Sir, – Of the 12 MPs who initially sought the leadership of the Conservative Party, two arrived to the UK as immigrants when they were children, one from Pakistan and another as a refugee from Iraq. Five other candidates were the children of immigrants to the UK from Africa, India and Pakistan.
Five of the 12 initial candidates were women. Just three were white men.
By way of contrast, in the 122-year history of the UK Labour Party, just six women and three people from ethnic minority backgrounds have sought the party’s leadership, none successfully.
For many years, the Irish public has been fed an image of a Conservative Party which is dominated by privileged and privately educated white men, and which is strongly hostile to immigrants and women. Your London correspondent Denis Staunton goes further with his extraordinary description of the party as being “devious and duplicitous ... vain, bitter and blinded by factional spite” (“Contest could see leader emerge that most Conservative MPs don’t want”, Analysis, July 11th).
If, as appears likely, the contest results in the Conservative Party electing the UK’s first prime minister from an ethnic minority, or its third female prime minister, surely the time will have come to revise these lazy caricatures? – Yours, etc,
BARRY WALSH,
Clontarf,
Dublin 3.
Sir, – Denis Staunton describes Conservative Party MPs as being “devious, duplicitous, vain, bitter and blinded by factional spite”.
Would Denis Staunton have us believe that the UK Labour Party is a bastion of truth, humility and ideological harmony? Or that any other large political party the world over is any different?
The level of outright hostility toward the Conservative Party which peppers your coverage of its leadership election certainly makes for great copy, but it does little to inform your readers. – Yours, etc,
THOMAS RYAN,
Dublin 6W.