Letters From A Tory Daily views on British politics and the Conservative Party from a centre-right thinker who writes letters on his blog to politicians, journalists and many others.

“What the public want is someone who has the courage, the decency, the integrity, the intelligence to solve the major problems we are facing all over the world.  In Gordon we have got that. …I think it has been a good year.”
- Alan Johnson, Health Secretary (yes, he really said this)

Dear Wendy Alexander,
All I can say is ‘well done’.  I mean it.  What you have accomplished is surely without precedent in Scottish politics.  To preside over so many screw-ups, mishaps and poor (but easily avoidable) errors of judgement without losing your job is indeed worthy of praise.  Most Labour ministers get booted out after one [...]

Just when I thought that Labour were uncatchable in the race for the ‘Biggest Idiots On The Planet’ award, a strong challenger emerges….

…perhaps that explains these pictures.
This was taken on the 27th June 2007:

This picture was taken on 26th June 2008, a year later:

Need I say more?

“Bankrupt financially, and bereft of ideas, it is skidding towards near oblivion for a very long time. And it is a horrible spectacle to watch”
- Polly Toynbee

Dear David Davis,
I fear that the worst is yet to come.  After the Conservatives put in a wonderful performance in Henley yesterday, your own by-election could undo some of the good work put in recently against Labour and the Lib Dems.  I had the dubious pleasure of reading through the list of candidates that you [...]

In case you can’t really see it, the little speck of red at the top of the pie chart is the Labour Party.  Labour received fewer votes than the Green Party and the BNP and were only 200 votes ahead of UKIP - and I don’t remember any of those rival parties being at the top of the political agenda [...]

Dear Harriet Harman,
Obviously you still haven’t grasped the naivety of your adherence to the mythical notion of equality.  As I said in the ‘Why I write these letters’ page on this blog, sometimes you have to accept that people are not equal.  No-one on this planet is ‘equal’ to anyone else – we are all [...]

“Thirty years after Margaret Thatcher rescued Britain from the unions, Europe and the Labour Party may be about to hand them back their placards and cast us headlong back into another era of discontent”
- Lord Tebbit, who fears the EU may scupper the industrial relations laws, curbing trade union power, which he introduced in the 1980s

“So-called liberal interventionism is a will-o’-the-wisp, a vapid, feel-good refashioning of foreign policy in response to a headline event, motivated by self-interest or passing mood. We should send food to the starving of Zimbabwe because that is something we can do, however much Mugabe distorts the supply. But as for dreaming of toppling him, those [...]

Dear Michael Martin,
First and foremost I would like to say congratulations for remaining in your job for so long, even though you lost the confidence of MPs and the public many months ago.  Derek Conway only lasted a few days but through some clever wheeling-and-dealing you have escaped with your role as Speaker in tact.  [...]

There has been a great deal of blogtime dedicated to the resignation of James McGrath, one of Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, over comments made about immigration in a recent interview.  Perhaps THIS STORY will put James’s supposedly resignation-worthy comments into perspective?

Dear local government workers,
As everyone knows, educational standards in this country have been falling for years but I would have hoped that between 600,000 of you someone would have a calculator to hand or at least be able to do some basic sums.  Civil service unions have already threatened to strike, which would disrupt benefits offices, museums, [...]

There’s nothing like a good old rebellion in the Labour Party.  First came the 10p tax rebels, then we had the 42-day rebels, and now we have THIS LOT.

Dear Ed Balls,
I wonder if your arrogance will ever cease.  Not only have already dismantled Tony Blair’s vaguely promising educational reforms since becoming Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, but you are now blinded by your own political ambitions and condemning millions more children to a second-rate education in an already second-rate education [...]

…and it looks like Mugabe has won it.
The Independent has two contrasting viewpoints on whether Tsvangirai should or should not have pulled out of the Zimbabwe elections, which make for interesting reading.  Horrible as it must be to resist Mugabe’s regime under the genuine threat of violence and murder, the dissolution of the opposition surely [...]

“I have seldom heard such a farrago of wishful thinking and muddle”
- Former Chancellor Lord Lawson on David Cameron’s “save-the-planet antics”

Sarkozy says: ““A child dies of starvation every 30 seconds and the Commission wanted to reduce European agriculture production by 21% during World Trade Organisation talks. This was really counter-productive.  …It would be highly unrealistic to keep wanting to negotiate a deal . . . which would cut farm output by 20 per cent while [...]

It sounds strange at first, but it would be a beautiful irony if the voters in the presidential elections in America were heavily influenced by cookies.

Dear Dominic Lawson,
Well done for correctly spotting the wider implications of Andy Burnham’s unacceptable and potentially libellous remarks about Shami Chakrabarti.  Anyone who considers this to be an isolated incident that has no wider ramifications is clearly not looking at this situation very hard.
For Andy Burnham to say “I find something very curious in the [...]

“Tom Harris’s breathtaking comments raise Labour’s arrogance and complacency to a whole new level.”
- Conservative Treasury Spokesman Philip Hammond, responding to remarks by Labour minister Tom Harris who says that everyone hit by the credit crunch should stop being “so bloody miserable”

Dear Iain Martin,
You have picked up on something rather curious about the EU that has been bugging me for quite a few days now.  It was written in stone that unless all 27 EU nations ratified the Lisbon Treaty, it was dead.  Somehow, this seems to have forgotten by our Great European Overlords.  For you [...]

I don’t know about you, but every time I think that things can’t get any worse, they do.  How far can our economy fall and how many people will it take with it?

“It is an absolute disgrace that MPs and MEPs claim more expenses in a month than public service workers earn in a year – and that’s without the nanny”
- Dave Prentis, boss of Unison

Dear readers,
Sorry for the lack of proper posting.  Today was promising to be a fantastic day for this blog, as I was going to reveal exclusive news about David Davis’ by-election campaign and also reveal some highly sensitive information about Labour ministers’ private lives, but unfortunately I left all my notes on Hazel Blears’s computer.