Letters | 30 May 2019

Leavers only, please

Sir: Your leading article (‘The end of May’, 25 May) correctly calls for the Conservative party to establish itself as ‘unequivocally the party of Brexit’. The meltdown at the EU elections confirmed this is now the only course of action open to it, if it wishes to survive. Conservative MPs should show they have finally woken up to reality. They need to send the membership two candidates with impeccable Leave credentials, and who are not in the current cabinet.

Placing any Remain-tainted candidates on the shortlist would display MPs’ continuing contempt for the party’s activists, supporters and donors. It would also show a curious lack of interest in their own job security.
David Soskin

(Former special adviser to John Major,  No. 10 Policy Unit)

Petworth,West Sussex

Learning the lesson

Sir: The fiasco of Theresa May’s ‘negotiations’ over Brexit should have taught all rational people that the EU will not renegotiate a deal so advantageous to itself when it is obvious that the British negotiators have not been serious about just walking away. Yet now we have Tory Remainer and would-be party leader Rory Stewart (who, incidentally, bears an alarming resemblance to Zarin, Masterspy’s henchman in Gerry Anderson’s Supercar TV series) telling us that there can be no question of leaving the EU without a deal, but that with his powers of persuasion he will obtain an acceptable withdrawal agreement. It leaves me wondering whether Mr Stewart and his ilk are fools, or whether they take the rest of us for fools.
Terry Smith

London NW11

Lest we forget

Sir: In his paean to Nigel Farage, Rod Liddle says he ‘cannot think of a single individual in the past 50 years who could have created, out of nothing, a movement such as the Brexit party’ (‘The Brexit party delusion’, 18 May).