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.
Secondly, I do not believe that Mr Wayne has read David Fraser’s book in detail. The opening pages make clear that it is the cumulative effect of soft sentencing that has resulted in a lack of respect for law and order, property and person. An offender knows ‘he can get away with it’ at most levels of the criminal scale, and this sends a message to the rest of society. Mr Fraser points out that petty crime is motivated primarily by greed and personal gain and not, as hinted by Mr Wayne, by social status, an argument with which I agree. The knowledge that the retribution will be weak, perhaps non-existent, plays a major part. Children — I have three — are not stupid.
Mr Wayne appears to be moving the goalposts by changing the debate to one exclusively about young offenders without addressing the problem of the persistent car thief, mugger or burglar. How, in his opinion, did they become regular offenders and what restorative action does he suggest?
Sam Jettubreck
London W6
HIV no longer lethal
From Michael Carter
Sir: I’m surprised that your fact-checking department didn’t notice several inaccuracies in Liddle Britain of 24 June. Sarah Jane Porter was convicted of the reckless transmission of HIV, not of deliberately infecting her sexual partner. And the ‘revenge’ motive which Rod Liddle attributes to her is pure speculation; it was never entered as evidence in court. I’m also shocked that Liddle is so ignorant of the risks of HIV transmission and knows so little of advances made in the treatment of HIV. Far from being the ‘death sentence’ he believes, treatment is now so good that HIV is an infection that a person should die with, not of.
Michael Carter
Patient Information, National Aids Manual
London SW9
Mea culpa
From Brenda Maddox
Sir: My devotion to James Joyce seems to have caused my husband, Sir John Maddox, to be unfairly rebuked for bad manners by Charles Moore (The Spectator’s Notes, 24 June). Leaving for the Joyce International Symposium in Budapest on 11 June, I accepted the invitation to the Samuel Johnson Prize dinner on his behalf but failed to write it in his diary. Upon returning from Budapest at the end of the week, I found that, busy on his research project, he had not remembered the dinner. Nor had I, immersed in thoughts of Leopold Bloom, remembered to remind him.
A letter of apology was immediately sent to the organisers. My husband, editor emeritus of Nature, has been accused of many things but never of bad manners. The sin of omission was entirely mine.
Brenda Maddox
London W8
The old country
From Katherine Gillard
Sir: Allister Heath, in his ‘No wonder the neo-Nazis salute Iran’s President’ (3 June), writes that ‘in 1935 Shah Reza Pahlavi renamed his country Iran’. This is quite wrong. The shah was restoring Iran’s ancient name, a name about 2,500 years old. The name Persia was an English invention.
Katherine Gillard
Christchurch, New Zealand
Lucas and the Lion
From Eileen Mitchell
Sir: Berthel Thorvaldsen did not actually carve the Lion of Lucerne, as Alexander Chancellor writes (Travel, 24 June). He designed it, but then, fearing that he might make a mistake when cutting into the rockface, thereby compromising his considerable reputation as leading sculptor to the royal houses of Europe, he lost his nerve and bowed out of the project. The work was executed, with remarkable success, by a local wood-carver, Lucas Ahorn, whose name and achievement are carved into the monument beside Thorvaldsen’s.
Eileen Mitchell
London NW6
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