Your correspondent seems to assume that Patrick Gordon Walker was parachuted in to a safe seat in Smethwick in 1964 (Letters, 21 October). However, he was the sitting MP and had been since 1945. Even though Gordon Walker lost his seat, Harold Wilson still made him foreign secretary.
The allegation of carpetbagging was certainly true of Gordon Walker’s next attempt to re-enter parliament when a byelection was engineered in the safe seat of Leyton, only for him to be rejected by the local electorate. Perhaps your reader is confusing these two events.
Roy Boffy
Aldridge, Walsall
• Like Eva Joyce (Guidelines from our own correspondents, Letters, 20 October), I “glance first at the headlines of the letter groups” when deciding what to read. So imagine my disappointment that under the headline to the left (as always) of her letter, “Scotland needs you to finish the job, Gordon”, I end up reading more stuff about Gordon Brown, rather than Gordon Strachan and his quest for European Championship qualification.
Phil O’Neill
Tunbridge Wells, Kent
• “The hunt for Reds in October” (front page headline, 20 October)? The Soviet Union collapsed over 20 years ago. The Russians are no longer “the Reds”, whatever smart film allusion you might be trying to make. Use headlines to tell us the news, not to increase hysteria.
Ian Mac Eochagáin
Helsinki, Finland
• Re the comment from a student protester that objections to two women kissing in a Brighton Sainsbury’s were surprising, “something he might expect in his home town of Southampton” (Love in the aisles, 16 October). This year Southampton is celebrating 50 years as a city, and many same-sex couples walk in the city centre exchanging a cuddle or kiss – no one bats an eyelid.
Carol Cunio
Southampton
• The Kleptocene (Letters, passim)?
Austen Lynch
Garstang, Lancashire
