing of the time. But I doubt the way in which the Portuguese cultural elites took these images to heart is so typical. The most talented Portuguese writer of the late 19th century, Eça de Queiroz, often referred in his novels to idealised accounts of Britain as either an Oxonian paradise or a futuristic benign utopia, as rhetorical counterpart to a hopelessly decadent Portuguese society. That, say, the mass of the population in British urban centres were mired in squalor at that time was a fact never worth mentioning in his works.

This idealisation of Britain remains a constant trope in Portuguese literature and arts to this day. In fact it is not just Britain that is held at such absurd lofty heights by Portuguese artists. Take the example of João Canijo, an excellent contemporary Portuguese cinema director. In an interview given in 2010, he could be heard deploring the unrepentant “ignorance” of the Portuguese when compared to what happened in France, where, he claimed, even young delinquents were fully knowledgable about the works of Jean Racine.

In time, this discourse seeped into political discourse. Politicians and pundits alike rush to point how the Portuguese should be in awe of the media-darling country of the day – say, Singapore and Ireland, if you are a right-winger campaigning for labour and financial deregulation, Finland if you are a left-winger emphasising the role of education on economic and social development – and how Portugal’s problems would vanish at once if we just had the courage turn the country upside down to copy them.

These types of comparisons are of lesser importance – role-model countries come and go at great pace these days – and not exclusive to Portugal. But they can have far more sinister overtones. And none more so than in the current context of deep economic crisis. Indeed, they paved the way for a very convenient narrative in which recession was not caused by the shockwaves of the bursting of a colossal global financial bubble, but was the result of perennial flaws of the Portuguese national character finally catching up with us. In this framework, the Portuguese were allegedly lazy, risk-averse losers tanning in the sun who were living beyond their means and thus totally dependent on an inefficient welfare state and on the goodwill of honest bankers – and were duly punished by market forces after 2010.

What is more astonishing is how this bordering-on-racist narrative was taken as self-evident and reproduced by the Portuguese media and by the current Portuguese government. This despite every bit of hard data pointing to its falseness. The fact that Portuguese work significantly more hours and for significantly lower wages than the OECD average, and that most of the growth in Portuguese families’ indebtedness in the past 20 years is explained by the acquisition of housing in a deregulated housing market, is overlooked. So too are the tremendous achievements of the Portuguese welfare state in health and, more recently, in education and the fight against poverty, despite having far less resources than most of its European counterparts. Yet I would venture that in no other European country was there such an overwhelming consensus on austerity – and the idealisation of other countries as opposed to the alleged rottenness of Portugal played a key role in legitimising that.

This is why I think Magueijo’s book struck a chord in Portugal. He is simply turning a deep-seated rhetorical trope on its head. What if, for once, instead of the age-old practice of comparing the worst there is in Portugal to the best that can be found abroad, we switched roles? For him, Britain just happened to be the perfect subject for this exercise: a country with which he is familiar and which is revered by Portugal’s political, economic and artistic elites. It is the latter that the joke is on, not on the British.

Pedro Estêvão

Lisbon, Portugal