Thursday’s dramatic turn of events makes absolutely no sense, until you think about it. Boris Johnson, a fearless politician who lead the Brexit campaign to victory, stands down just when a wave of public popularity is ready to sweep him into the job he has been coveting for years. Meanwhile Gove, who has consistently said he doesn’t want to be PM, goes forward into an election which he knows he is unlikely to win against Theresa May. How can it make sense? Gove and Johnson have simply entered into a murder-suicide pact, so that both can sleaze their way out of further responsibility for Brexit. Boris retires with public sympathy after being knifed in the back by his former colleague. Meanwhile, Gove appears to be the dedicated Brexit campaigner, willing to put himself forward and do what is right for the country, but is ultimately defeated by the Tory machine.
This whole PR stunt was stage-managed, including a bizarre leaked email (Report, 30 June) written in language no wife would use in a private message to her husband. Given they have told nothing but lies to the British public for the last three months, it is no surprise that these two careers end with yet another huge deception – but not all of us have been taken in.
Robert Bruce
Caerphilly
• The leaked email from Sarah Vine may have given the game away. Or am I alone in seeing the dead hand of Rupert in the sudden conversion of Michael Gove from backroom cheerleader to candidate and ruthless former friend? Might Boris have got in the way of Rupert’s 30-year plan for world domination? Will we ever know whose astral voice caused the Damascene conversion that turned Michael against Boris at the last moment?
Peter Kopp
Hull
• Lacklustre campaigning for remain by Labour leader provokes mass resignations and calls for him to stand down. Lacklustre campaigning for remain by Tory home secretary provokes a groundswell of support for her to become our next PM. Is Armando Iannucci busy at the moment?
Annette Millward
Isleworth, Middlesex
• All those children whose GCSE grades were stolen by Michael Gove in 2012 are now of voting age. Let us not forget.
Kathleen O’Neill
Hayling Island, Hampshire
• When the political lives of significant British politicians have come to a sticky end, the answer has sometimes been to send them off to become EU commissioners. Witness Leon Brittan, Neil Kinnock, Peter Mandelson, Roy Jenkins. What’s to be done with Boris?
Peter Cave
London
• Will Boris Johnson now be described as the worst prime minister we never had?
Roy Harrison
Bristol
• Was the coalition government really so unstable, so divisive and so bad?
Nick Eden-Green
Canterbury, Kent
• The immigration law set up by Theresa May is a vicious document, enshrining planned erosion of humanitarian values. The permission to appeal against erroneous negative first judgments against migrants is progressively restricted. Summary evictions by immigration officials may have equal force to a high court decision, without reference to the high court. An all-party parliamentary committee condemned outright immigration detention for more than 28 days. This goes on. Keeping children in immigration detention is illegal. It continues.
A landlord or employer who knowingly or unwittingly lets accommodation or employs someone without papers, can be fined and imprisoned for years. Destitution, indefinite detention, withdrawal of financial life-support, are part of UK policy, led by May, to create a “hostile climate” (her words) for anyone falling foul of the Byzantine legislation, now further screwed down.
This tightening of the noose – the removal of the right to family life in the 2014 bill, the removal of the right to appeal, the near wipe-out of legal aid, the rendering of technical offences as criminal, freezing bank accounts, summary evictions, the refusal to admit more than a derisory number of refugees fleeing for their lives, the scandal of the jungle in Calais – make an outrageous mockery of the one-time British virtue of giving refuge to those in need of it.
Now the woman who has actively set up these evil processes wants to be prime minister. By all that is decent in Britain, this must not be allowed to happen.
Brian Kendall
Sandwich, Kent
• As a keen student journalist, I interviewed Boris Johnson in 2002. His media star was rising and I asked him if the rumours about his ministerial ambitions were true. “Susannah,” he said, “I think I’m like that Ronseal stuff. I’m wizzywig.” He grabbed a Post-it note and scribbled it down: WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get. I didn’t have the heart to point out that their actual slogan was “It does what it says on the tin”. I kept the Post-it note.
Susannah O’Brien
Bournemouth
