LETTERS Colossal bore
Sir: Your leader (13 June) talks sourly about a boring, stupid, vacuous election. I think it has been fascinating, but since part of the fascination is that very sourness, I suppose you couldn't be expected to feel quite the same.
You mention the word 'caring' with a sort of jeer, like Mrs Thatcher did in an interview with David Dimbleby when she spoke of 'drooling and drivelling' over the unfortunate. What has been so refreshing about this election is that the Right has come out of the closet. The unemployed, the poor, the homeless and the ill are really a colossal bore, and — what's worse — the cause of boringness in others.
You castigate the Tories for pretending to care about the welfare services and for vying with Labour over spending. Why bother to be hypocritical, you suggest, when the 'freedoms' of independent (pri- vate) education and private health are to become as entrenched as home ownership. As though nobody will be left behind like August in London, when no one, but no one, is there.
What this election has pointed up as no other in my lifetime, is precisely what makes politics interesting. My abiding memory is of Mr Wakeham, the Tory Chief Whip, telling the lady on the phone- in programme whose husband was on £90 basic, that she really couldn't complain of not having had a holiday for eight years, because she must bear in mind that many more others had had excellent holidays. But the trickle-down theory isn't shatter- ingly obvious to ladies like that, and I can quite see that it would sour the temper to be reminded of them and their families lots and lots of times over.
Juliet Hankey
8 Milman Road, Reading, Berkshire
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