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Letters

Wednesday, 25th June 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Judgment of Parris
Sir: A word on behalf of Fernando Rodrigues. Matthew Parris informs us (’Another Voice’, 7 June) that thanks to his teacher Mrs McLeod he discovered aged eight that he was a bright boy and could go far and that he has known these things ever since. He gives Fernando Rodrigues as an example of others that were not bright, had no great intellect and struggled with English.

Fernando Rodrigues (who, like me, is Portuguese) was quite upset with this article. He has asked me to inform your readership that he too has done very well. He is happily married and in possession of the love of his children. He has been able to support them in an honest way. As he approaches retirement he looks forward to a great many things he wants to do. He is, as much as any man can be in this hard world, content with his lot. He has no recollection of Mrs McLeod being so stern or of Mr Parris being so bright.

Manuel Lemos Macedo
Tomar, Portugal

Murder in the dark
Sir: Peter Oborne rightly observes (‘We have a duty to protect Zimbabwe’, 21 June) that the MDC has relied on the peaceful tactics of Gandhi in his campaign to bring about regime change in Zimbabwe. But Gandhi was only affective against the British Raj because it observed the rule of law. Gandhi wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes against the likes of Pol Pot, Mao, Hitler, Stalin or Saddam. As Mugabe and his cronies have already murdered 20,000 people, it is fanciful to think that anything other than overwhelming force will drive him and his chums from power.

The US is busy with its war in Iraq, the UK is consumed with post-colonial guilt and the UN is useless, but the idea that other African states will drive him from office is risible. And in the unlikely event that South Africa turns off the lights, Mugabe will carry on murdering in the dark. The only hope is a coup, but the perpetrators may be just as bad as Robert Gabriel Mugabe.

Brian Jackson
Adstock, Buckinghamshire

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Derek Smith

June 27th, 2008 5:10am

What nonsense is this from Andrew Roberts? Does he really believe that the equivalent of the Hiroshima atomic bomb in conventional explosives can be packed into an 18-ton truck?

This battle has just begun

‘I was excited and delighted by it in that first Bombay minute,’ says the narrator in Gregory David Roberts’s great novel Shantaram.

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

New Labour has always preserved from the hard Left the Leninist idea that the party (or, in Blair/Brown theory, ‘the project’) is the only reality to be respected.

Diary

Rani Singh

I’ve just emerged from the gym, winding down after a day’s writing, when my son Sukhraj calls, alerting me to sudden news of explosions and fatalities in Mumbai.