Sir: In the course of her post-election anal- ysis Anne
McElvoy touches upon the bien pensant outrage, or feigned outrage, at the Tory election advertisement which showed Tony Blair perched upon Helmut Kohl's knee. `Anti-German!' shrieked the accuser.
Anti-German? Were foreign critics of the late President Mitterrand automatically branded as anti-French? As it happens, while the sketch in question undoubtedly belittled Mr Blair (which was presumably the object of the exercise), the German Chancellor was properly depicted in a neu- tral and by all accounts accurate light: essentially as a benign uncle, but one with an unusually powerful personality.
A controversialist could indeed argue that if anyone is disparaging the German people, it is a prominent political figure who evidently believes his fellow-country- men to be so prone to periodic and unpro- voked bouts of aggression that they need to be permanently strapped into the straitjack- et of a federal European superstate. One unhappy consequence is that their sane and blameless neighbours are being pressurised to submit to similar hobbling. While on this topic, your editorial of the same date surely draws the wrong inference from the substantial swings against certain high-profile Tory Eurosceptics on 1 May. This demonstrated not burgeoning Euro- enthusiasm among the electorate but the common activist conviction that loyalty to one's party leader, right or wrong, should outweigh other considerations. The pas- sionate yet notably correct and unflamboy- ant Eurosceptic, Richard Shepherd, was rewarded by a well below average adverse swing of only 7.8 per cent. And remember that the Referendum party and the cash- strapped UK Independence party between them garnered between 4 and 9.2 per cent of the vote in over 100 constituencies cov- ering enormous tracts of eastern, southern and south-western England.
Monson
House of Lords London SW1
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