BORIS Johnson calling for the country to come together on Valentine’s Day over Brexit is being more than a little hypocritical considering the divisions in the Westminster Cabinet over Brexit, so perhaps he should have been directing his message to Theresa May’s Cabinet in the first instance!

But hold on, was this really a speech promoting himself as a possible tenant of No 10? Just in case the country has forgotten, the divisions that have existed since Brexit are in their entirety due to Mr Johnson and his Cabinet colleagues.

The country is in turmoil and crisis, on a road to nowhere with massive job losses due to the collapse of Carillion, inflation rising, public services precariously hanging in the balance, a local authority in England declaring bankruptcy, yet amidst the turmoil and crisis and true to form, step forward Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. No-one is surely taking him seriously. It is appalling that our so-called senior politicians, people who are making decisions that affect us all daily, are so busy listening to their own voices that they miss the cries, even screams, for help from those affected by their policies. Incidentally, for us Remainers in Scotland (who are the majority), we were deafened by the silence of no mention from Mr Johnson.

Catriona C Clark
Falkirk

IN the report of a somewhat notorious speech (Johnson urged to quit after Thai sex tourism remarks, The National, February 15), it is difficult to find anything substantive. We are told that this is the first of six speeches that will “set out the government’s road map for its Brexit negotiations”. There was not much evidence of concrete proposals in among the smutty comments and vacuous statements.

Perhaps he was given the section of the road map labelled “here be dragons”!

Shirley Robins
Dunoon

IN his famous speech, President Kennedy asked the US nation “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”. In a metaphorical way Boris Johnson turns these inspirational words on their head. In his vainglorious speech on Wednesday, he was merely asking the country: “What can you do for me, ie make me Prime Minister?”

Boris Johnson is just one of many hypocritical liars at the rotten core of this Conservative government.

Terry Keegans
Beith, North Ayrshire

BORIS Johnson, having ploughed through a mixter-master of nothingness in his speech on Brexit, omitted to mention the most telling fact about any future proposals from the UK to the EU. All the EU has to say is “no”. It has the final word, it is the final arbiter. The UK Government is the supplicant after it formally leaves in March 2019.

John Edgar
Stewarton

MR Johnson is a professional political clown. The official “dead cat” of Tory politics and the best of his kind. Every time Johnson enters the scene, anything he says will be nothing but a smoke screen aiming to distract and to deceive, and very often he succeeds.

Here in Scotland, the second-rate colony of the north, we are spared the “dead cat skills” of Mr Johnson and instead we have to put up with the Poundland version of Mr Johnson: Mr Mundell. But such is the ineffectiveness of Mr Johnson’s Scottish version that rather than looking the other way, he actually makes us focus on the problem with even more intensity.

Maria Carnero
via thenational.scot

A TEACHING practice posting at the hamlet of Ochiltree, outside Ayr, came to mind when I pondered on National maverick columnist Michael Fry, who is sometimes accused of championing unfettered capitalism (No grand design can predict an unstable world, The National, February 13).

I enjoy Mr Fry’s weekly column. He is certainly a capitalist, or maybe more of a free-enterprise person. Ochiltree was the setting for The House with the Green Shutters, the recognised classic of its kind by George Douglas Brown, which profiled a local man on the make who made it, and shed principles and morals in the process. The same sort of process was echoed several years later by John Macdougall Hay in his novel Gillespie, which was set in a fishing rather than a farming community.

These two Scottish novels encapsulate a particularly Scottish trait for entrepreneurship, but while the two main characters, John Gourlay and Gillespie Strang, exhibit ruthless acquisitiveness, the authors of the novels oversee the deeds of their characters with stern moral rigour. It was no minor detail that Gillespie’s creator was a Church of Scotland Minister.

Probably Michael Fry knows of these two trenchant Scottish novels and might be aware that free enterprise in Scotland is subject to certain guidelines and perimeter pegs that many advocates of unfettered free enterprise, free trade, and unbridled financial transacting ignore. Perhaps an outstanding example of this was Margaret Thatcher and it is well known, at least up here in Scotland, how abrasively her antipathy towards public-sector services was received in Scotland. When she addressed the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in her “Sermon on the Mound” speech in May 1988, the rebuff was a stony silence, and copies of the Church’s reports on homelessness and the welfare system were presented to her. If she was “not for turning”, neither was the Kirk for turning a blind eye to the effects of her ideology favouring free-enterprise economics.

At least taking issue with Michael Fry stirs up some thinking about such matters.

Ian Johnstone
Peterhead