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Your support makes all the difference.Having isolated for eight months, my disposition was grim, but hang on, what’s this? Is it true? When I was told that Dominic Cummings had “resigned”, delight coursed through my veins!
Immense harm has been achieved during the past four years to our civil service and government, which will hang around until we find a prime minister who can heal and bring the party back together. That will be for the next person in the post to handle.
Keith Poole
Basingstoke
Perhaps delusional is a better word?
Dominic Cummings was described in the Independent as “a visionary”! In my career as a community psychiatric nurse, I have met and treated many such "visionaries".
Michael Pate
Preston
That cardboard box…
Pictures of Dominic Cummings leaving Downing Street laden with a large box and a backpack makes one wonder what he was carrying and why so much of it? As someone well known for his honesty and adherence to the law, he obviously hadn’t just raided the stationery cupboard on being shown the door, and being a dedicated public servant he would have had no desire or time to work on personal stuff whilst in the office. Besides, what he was working on shouldn’t leave the office for security reasons.
So what was he doing? Could the truth be he was following government Covid-19 advice to work from home and didn’t want to say so in case others copied him, as many did when he went for an eye test, leaving the ship of state vulnerable? In the meantime we must hope those he left back in the office can cope in his absence.
John Simpson
Ross on Wye
A word of warning, but to whom?
Is the government ad along the lines of “Time is running out" urging us to prepare for the new rules on 1 January, directed at the public or itself? A personal message, perhaps, to Boris Johnson.
Peter Smith-Cullen
Dunston
Lockdown lefties
Your paper gives the impression that only right-wing Tory MPs are against lockdowns. You couldn’t be more wrong. I am a grandmother in her 70s and a retired lawyer. I cannot see my grandchildren or my children, all of whom are healthy. I cannot visit my 96-year-old mother in a care home. The economy is suffering endlessly, and who knows how long the recovery will take. My children and their wives are all hanging on to jobs. My grandchildren cannot play their sports at weekends.
I know of not one single person who supports this lockdown, or any in the future, in any generation. And everyone I know, of my generation, does not want to be “saved” while younger generations suffer.
Since the problem is in hospitals and treating those who get the disease severely, that is where all the efforts and resources should go, and not in incarcerating the whole population. I fully understand the issue of the disease spreading, but it will, whatever governments do. The downsides of lockdowns are far too serious now.
I am powerless in this situation. No one is listening to people like me. And Brexit now, too (which I didn’t vote for). All very depressing.
Alison Parker
Canterbury
Good riddance, Mike Pompeo
The outgoing secretary of state Mike Pompeo is considering classifying any criticism of Israel's war crimes as antisemitic. So it will be an offence to support human rights and international law. The new plan will equate any criticism of Israel with antisemitism as an attempt to silence pro-Palestinian advocates. That takes a very twisted mind to come up with such a plan.
Pompeo's plan will affect NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch by cutting their funding. Other pro-Palestinian organisations abroad will also be targeted. Pompeo needs to educate himself on the US Constitution because his plan infringes on people's right to freedom of expression. I am even surprised yet that there is no outcry from the defender of free speech.
Rabbi Alissa Wise, deputy director of Jewish Voice for Peace, summed up the plan in one sentence: "This would be a disaster for Palestinians, the Palestinian rights movement, and all those endangered by white nationalism and real antisemitism."
Thankfully, Secretary Pompeo will be leaving his post in less than 100 days.
Mahmoud El-Yousseph
Westerville, Ohio
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