We did not elect new PM, so why back her?

✒ ALEX Chalk (Echo, September 8) exhorts that we all stand behind our new PM - but why should we?

We are after all a democracy and did not all vote for Ms Truss.

In fact, most of the country didn’t actually vote for a Conservative government - they got power with 44% of the electoral support, below half the voters, yet they have an overwhelming majority in parliament. Power they have blatantly abused.

The Johnson administration, of which Ms Truss was a senior member, saw businesses applying for the billions available from Covid contracts, who were 20 times more likely to be successful if they had Tory connections than those that didn’t.

And some of those projects, such as the Test and Trace fiasco, managed by the unqualified Dido Harding, wife of a Tory MP, resulted in the effective waste of almost £40bn.

As Mr Chalk reminds us, let us not forget our children will have to pay for this.

Self interest is the hallmark of Tory MPS. Some may recall that in 2016 Conservative MPS voted to reject a proposed rule that would have required private landlords to make their homes “fit for human habitation”.

An entirely reasonable proposal rejected by Tory MPS, more then 70 of whom were landlords themselves, including, it seems, our own Mr Chalk.

More recently, proposed changes to the environment laws to stop sewage pouring into our rivers and coastal waters from the privatised water firms (mostly foreign owned) were radically weakened to ensure the owners interests were fully protected - again by the Tory MPS, including, as usual, Mr Chalk.

It seems for them the public swimming in sewage invested rivers and beaches is unimportant.

Given such a record, rather than get behind Ms Truss, we would do better to follow the Haldane/jefferson aphorism that ‘it is the duty of the citizen to be a nuisance to the state’ and keep the government aware that the public is alert to their abuse of trust.

Frank Chacko

Cheltenham