Sajid Javid may have avoided ‘a life of crime’ in the traditional sense, but his career choices are still shameful

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With the sun setting on Theresa May’s premiership, Sajid Javid has made an early pitch for the Tory leadership with a speech which was supposedly about “crime” but was actually about Sajid Javid.

Javid claimed to have been brought up on “Britain’s most dangerous street” and admits he could have turned to a life of crime making “easy money” as a drug-dealer were it not for upright parents, supportive teachers and the love of a good woman.

As a result Javid took another path and became a managing director of Deutsche Bank AG before going on to become a Tory MP.

Javid rejected the life of a petty criminal to join two much bigger gangs.

As Bertolt Brecht observed: “Bank robbery is an initiative of amateurs. True professionals establish a bank.”

Sasha Simic
London N16

‘Question Time’ beckons

I see the new Brexit Party has a high-profile candidate for the Euro election, namely, Annunziata Rees-Mogg.

Is it just more than possible that she will be invited onto Question Time almost immediately and maybe go on to emulate or even beat the record appearances of her new boss, Nigel Farage?

Do not bet against it!

Robert Boston
Kingshill

Margaret Hodge’s leak

How disappointed Dame Margaret Hodge must have been that her secret recording of her “private” meeting with Jeremy Corbyn only evidenced his personal concern that some complaints of antisemitism may have been “mislaid or ignored”.

It’s pretty hard to spin that against Corbyn, no matter how much you detest him, and we all know Hodge detests him.

After all, she did call him a “f***ing antisemite and a racist”, and then said she felt frightened and victimised when it was suggested to her this disgusting insult was possibly a cause for disciplinary action.

Penny Little
Great Haseley, Oxfordshire

We should boycott the EU elections

Far from being an affront to democracy (Editorial,15 April), boycotting the elections to an impotent parliament of an institution we have already voted to leave would be an affirmation of popular sovereignty.

Participating in this exercise serves only to validate our parliament’s consistent attempts to subvert the referendum result.

It also may serve to provide some measure of legitimacy to a right-wing formation like the Brexit Party of that poundshop bourgeois Farage, or worse to Ukip, both of which may end up as the repository of working-class votes who share nothing with these except an antipathy to the EU, albeit from entirely different class positions.

A boycott is the best expression of the democratic impulse.

Nick Wright
Croydon

Donald Trump’s sense of humour

The White House press secretary stated that the president was clearly joking when, in 2016, he repeatedly said how much he loved WikiLeaks.

Well, I’m glad she cleared that up for us. It all makes sense now.

He was obviously also joking when he said that the Mexicans would pay for the border wall and that he would make America great again. He’s a card, isn’t he?

David Rose
Sutton Coldfield

The epicentre of the measles outbreak

In yesterday’s Letters, Rachael Padman objects to the use of the word epicentre in your item about the outbreak of measles in Brooklyn. She points out that an epicentre is the point on the earth’s surface immediately above the centre of an underground earthquake. Since the measles outbreak occurred on the earth’s surface, the centre and epicentre coincide in this case.

Although it might be unusual to refer to the epicentre of the measles outbreak, it is not wrong.

Keith Tizzard
Ottery St Mary, Devon