SATURDAY’S report on the best news of the year – the departure of Dominic Cummings – has perhaps arrived to late in saving the Conservative and Unionist party in Scotland.

The infiltration of Cummings and his ilk into the party which historically has provided the majority of UK governments for the past century have all but destroyed the Tory party and its traditional moderate wing from within.

They and people such as Nigel Farage, who have never won an election in their own right, have changed the political face of this once-great political institution beyond recognition. The 2016 EU referendum was merely the vehicle for them to give effect to that change.

Like Labour, the Tories contained a broad church of political opinions with no single faction having a totality of control. However the difference with the Labour Party was that their militant left who, until recently were on the ascendency, did not destroy all opposition from within.

Whereas the Brexiteers with their 2019 clearing-out of Tory moderates at Westminster, and the 95,000 individual card-carrying members electing Boris as their willing tool in promoting populist anti-EU policies, left me to wonder, where is their equivalent of a Keir Starmer in bringing the Conservatives back to some kind of political equilibrium?

It certainly won’t be provided by the likes of Michael Gove in the cabinet, or Iain Duncan Smith from the backbenches.

Never have so few political spoilers inflicted so much damage to a once-great institution of Westminster Government.

William Maley, Ayr.

IT is a reasonable inference that Dominic Cummings et al would not have dared behave as they are alleged to have done if the Prime Minister were in robust health.

Ergo we have oblique, but fairly convincing, evidence that the PM has post-COVID syndrome and has been unwise to continue in office in what would be stressful times for someone in perfect health.

Dr William Durward, Bearsden.

 

SCHADENFREUDE is pure dead brilliant!

T. J. Dowds, Cumbernauld.

 

CUMMINGS at least had the audacity to try to shake things up, not least the Civil Service, and it was an interesting failure.

But his abrasive manner perhaps carried the seed of his own downfall. He was pitiless towards those whom he considered his opponents, and as long as he had the active support of Boris Johnson, who admired him, he was safe.

But as with Theresa May’s chief aides, Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, such abrasiveness never lasts. They rubbed people up the wrong way and built up resentments; Cummings did the same.

My faith in politics has been restored with Cummings’s departure.

L. Ferguson,

Glasgow.