Total meltdown

From self-proclaimed “strong and stable”, the Tory Cabinet has quickly descended in a matter of weeks to being “weak and wobbly ”, as Cabinet ministers ferociously brief against each other.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond is now firmly in the firing line, claiming that public sector workers are overpaid as he rebuffs advances to end the one per cent pay cap. This, even though the incomes of five million of them have fallen since the Tories came to power. Well, as the Chancellor said, “driving a train is so easy a woman could do it”. This from a man who has to endure a salary of a mere £143,000 per annum, plus a free house and chauffeur-driven limousine.

In the year since Mr Hammond has been Chancellor, so well has he performed that the UK has slumped to the bottom of the league of G7 industrial countries in terms of economic growth.

North of the Border our economic news is a little rosier, with growth in the first quarter of 2017 at 0.8 per cent, four times that of the UK as a whole – confounding those gleefully awaiting a Scottish recession. As this was not the case, it was the “broad shoulders of the UK”, according to the doomsayers, that led to this growth.

The Tory Government is in total meltdown, at one of the crucial moments in the UK’S political history, as we negotiate Brexit. Our public sector, indeed all of us, deserve better than being caught in the middle of a Tory civil war, reinforcing their already woeful performance.

ALEX ORR Leamington Terrace, Edinburgh