Biography of Boris from Bullingdon to Brussels

Max Hastings’ portrayal of Boris Johnson makes a convincing and chilling read (I was Boris Johnson’s boss – he is utterly unfit for No 10, 25 June). However, I wonder how Mr Hastings looks back on his stewardship of Johnson when he was editor of the Telegraph and BJ was Brussels correspondent writing his “flamboyant”, going-on-lying stories from Brussels (remember the EU standardised condoms?) which set the mood of sneering contempt for the EU that David Cameron shortsightedly encouraged and that ultimately led to the mess we’re in now.

The man himself told Desert Island Discs in 2005, as quoted in Andrew Gimson’s Boris biography: “…everything I wrote from Brussels I found was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party, and it really gave me this I suppose rather weird sense of power.” Sends shivers down the backbone, huh? After his spell in Brussels, Johnson was promoted.
Helen Oldfield
Deddington, Oxfordshire

• In her 1931 book Women and Politics, the Unionist party MP Katharine Stewart-Murray, Duchess of Atholl, advised voters to ask themselves three questions: “Is the policy for which a candidate stands in the interests of the country as a whole; is it an honourable and a practicable policy; and is his or her personal and intellectual equipment such that he or she can be trusted to further it in an honest and intelligent manner?” Surely something to worry about for those considering Boris Johnson for the next leader/PM? A far-sighted and committed anti-fascist, she was nicknamed “the red duchess” for her concern for those caught up in the Spanish civil war. She was always, however, a true-blue Tory.
Jane M Card
Harwell Village, Oxfordshire

• What planet has Matthew d’Ancona been on since the 1980s (Boris Johnson has turned the Tory party into a cult, 24 June)? The Tories have been a faith-based party ever since Margaret Thatcher took over. Their bizarre membership currently prepared to risk the breakup of the UK, and even the fate of their own party, for the sake of a no-deal Brexit are very much Thatcher’s progeny and “true” believers in English exceptionalism. They have a surreal nostalgia for an unreal imperial Britain before the virus of socialism was introduced and total faith in all the neoliberal nonsense that Britain has been subjected to since 1979. D’Ancona once characterised Michael Gove as a visionary-reforming liberal just after he had, at massive expense, fragmented and further marketised schooling to its current detriment – insane meddling with generations of children’s wellbeing on the basis of evidence-free faith in the primacy of markets and total contempt for the knowledge and expertise of educationalists. Liz Truss, on radio recently, speaks with the same evidence-free certainty about the opportunities of a hard Brexit and the Thatcherite paradise that will be delivered post-Brexit.
Philip Wood
Kidlington, Oxfordshire

• As you state (The public won’t choose the next prime minister. But scrutiny is still vital, 24 June), Johnson’s “record in office is one of carelessness”, not only with public money and the fate of British subjects, but also “about the truth”. In the list of his “horrible rhetoric”, Matthew d’Ancona should not have omitted this “potential” prime minister’s description of the £250,000 paid for his weekly Telegraph column as “chicken feed”, as it is clearly indicative of his total lack of empathy; if there exists a Labour propaganda machine, Johnson’s mouth has to be a godsend. d’Ancona correctly concludes that “we have a right to know everything” about this would-be PM, and that must, therefore, include whether he is as careless with his own finances as he appears to be with the public’s. Pressure needs to be exerted to persuade the two remaining candidates to make public their recent tax records. It seems ridiculous that voters know more about the tax paid by the likes of Amazon than paid by our prime minister!
Bernie Evans
Liverpool

• On my 22nd birthday in 1972 we went to the Trout Inn near Oxford for a candlelit dinner. When we arrived we found the dining room trashed. The barman apologised: “We had the Bullingdon Club in last night.” We were mystified: “Did you call the police?” He shrugged. “Who will pay for all the damage?” He sighed: “Their dads will be here on Monday morning with their chequebooks.” And now they’re trashing the country.
Jenny Willan
Cullompton, Devon

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