I SEARCHED in vain for clues that Ian Lakin's letter (March 18) was some kind of ironic joke. To consider, in any way, that Theresa May will earn "huge respect and indebtedness from the British people" for leading us out of the EU surely displays an astonishing level of naivety.

From the start of her negotiations, and I emphasise her, Mrs May has demonstrated a complete disregard for collaboration and consultation alongside barely concealed contempt for those parts of the UK who voted, sometimes overwhelmingly, to remain in the EU. Rather, the DUP, that small but crucial passport to her holding on to a parliamentary majority was feted and bribed irrespective of the fact it does not possess, as a minimum requirement, the credentials of representing the democratic wish of the Northern Ireland people to remain in the EU.

Two years, later following the resounding defeat of her plan Mrs May announced a new but pitifully overdue approach of "reaching out" across the House. We were then treated to endless TV footage of opposition party delegates dutifully arriving to be "consulted", each leaving with the same bemused expression – and ultimate verdict. Mrs May did not budge an inch from her own self-defined red lines. The voices she was listening to were again those extremists in her own party while large parts of the UK howled in disbelief.

To consider Mrs May's negotiation as anything other than stubborn ineptitude does democracy a disservice. Any strategy involving the whole of the UK demanded from the start and at the very least, a cross-party approach, yet even now this is denied us. Speculation that the DUP may be offered another bribe is further sickening evidence of Mrs May's desperate obstinacy.

Rather than earning our respect and indebtedness, Mrs May, the architect in her previous role of some of the country's harshest and least defensible policies, will have merely reinforced her reputation as a closed-minded, self-serving politician who has swept aside the concerns and wishes of half the country and failed the narrow majority who voted to leave the EU with what will be a catastrophic deal, worse in countless ways than the status quo of our current EU membership.

It is hard to imagine a less successful political legacy.

Dr Brenda Gillies,

12 Victoria Street, Newport on Tay, Fife.

MANY of your readers will remember a time when UK citizens looked across to Europe and shook their heads in amused condescension at the faltering attempts of continental states to govern themselves through the practice of parliamentary democracy. We watched operatic levels of discord in their legislative chambers preclude reasoned debate, fluid factions of politicians claim that their policies were the only true course to follow, soi-disant leaders of popular opinion indulge in self -serving political posturing; all this emotional and febrile behaviour producing a pantomime of a parliament, a government in constant crisis and a discontented and disillusioned electorate. How we laughed at the foreigners and their funny, foreign, inadequate ways.

Well, who’s laughing now?

Ian Hutcheson,

161 Beechwood Drive, Glasgow.

THE SNP at Westminster is intolerant of dissent and functions as one. Ignored are the 36 per cent of SNP supporters who voted Leave. The SNP complains of bias by the BBC, but the bias demonstrated by the SNP against a significant number of its own members is not admitted. In a greenhouse throwing stones?

William Durward,

20 South Erskine Park, Bearsden.