Letters | 14 November 2009

Good relations

Sir: Timothy Garton Ash writes (‘I was the man from Spekta’, 7 November) that Britain had a good name in central Europe. Perhaps the British Council played some small part in that. Uniquely in communist countries, the Council in Poland worked independently of the embassy, and with the encouragement of many Polish academics and others and — for all the compromises that had to be made — helped to keep alight the flame of independent cultural relations which are intolerable to totalitarian government. Poles were also grateful to Margaret Thatcher for creating the Know-How Fund. The Council was well placed to help quick and widespread progress to be made with that.

Charles Chadwick
(Director of the British Council, Poland 1989-1992), London NW3



Short circuit


Sir: Ted Short? I mean, we all know that there was a large pro-Soviet faction within Labour (‘Labour’s Soviet secrets’, 7 November). And some of us know that it, with the Communist party itself and with the Trots, created New Labour, having followed academic Marxism’s transition from economic to social, cultural and constitutional means.

But Ted Short was decorated by Franco, is a Companion of Honour (in the personal gift of the monarch), and is or was a vice-president of the Prayer Book Society. Just ask any hard leftists who go back to the Wilson era what they think of Short. Please do not spoil a good and important story with something as silly as this.

David Lindsay
Lanchester, County Durham



Flights of Churchill


Sir: I am pleased that James Delingpole enjoyed Into the Storm and that even the reluctant Mrs D was moved by it; the drama was certainly compelling and mostly very well done. Leaving aside the permanent grumpiness of both Winston and Clementine, who could not possibly have spent five years without smiling, there were a number of fairly obvious solecisms, such as the apparent VC investiture (which would have been carried out by the King himself), the Tehran dinner which was held at the British embassy (not the Russian) and ‘Some chicken, some neck’, which was proclaimed in Ottawa (not Washington), I was particularly pleased by the attempts to convey the horror of Churchill’s early wartime flights.