THOSE LETWINS

Oliver Letwin (“The intellectual who underrated the voters”, December) was not the first of his tribe to upset the political applecart — it runs in the family.

When Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher set up the Centre for Policy Studies the letterhead read: “To advance social market policies”, and its first publication was Why Britain Needs a Social Market Economy. The wisecrack then was, “We need more Erhards and less fainthearts,” as the German experience was much admired.

This was too much for Shirley Letwin — Oliver’s mother — who persuaded Keith Joseph to drop the word “social” and go for “red-blooded capitalism”. Today, the harm done by this advice can be seen all too clearly. Under-regulated markets in the form of runaway executive salaries and exploitive denationalisation of our utilities have given the cause of capitalism a bad name which it would not have deserved had social responsibility been encouraged simultaneously. Lord Vinson

London SW1