Tax and the next PM

SIR – No country has ever taxed its way into prosperity. Rishi has forgotten this, but Liz has remembered it.

Tim Pope

Weybridge, Surrey

SIR – It’s surprising how long it took the country to get the measure of Rishi Sunak. His early popularity was pretty much guaranteed: the generosity of furlough and cut-price lunches was hardly likely to cause a violent backlash.

Now under pressure, he displays aggression and a rather less attractive side to his personality.

Cameron Morice

Reading, Berkshire

SIR – Allister Heath writes that Liz Truss wishes to defy the “groupthink” of the “Left-wing cultural elite” (Comment, July 28), yet in the same edition you report that she is planning to create a new range of criminal offences to outlaw leering, sexual propositioning and wolf-whistling.

In doing so, she is planning to advance the woke, New Left agenda of establishing ever more control over how we communicate and conduct ourselves, even when absolutely no direct, physical coercion is involved.

Ms Truss is planning to make the old feminist slogan of the “personal is the political” a sad reality. As with the Government’s Online Safety Bill, contemporary Conservatives, with the honourable exception of Kemi Badenoch, are now indistinguishable from the illiberal culture-control Left. Marc Glendening

Head of Cultural Affairs at the Institute of Economic Affairs

London SW1

SIR – It’s good to see that Winchester is strongly represented on both sides of the Conservative leadership contest, with Patrick Minford in Liz Truss’s corner and Rishi Sunak in his own. It appears the senior Wykehamist may be leading on points.

Andrew Baines

Winchester, Hampshire