Your editorial is right — last week’s election results were about as bad for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as they could have been (“Routed Conservatives should end Britain’s damaging drift”, FT View, May 6). His party lost a parliamentary by-election, one of the only two mayoralties it held, and almost half the council seats in which it stood.
The vast bulk of these losses, with the exception of two council seats in the Hampshire town of Havant, were to parties to its left.
Yet the response of a number of prominent Tories who have taken to the media over the past few days is to demand that the government move to the right, focusing not on the haves (who are legion) but on the Havants (who only reach double figures if you count in binary).
What was the adjective that John Stuart Mill famously applied to the Conservative party? He called the Conservatives the stupid party.
Jonathan Allum
Amersham, Buckinghamshire, UK
