An MP’s duties

Shimon Cohen (May

12) asks Jeremy Newmark to remember that he is “supposed to be trying to represent his constituents.” Mr Cohen appears to suggest that an MP’s job is to substitute his constituents’ views for his own.

The reverse is true. Edmund Burke said that when it came to elected representatives, “your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

For all that I disagree with Mr Newmark, and would not vote for him, I side with Burke in regards to his duties .

Lee Barnett,

London NW8 that he might be forced to allow German-Jewish sportsmen to participate in the Games and prepared for the possibility. A secret training camp for Jewish athletes was set up at Ettlingen near the Black Forest. Among the handful who trained there was Paul Yogi Mayer, later a wellknown youth leader in London, first in the Jewish community as leader of the Primrose Club for young Holocaust survivors (“The Boys”), followed by the Brady Boys’ Club in the East End, and then more widely as youth officer for Islington Council.

Yogi, who died in 2011 aged 98, trained under official secrecy for the pentathlon but, thanks largely to Avery Brundage, his services were not called upon. He did, however, report on the Games but then fled Germany with his wife and baby son in 1938. Nearly 70 years later, in 2004, he published his own work on Jews in sport: Jews and the Olympic Games: Sport – A Springboard for Minorities.

Ruth Rothenberg,

London NW3