Like Joy Hurcombe (Letter, 18 July) and many others, I appreciate the finer qualities of Jeremy Corbyn and celebrate the fact that Labour seems to be getting back to its founding principles. However, it is one thing to have those principles, it’s another to put them into action. A good designer wouldn’t be able to run Marks & Spencer; the best sportspeople are often lousy managers. The parliamentary Labour party has first-hand knowledge of Jeremy Corbyn’s management and leadership skills, and have obviously found them wanting. I imagine the problem is that they can’t explain their fears in too much detail because they will be exploited by the Tories.
Jefrey Pirie
Totnes, Devon
• I voted for Jeremy Corbyn and rejoiced when he became leader. I agree with most of his policies and want to see them in place. This can only happen if we have a Labour government, and that will not happen with Jeremy as our leader. We are a parliamentary party, and the leader has to have the backing of a strong frontbench – he does not have this, and does not have the support of many Labour voters. I have always been on the left of the party and have marched with Jeremy against war in Iraq, Trident and austerity; but I want to see a Labour government, so I will not vote for him again in the leadership election.
Christina Green
Whitton, Middlesex
• There is no reason why, under Labour’s alternative vote rules, both Angela Eagle and Owen Smith should not stand without splitting the vote. It is to be hoped that both challengers and the parliamentary Labour party will understand the difference with first past the post. The PLP would be making a mistake by deciding on only one challenger.
Ron Medlow
Former secretary, Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform
• If senior Labour MPs wish to ensure the self-destruction of their own party, they could not have hit upon a better stratagem for doing so than their cowardly refusal to come forward as candidates against Jeremy Corbyn, who most of them, quite rightly, consider totally incapable of ever winning a general election. Alan Johnson, Yvette Cooper, Hilary Benn, Harriet Harman and Chuka Umunna (to name a few) are alienating their most loyal core centre-left voters by leaving the nonentities Angela Eagle and Owen Smith, to fight it out with Corbyn – and probably lose to him. One would have thought that after Scotland they might have learned the lesson that loyal Labour voters will not wait indefinitely for powerful, charismatic and unifying leadership.
Stephen Porter
London
• Like Sandra Tove (Letters, 18 July), I have been a Guardian reader for over 50 years and I too am surprised to find myself portrayed as an extremist with militant tendencies simply because I agree with, and voted for, Jeremy Corbyn. Even more surprising, at my local branch meeting recently when I attempted to discuss the treatment of Jeremy and his followers in the press, I was curtly informed that actually both Marx and Trotsky are dead. I am still recovering from the shock.
Juliet Harvey
Bristol
• Zoe Williams talks of finding a Labour leadership candidate “who isn’t an open insult to the people who voted for [Jeremy] Corbyn” (Owen Smith: decent bloke, good politics. But is that enough?, 18 July). As it happens, only one candidate fits that bill, and he is already on the ballot. His name is Jeremy Corbyn.
Bruce Paley
Castle Morris, Pembrokeshire
• A further consideration anent Mr Corbyn is that only once since 1721 have we elected a prime minister with a beard.
David Butler
London
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