Letters to the Telegraph

The Telegraph letters page is a competitive place. This week it had the Iran ceasefire, two ministerial resignations and an American AI story to contend with. My letter about a West Sussex car park did not make the cut. It finds its home here instead, as the centrepiece of Episode 5, which turns out to be about rather more than parking. It is about the summer jobs of the early seventies, the trave...

This week I sent a single quotation to the Telegraph. No comment, no gloss. Just Churchill, House of Commons, November 1936, on a government that could not bring itself to rearm. The letters editor will decide whether to run it. But the resignation letters of John Healey and Al Carns, landing within hours of each other on Thursday, made the argument for me. This episode takes those letters as its...

Last week I sent a short letter to the Telegraph about the disorder in Southampton and the death of Henry Nowak. Its argument was a simple one. When a government meets legitimate public anxiety with a charge of bigotry, it does not make the anxiety disappear. It abandons the people who hold it, and leaves the ground to those who will put it to worse use. In this third episode I read that letter, a...

Welcome back to Letters to the Telegraph, the weekly series in the spirit of Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America. Each episode takes one of my letters to the editor, sometimes published, sometimes not, and walks around the story behind it. This episode is built around a letter on a subject that is hard to escape at the moment, the state of British defence, and one document in particular that was...

Welcome to Letters to the Telegraph, a small weekly series in the spirit of Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America. Each episode will take one of my letters, sometimes published in the paper, sometimes not, and walk around the story behind it. This first episode is built around a letter prompted by two stories from the same week, both involving Glasgow and the same regiment. The letter ran as follow...