Patience Wheatcroft is absolutely right about Liz Truss’s lack of empathy (I was a Conservative peer – Tory voters will not tolerate Liz Truss’s bungs to the rich, 28 September), but her otherwise compelling argument also proves that Truss is merely the embodiment of an empathy vacuum sucking the humanity out of the rest of the party.
Wheatcroft argues that voters may balk at the increase in food banks and in-work poverty. However, the fact that Tory MPs would acquiesce with the cynical Truss project “if they had thought it would save their seats”, and only ditch her if they realised she was deaf to those on whom their seats depended, illustrates that their sensitivity to the public mood is entirely superficial and chronically self-serving. Whatever Tory empathy exists in parliament, it begins and ends with concern for themselves.
Paul McGilchrist
Colchester, Essex
• I admit that it was with unashamed glee that I read Patience Wheatcroft’s article. Her shrewd and incisive analysis of Liz Truss’s total lack of political judgment evident in last Friday’s “fiscal event”, the dismayed astonishment of Truss’s own MPs and the chaos caused in the financial markets must represent the broadest ever admonishment of a newly installed prime minister.
Couple this with Wheatcroft’s scornful use of the words “ineptitude”, “disastrous”, “intolerable” and “inequity”, this could perhaps portend the beginning of the end of Truss as prime minister. The Conservative party’s psychodrama continues.
Peter Riddle
Wirksworth, Derbyshire
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