Letters | 25 October 2012

The toxic centre-ground

Sir: I found it hard to be convinced by Matthew Parris’s claim (‘The centre holds’, 20 October) that David Cameron has ‘brilliantly understood’ that old ‘nasty party’ problem. It is held by the soft wet left of the Conservative party that Mrs Thatcher’s party was that ‘toxic’ nasty party. However, the figures suggest the opposite. She won her first election as leader in 1979 with 13.7 million votes, her second in 1983 with 13.0 million and her third with in 1987 with 13.8 million. In the afterglow of Thatcherism without the poll tax, John Major scored a record 14.2 million. That master politician Tony Blair managed 13.5 million in 1997, but by his third victory that had fallen to 9.5 million and by 2010 Labour could muster only 8.6 million electors to support them. However, what Matthew Parris calls a brilliant understanding of political positioning harvested David Cameron’s friendly middle-ground soft-focus lovable Tories only 10.7 million. Sadly that was not quite brilliant enough to form a Conservative majority administration.
Lord Tebbit

House of Lords, London SW1

Classical genius

Sir: Where there was darkness, now there is light: John McInnes has come among us (Letters, 13 October) with the news that ‘Classical music hasn’t changed, because there’s been no Lennon and McCartney in the mix, just (among others) [composers such as Purcell, Handel, Mozart and Elgar], who were certainly very talented, but sadly, not geniuses.’ In our ignorance, some of us had thought that classical music had indeed changed between Purcell and Elgar, and that Mozart, for example, was a genius. But with this magisterial stroke of the pen, centuries of misconception, libraries of music criticism, the sentiments of concert hall and opera theatre audiences for the past 350 years have been swept aside. The operas and oratorios of Handel? The piano concertos and operas of Mozart? Not up to the mark, I’m afraid.