Our current leaders are yet to be great

AT the age of 81, going on 82, I am composing this letter on September 3, 2020, exactly 81 years after the UK had, in the space of 21 years declared a second war on Germany and one which meant that I only saw my father intermittently until 1946.

The main difference between the Germany of the first and second war was that the head honcho had changed from a “royal” to an elected “commoner”, namely Adolph Hitler. Hitler’s rise to power was helped by the appalling economic treatment visited by the Allies on Germany’s “ordinary man in the street” at the end of the first war. A treatment that the Nazis attributed to the Jewish community, rather than to Germany’s Aryan foes in the first war, who, at the end of it, squeezed Germany’s so-called “ordinary people” so dry that Hitler conned them.

One cause of this continuing sad story is the wrong, and empty, form of rhetoric delivered by the likes of the Englishman, whose unflattering photograph appears on page 20 of your September 2 edition and his American counterpart who appears to the left of the photograph appearing on page 19 of the same edition. Until I checked myself, I was about to say that fine oration without healing substance is hollow, but neither Boris Johnson nor Donald Trump, as so-called leaders of the, self-called, free world can be classified as a fine orator.

The same cannot be said about our own David Lloyd George and Aneurin Bevan, who matched oratory with substance: the former enacting the introduction of the old age pension and national insurance and the latter founding the National Health Service. It will take Boris and Trump to deliver something like these two to qualify as great men: as yet the signs are not good.

Derek Griffiths

Cardiff