Crisis of the nation
Sir: In your highly responsible leading article (July 29) on the current crisis of nation, government and party, you suggest, and I am sure rightly, that Ministers may not understand.
You write of the Prime Minister's "sharp-edged ability to divide the nation." Yet, on the steps of Number Ten after his election victory, he quoted Disraeli. Except at Health and Social Security I can see little sign of Disraeli and yet I think one is on very dangerous ground when accusations of hypocrisy, and deceit are bandied about; the whole currency of politics can be very quickly debased that way. I suggest that Ministers have forgotten Peel's comment when he heard of the fall of his friend Louis Philippe in 1848. Peel blamed it on excessive reliance on a Parliamentary majority to the exclusion of opinion in the country outside Parliament and added that protectionists had wanted him to make the same mistake here.
Statistics show that in every election from 1945 to 1970 the victorious party has polled less than half the total votes cast. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that in the whole of the post-war period the country has been more or less evenly divided.
In such circumstances any patriotic government has no option but to accept the absolute truth of your statement: "The job of this Government — and of any Government of this country (my italics) — is to sort things out and not to stir things-up."
George A. Short 5 Scarsdale Road, Manchester 14
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