The evidence shows that May will not be able to unite Britain

YOUR front-page lead headline today reads “‘May rebuffs Sturgeon bid to have Scotland stay in EU (The Herald, July 21). Exactly who is this “May”? My recollection is that she was an extreme right-winger in the Tory Party who changed her tune under David Cameron’s governments and behaved without distinction, other than blind prejudice, as Home Secretary. I now know that she is the woman who enthusiastically said “Yes” when asked if she would press the nuclear button (“Prome Minister argues case for nuclear button”, The Herald, JJuly 19).

Among your recent contributors have been a number who have challenged Nicola Sturgeon’s right to speak for Scotland on the grounds that the referendums of 2014/16 reinforced the democratic unity of the UK’s decision to swim away from Europe. By their accord Theresa May is rightfully in office and entirely entitled to absent us from Europe and press the wee red button. I’m afraid I don’t quite see it that way.

Apart altogether from the fact that Mrs May would require the consent of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton before pressing her magically independent button there is the democratic deficit that she has never been elected by the electorate of the United Kingdom, nor even by the membership of her own party, to govern this rapidly disunited kingdom with the high-handedness that made her so infamous as Home Secretary and so detested among her parliamentary colleagues. She has no democratic mandate to govern, least of all over Scotland, although an isolated David Mundell, loyally voting to renew Trident on the Clyde, would doubtless disagree, arguing that his Parliamentary majority of 798 proved the inviolable nature of the Union and, thus, Mrs May is entirely within her rights to set about the business of depriving Scottish and fellow Europeans resident here of the rights of citizenship which have endured for longer than many electors remember.

The First Minister has my wholehearted backing in her dealings with her Tory Crowned Colleague and I am confident that all Scots of sensibility are on her side. KM Campbell, Bank House, Doune. PRIME Minister Theresa May’s stated intention is to unite “the kingdom”.

I have just watched her first performance in Prime Minister’s Question Time (“Prime Minister May takes up where Thatcher left off”, The Herald, July 21).

I will be surprised if many Scots are favourably impressed by the revelation, in her attack on Jeremy Corbyn, that she is a waspish, captious, acrimonious and spiteful female.

Far from uniting her “kingdom’”, I wonder how many wavering Conservatives in Scotland she lost right there. Shona Arthur, 9 Cupleasant Avenue, Tain.