The Spectator

Letters | 23 May 2013

Stay Conservative

Sir: Dr John Hyder-Wilson wrote (Letters, 11 May) of my calls to ‘shift Tory party policy rightward’ to meet a threat from Ukip, which he felt was inconsistent as he could not remember me advocating a leftward shift in response to a threat from the SDP/Alliance in the early 1980s.

Of course he could not. I am afraid that he is in a muddle. I responded then to the SDP/Alliance, and would do so now to Ukip in exactly the same way, by advocating Conservative policies for the Conservative party.

As Dr Hyder-Wilson may remember, Margaret Thatcher won her third election victory on Conservative policies after eight years in office governing on those policies. In that victory she secured more votes than at her first victory.

That option is open to Mr Cameron should he wish to win in 2015.
Lord Tebbit
House of Lords, London SW1

Proving the pox

Sir: Matthew Parris’s piece about online comments (18 May) reminded me of my own experience on the matter.

When I worked at the Edinburgh Evening News website, comments amounted to the following: 80 per cent abuse, 10 per cent providing hard evidence of how and why the story was inaccurate, 5 per cent empathy with the issue at hand, and 5 per cent commenting on unrelated crime stories elsewhere on the website — comments upon which would have been disabled for legal reasons.

I once penned a front-page story, based on official Scottish government statistics, which showed not a single child in Edinburgh had caught chickenpox for the past three months. It was uploaded on the website and the opening comments were as follows. The first was from a women whose friend’s toddler had been diagnosed with the illness only a fortnight ago. The second, a parent whose son came down with it the week before that.

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