Shambolic Tories can’t rely on fear of Labour to win a general election

SIR – Sir Iain Duncan Smith (report, June 12) says that the threat of a Labour government “encompasses high taxes, huge powers for the unions, and bonkers protesters at the top table”.

Does he not realise that the Johnson and Sunak premierships have left the country groaning under these burdens – and worse – already?

Tim Coles
Carlton, Bedfordshire

SIR – At the next general election, Rishi Sunak will be asking voters to trust him by voting for him. But voters are likely to think: we can’t trust him because he stabbed his own boss, Boris Johnson, in the back, deposed him and stole his job. For that reason, a Tory win under Mr Sunak is very unlikely.

David Kilpatrick
St Albans, Hertfordshire

SIR – Those who support Boris Johnson and are under the impression he still has the power to attract votes should be reminded of his by-election record, which includes huge and embarrassing losses in Chesham and Amersham in 2021 and Tiverton and Honiton in 2022. He would still represent a significant election risk to the Tories, particularly after the findings of the Privileges Committee.

It is a measure of Mr Johnson’s delusion that he should accuse the committee, which includes Tory Brexiteers, of being a “kangaroo court”, when all the evidence shows that he was solely responsible for his own downfall.

David Taylor
Lymington, Hampshire

SIR – Boris Johnson and the Duke of Sussex seem to have something in common: they believe it is always someone else’s fault.

Annabel Burton
Winchcombe, Gloucestershire

SIR – It makes one gasp that something so trivial as socialising in Downing Street during Covid should create such a crisis in our political system. However, there is of course a greater underlying cause: Brexit. The European issue split the country and the 2016 referendum was the inevitable result of this.

Could it all have been avoided? I suspect so. Does one have to go back to the Maastricht Treaty to see what might have been changed?

Perhaps if Gordon Brown had called the referendum that was promised on what became the Lisbon Treaty, we would have voted it down and it would then have been necessary to renegotiate.

Remember, the French and Dutch voted against the original constitutional document, and the Irish voted against the treaty itself, so we would have been pushing at an open door.

Apart from anything else, the behaviour of Brussels over the Lisbon Treaty and the way it was rammed through were critical factors in making the issue of national sovereignty so determining in the 2016 referendum.

Charles Pugh
London SW10