Dear James,                                                                                                                                             

How much longer can our nation put up with this madness? Suella Breverman is running riot making poor, little Rishi Sunak look even poorer and littler. Stuck in his Goldman-Sachs ‘process’ straight jacket, our PM appears weak and indecisive. Should he kick her out or should he yet again show his feeble grasp on power and let her continue to make trouble from her free wheeling right wing extremes? Whatever the decision, Rishi’s showing his colours. Washed out grey, he droops like a limp pennant from within the political doldrums that your sad Party currently inhabits. It’s almost embarrassing to witness. 

Dear James,

As a junior minister you are subject to the rule of collective responsibility which in simple terms means that whether privately you agree or disagree on policy or collective behaviour, publicly you have to toe the government line. This should always bring up the question of principle.  Simply put, how much can a private individual sacrifice to keep his job? Well, in the last few days I assume that you have been witnessing the revelations at the Covid Enquiry? I’d like to think that you were shocked but, on the other hand, being so close to government you probably knew it all along. If so, did you ever consider your position?  Are you considering it now? And, if not, why not?

Dear James,

What does it feel like, three years on from Britain’s exit from the largest market in the world? Still putting on the brave face are you? Still avoiding the difficult questions? Still unwilling to face the truth? But no problem can be solved without a clear facing up to reality. Our nation faces calamitous crises on many fronts and a political class swirling in a maelstrom of old school yah booing with almost none able to admit the truth. Our nation needs a total reset James. From the constitution, the voting system, the taxation system to the methods of party funding and questions of personal integrity we need to sit down as a nation to think. Do we want to be governed by an oligarchy of the rich and privileged whose main purpose is to protect its own or do we want a government who governs for all?

Dear James,

Surely these are the end of days for the Tory Party? That demon worm called Brexit has been devouring your party from within for the last thirty years and now all that is left is a husk, a discarded skin, a shrunken, shrivelled corpse of a once largely honourable party.The only problem remaining is that you’re unable to admit failure and that is the mark of Cain on any politician. No ideas, no plans, no philosophy, no honour. There is nothing left within this political cadaver James - it’s just a desiccated skein of yesteryear wrapped around the last feeble skirmishes of your own civil war. And all the nation can do is to watch the death throes in numbed and helpless horror.

Dear James,

One month ago, Rishi Sunak, our new PM, kidded himself that he could create a cabinet containing all the flavours of your divided party. He would be the great smoother over of all dissent, the calmer of the torrid seas of your divided party and the reasonable guarantor of that elusive condition called Tory Party unity. Suella Braverman, she who ‘dreamed of refugees on a plane to Rwanda’, was included. As was Steve Baker an extreme Brexiteer who substituted for “Monocle-Mogg’. Sunak even took on the notorious Sir Gavin Williamson - that serial baby-faced, failure from previous regimes and keeper of Cronus the giant tarantula kept on his desk to intimidate all comers - but he lasted just a few days after being found guilty of bullying. Otherwise they were all there, beaming solidarity and post-Trussian peace. Fronted by Sunakian charm and the calm and balm exterior of Jeremy Hunt, we were told that at last we were in ‘safe hands’.

Dear James,

It’s been a dizzying week. Our nation has looked on helplessly as the Tory Party civil war has exploded all around us. Last Wednesday, Liz Truss resigned, her thankfully brief experiment on the British people, scuppered by the ‘orthodoxies’ of the global financial markets. Her ‘new era’ was over in forty four days. The day before, the Tory MP Sir Charles Walker had called her government ‘a shambles, a disgrace.’ He was sick and tired of this group of ‘talentless people’ putting their own personal circumstances above the national interest. ‘Hear hear!' to that.

Liz Truss is politically dead. Yesterday, on cue, Jeremy Hunt came onto our screens with the palour and demeanour of the kindly undertaker. Understated and yet with the stiffly upright posture of the lead mourner, he was perfect for the role. He told us that the Growth Plan of three weeks ago was dead. We were reassured. Without saying it, the implicit message was that the main instigator of that plan was also deceased and he was the right man to dress the corpse and bury the perpetrator. Jeremy Hunt would look good walking before the hearse in a top hat and cane.

Dear James,

Yesterday Liz Truss sacked her Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng. We’ve now had four Chancellors in four months and four Prime Ministers in six years. However, we’ve had only one party in power in the last twelve. That party - your party James - has presided over a catastrophic collapse of national self-confidence and International reputation that makes the developed world look on in bewilderment at the demise of No 10 Downing Street as the bastion of sound pragmatic government. Now it stands there, forlorn, lost, an old grey lady sitting, pondering how to extract herself from the quagmire of multiple crises, many of which have been of your own party’s making.

Dear James,

So now we know. The cause of all the problems that have faced our nation for the last ten years has been identified. It’s the ‘Anti-Growth Coalition’. In other words, all of us. Unless of course you happen to be one of that tiny minority of the UK population who voted her into the top job one month ago. Into this category of saboteurs are green campaigners, Remainers, trades unions, Lib-Dems, Labour Party members and the SNP. She might also have added you James and the rest of the Tory Party plus the 75% majority of the population who currently, according to the latest opinion polls, thinks she’s lost control of the economic situation. But that would have been a step too far even for this rabid populist replacement for the last dud.

Dear James,

So, no Trappist monastery for Liz then? After a week of silence, on Thursday she was wheeled out in fully robotic mode and for eight minutes each she answered local radio stations for a full hour. The country had misunderstood her. The big issue was ‘the huge energy capping exercise’ in Kwarteng’s ‘mini-budget’ last Friday, not the market turmoil that followed. The reaction was due to Putin’s War and nothing to do with her own government’s miscalculation. Her message was this ‘lady’s not for turning’. The real message was, ‘Once in a hole continue digging!’.

Dear James,

You’ve done it at last! Congratulations on your Resignation this morning!

I attach your Resignation letter.

BH - Your (Slightly Less) Concerned Constituent

Dear James,

What a day! Tonight thirty eight Junior Ministers and Aids have asked Boris Johnson to resign. You, of course, will not be one of those ‘considering his position’. Yet. Your one abiding characteristic as a politician is blind loyalty to whomsoever may be your leader at the time. Had Sir Oswald Moseley achieved his dream of becoming your party leader, he could have counted on you! Yet now you have to decide whether to abandon the sinking ship or stay loyal to its drowning captain. Difficult one eh James?

Dear James,

How much more evidence do you need? On Thursday your party suffered two crushing defeats in by-elections. The Liberal Democrats overturned a massive Conservative majority of over 24,000 at Tiverton and Honiton with a swing of nearly 30% and a 52.9% of the vote share. This is the biggest majority lost in by-election history and the third time in a year that the Lib-Dems have overturned sizeable Tory ma]orities. At the other end of the country, at Wakefield, Labour, with a 12.7% swing, grabbed back a 'red wall' seat less than three years after Tories snatched it from them in 2019. Surely James, even for you, it’s now clear that Boris, the ‘vote winner’ has become Boris the ‘vote loser’?