Letters to the Editor | 8 July 2006

Elite electorates

From Alan Hall
Sir: I was amused by your leading article this week (1 July), criticising New Labour for treating ‘the highest office of government’ as if it were ‘the captaincy of its own team’. You affect to be shocked that the debate on who should succeed Tony Blair is not being conducted, so to speak, in open forum — or perhaps at the Court of St James’s — where the Queen’s loyal subjects might be invited to contribute their own pennyworth of opinion. But since when was the leadership of a political party (in or out of office) anything more than a matter for the party itself to decide?

The ‘manner and timing’ of Lloyd George’s ‘exit’ in 1922 was decided by a gathering of Tory MPs and peers at the Carlton Club (surely an ‘elite’ by any definition). They may well have believed that the Sovereign would judge Bonar Law to be better equipped than the Welsh Wizard ‘to command a sound majority in the House of Commons’; but to suggest that the procedure was attended by anything other than party shenanigans is surely ridiculous. Rab Butler — who failed to ‘succeed’, respectively, Eden in 1957 and Macmillan in 1963 — would have been hard pressed to distinguish much difference, then and now, between the conventions and ‘constitutional norms’ being observed to choose, in effect, the prime minister of the day.
Alan Hall
Tonbridge, Kent

Soft sentences don’t work

From Mrs Sam Jettubreck
Sir: In response to Mr Peter Wayne’s indignation (1 July) at my letter I would like to offer the following riposte.

Firstly, am I right in believing that Mr Wayne is himself serving a prison sentence? While this by no means precludes him from this debate — perhaps even the opposite — I would venture to suggest that his view is coloured.