Mrs May’s bizarre lack of decision meant that she had to be asked to go, and without delay

SIR – I do not blame Theresa May for splitting the Conservative Party into two over Europe. I would no doubt have done so myself had I been leader.

The decision about Europe is binary in my view. It was always inevitable that the split would take place. You are either in Europe or you are not.

What has surprised me is the style Mrs May has adopted in her leadership. Looking back, it was ever thus. She failed to take decisions when she was chairwoman of the party under Iain Duncan Smith’s leadership. I was on the board and she had not changed her ways by the time I was chairman of the political honours committee under her leadership.

I fail to understand why, having worked her way up the party, she cannot take a view about anything. I do not comprehend how someone at the top of politics most of her working life has apparently no views of her own – on defence, agriculture, foreign affairs, even immigration and education, and above all on the constitution of our country, which she has done so much to destroy. I wish to make sense of it all, but I can’t.

Even when she does express her view in public she never seems to follow it through with a decision. What it means is that all decisions are taken in the anteroom of her office. This is bizarre.

Clearly this could not go on. Whatever the rules of the party, we have to change the leadership. I cannot understand why someone had not already taken this view. Lord Spicer

London SW1

SIR – Yet another meeting with the 1922 Committee; yet another failure to name a definite departure date.

How many more lost votes and lost seats to appease Mrs May? Her legacy will be read in the obituary of the Tory party. W M Davies

Burton, Cheshire

SIR – How can the 1922 Committee let the PM dictate her timetable, yet again yesterday afternoon, after the damage she has done? Tom Pearson

Northleach, Gloucestershire

SIR – Nick Timothy (Comment, May 16) is right to describe the electorate as having “already made” the choice between Leave and Remain in the 2016 referendum. However, he could have brought the subsequent betrayal of this decision by the Prime Minister and MPS into sharper focus.

Her predecessor, David Cameron, made it clear that (in the European Union Referendum Act 2015) the legislature had exercised sovereignty in a way that would allow the will of the electorate to find decisive expression. Not just Mrs May, but the many parliamentarians who seem unwilling or unable to grasp this fact should (as Mr Timothy puts the point) do their “duty” and “stand aside”. Professor Richard Mullender

Newcastle Law School SIR – When David Cameron did his runner in 2016 there were 331 Conservative MPS. All had seen Mrs May as Home Secretary for six years – as a poor communicator making bad decision after bad decision.

Yet those 331 MPS allowed Mrs May to take over as prime minister unopposed – an extraordinary collective, crass political judgment.

There are still nearly 300 of those MPS in the Commons. They claim that political judgment is their trade. In 2016 they showed us just how irresponsible their judgment was. It is now time that their local associations deselected every last one of the remaining 2016 irresponsibles.

The Conservative MP stable needs a root-and-branch clear-out.

Dr Gerald de Lacey

London W11

SIR – What did Stephen Barclay, the Brexit Secretary, mean by referring to the “Barnier deal” (report, 15 May)? I always thought it was Mrs May’s deal. Christine Callingham

Stevenage, Hertfordshire