Too broad a Church

Sir: I am not implacably hostile to Justin Welby; I share Christian empathy with the Archbishop’s earnest struggles to attract a spiritually dead nation back to the Church of England as described by Dan Hitchens’s article (‘The lost shepherds’, 8 April). However I cannot agree with his strategy. A liberal church is doomed to failure because it’s selling something that we already have. I ask our bishops: what is the Church’s USP? What does it offer that we can’t get elsewhere? The Church used to stand apart as a bastion against a hostile world, but if all it does is follow along behind modern secular fads then it is admitting its own redundancy. If you permit everything, you stand for nothing.

Robert Frazer
Salford, Lancashire

Rishi’s no Nigel

Sir: A nice try from Rishi Sunak (‘What Nigel Lawson taught me’, 8 April), but I’m not buying it. I don’t think for a moment that Nigel Lawson would have presided over the Sunak Covid policy that contributed significantly to domestic inflation – the world’s most generous, unnecessary and longest-running furlough scheme. Nor would he now have chosen to increase corporation tax so markedly, at a time when UK business needs to be as competitive as possible if it is to grasp the opportunities of Brexit. He will collect less, not more capital gains tax as a result of his swingeing cuts to the annual allowance. Until there is proof otherwise, I view the Sunak (Hunt) management of the economy as socialistic and thoroughly unhelpful to enterprise and growth.

Alasdair Ogilvy
Stedham, West Sussex

Driven away

Sir: Ysenda Maxtone Graham, who must be a neighbour of mine, could have gone yet further in her criticism of the draconian council that is festooning Fulham with traffic cameras bearing £130 fines (‘Mental blocks’, 8 April). Since all right turns and link routes are barred to eastbound visitors, thus stopping them driving the short distance between Parsons Green and Wandsworth Bridge, they must not only turn round but make a mile-and-a-half loop, driving across the ultra-congested Putney Bridge and continuing south of the Thames through Putney. Ysenda is right to claim that fear of blundering past a camera is putting tradesmen and others off coming to Island Fulham. A few days ago a British Gas engineer supposed to fix our hot water rang to say he was too frightened to drive to our house. With great difficulty I persuaded him to come, talking him through camera-free streets like a flight controller with a troubled plane. I’ve lived in the same Fulham house for 56 years and never seen anything so silly.

Benedict Nightingale
London SW6

Heavens above

Sir: Christopher Howse on the surprising beauty of the ruined St Mark’s Church in St John’s Wood (‘From the ashes’, 8 April) brought to mind C.S. Lewis’s words in a letter of 10 January 1931 after visiting Tintern Abbey: ‘All churches should be roofless. A holier place I never saw.’

Michael Ward
Oxford

Write Reverend

Sir: I was pleased to see the Diary article by Archbishop Rowan Williams (8 April) and that the Revd Richard Coles was mentioned in passing in the Competition section. What a shame that he did not win a prize, in which case you would have published his little essay. Now that he has retired from his Saturday morning programme on BBC Radio 4, might it be feasible for you to invite him to write for The Spectator from time to time?

Penelope Wade
Cheltenham

Frank talk

Sir: Like Michael Wingert, I too used to drink in Crouch End (Letters, 8 April), although I was more of a Great Northern Railway Tavern man up the road. However, the best old men’s pub in a Lucy Holden mould which I regularly frequented was the Barley Mow in Brighton. What made it was Frank. He was well into his eighties, had been round the world, married three times (but never had he married a woman from the same country twice, as he would proudly boast), and could pontificate on everything from Brexit to transgenderism. Every proper pub needs an old git like Frank and I loved bumping into him, because if Frank wasn’t in, it was me.

Bob Maddams
Bognor Regis, West Sussex

Fly count

Sir: I will be the last man in Britain to defend the BBC, and Ross Clark may well be right to question the methodologies of surveys of insect numbers (‘Island myths’, 1 April), but anyone who remembers what the front of a car looked like after a long summer journey 50 years ago knows that something pretty fundamental has changed.

Michael Upton
Edinburgh

Growing pains

Sir: Bernard Cornwell in ‘Letter from America’ (8 April) records someone seething with rage informing him that snowdrops are an anachronism in The Winter King. Plants are often troublesome in historical fictions. In Robert Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons, Henry VIII remarks on a rosebay when he visits Sir Thomas More – a plant something like a rhododendron or oleander and just about plausible. However, when the film version was made the plant became a magnolia – named after the botanist Pierre Magnol (1638-1715). Ouch!

Bernard Richards
Brasenose College, Oxford

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