PM worst since Chamberlain

I must be living on a different planet to Graham Becket [Letters, Gazette, July 30] as I think that Boris Johnson is the Prince of Inaction! He is an arch-ditherer. He dithered about starting lockdown. If he had started it a month earlier, many lives would have been saved. Then he ended it too soon, as we are hearing daily. Having lived through WW2, I think Johnson is the worst PM since Chamberlain. I thank our lucky stars that a man of the calibre of Churchill led us through that war, not one like Johnson. A man with a lot of bottle indeed, it is a bottle of vinegar!

He is no hero in my view, or the views of many disappointed people who voted for him.

Alderman Ken Hando The Paddocks, Beltinge

■ Graham Beckett’s paean of praise for Boris Johnson was written before the news that he had elevated Claire Fox to the House of Lords.

Claire Fox was a member of the Revolutionary Communist

Party (RCP). In 1993, an IRA bomb killed 12-year-old Tim Parry, three-year-old Johnathan Ball and young mother Bronwen Vickers. The RCP declared: “We defend the right of the Irish people to take whatever measures are necessary in their struggle for freedom”. Claire Fox has refused to condemn this statement. After she spoke last year to Colin Parry, the father of the 12-year-old, he said that she had “repeatedly refused to disavow her comments supporting the IRA bombing which took Tim and Johnathan’s young lives”. When Toadmeister (Toby Young) asked her to repent, Claire Fox complained: “What makes me mad is this is an attempt to get people to apologise for things they sincerely, firmly believed in for years.” So Claire Fox does not accept that an act of terrorism which has the clearly foreseeable consequence of killing children is wrong.

The RCP approved the murder of four MPS – Airey Neave, Robert Bradford, Sir Anthony Berry and Ian Gow. In the Christian tradition, we have a greater revulsion to the killing of children than of adults, but in this country we remove MPS by exercising our vote, not by assassination. Writing in Conservative Home, the respected commentator Henry Hill observed: “It is a nasty but inescapable reality of any peace process that it involves a certain amount of letting go.” Although Claire Fox has condemned “the dissident activities of paramilitaries since the Good Friday Agreement”, Mr Hill, reflecting on the murder of my friend Ian Gow and other MPS, commented, “there ought, surely, to be some limits, if not to Fox’s ambitions for public life, then at least to a Conservative Prime Minister’s willingness to facilitate it. The limits of justifiable rapprochement do not extend to a seat in the House of

‘One can just hope the council’s retail property portfolio will turn out to be a wise use of taxpayers’ money. To have one white elephant may be regarded as a misfortune, to have two looks like carelessness’

Lords.”

Margaret Thatcher and John Major were willing to sacrifice much to ensure that the future of Northern Ireland was determined by the ballot, not the bullet. Each would rather have cut off their right hand than sign the letter elevating Claire Fox to the Lords.

What a contrast to the indifference to the murder of children 27 years ago in Warrington displayed by the gangster squatting in No 10.

Joe Egerton

Palace Street, Canterbury