Johnson and Trump have a lot in common – they both have little respect for the public they were elected by

Following the lives of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, it appears to me that they have little regard for the needs of the people that they represent and certainly are devoid of any sense of responsibility for the effect of the policies they advance on the electors.

Both are hardened to the trauma that they cause, blaming all and sundry for failures of these policies. Boris believes that he can clown around making sound bite promises which are vacuous and Donald bullies his way from one dangerous lie to another.

Notwithstanding their immaturity and lack of integrity my real, overriding worry is the administrations that support these two leaders. When Boris can present the disastrous failure of the test and trace system as “world beating” and “successful” is bad enough, but to have various members of his cohorts backing his utterly fictitious, ludicrous claims is beyond me.

Slightly differently, Donald bombastically calls everyone who doesn’t agree with him stupid or that it’s fake news. This man’s lavish lifestyle, which is outside most people’s comprehension, has paid an insulting tax bill of $1,500 (£1,154) since taking office.

Both leaders have an entourage that appears to support such behaviour and neither suffers any retribution. Boris and Donald have between them devalued the high offices they occupy, assisted by their administrations.

The loss of respect, responsibility and integrity of our leaders for the people they govern is an affront to common decency. The people who condone and assist in this devaluation, along with Boris and Donald, ought to be ashamed of their participation and association with such leaders.

Keith Poole

Basingstoke

Nonsense

John Cameron of St Andrews regularly gives us the benefit of his often outrageous opinions on the Independent letters page.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of letting students go home for Christmas to suggest that Professor Jason Leitch, Scotland's national clinical director, is proclaiming idiocies is nonsense. For the most part Professor Leitch is the fountain of common sense compared with the nonsense we get from Boris and his cabinet.

To also suggest that it is a mistake to encourage poor students to go to universities sounds like elitism to me. I took the apprenticeship route in 1962 from my grammar school because my widowed mother needed some financial help, not because I would not have achieved a degree. Being better off and being privately educated doesn't make someone intelligent, it just gives them advantages that they don't necessarily deserve, like many in our current government.

Alan Lammin

Terregles, Dumfries, Scotland

Fake news?

Surely James Moore's excellent article missed a couple of points. Firstly, President Donald Trump said as usual that news about his taxes was "fake". Then he said that the details were stolen. If stolen then they are true, as fake news is just made up?

Also Trump is acting like a cornered cat. He cannot afford to lose the election, now or in the future, hence his wish to create a political dynasty. His family is too high profile and only as the president can he hope to keep all the allegations against him and his companies at bay.

Alan Hutchinson

Address supplied

Excuse me, but was the James Moore article about Trump? As I had to keep checking it wasn’t about someone closer to home because there were so many similarities with the British situation.

Richard Mason

Leeds

Crossroads

The government’s new measures to boost employment opportunities in the post-Covid-19 economy are to be welcomed, and will help transform our skills system for the better. However, we must not solely focus on changing policies to be successful, we must also put great emphasis on changing employees’ mindset when it comes to addressing some of the systemic issues exacerbated by the pandemic (eg. the UK’s faltering productivity, widening skills gap and failing social mobility).

Worryingly CIMA’s research in 2019 revealed that 37 per cent of UK workers didn’t feel that they need to learn new skills, despite a growing awareness of the impact of technology on jobs. This complacency towards learning and development was a nagging issue prior to the coronavirus crisis but has now become an acute problem for UK businesses and could hamper our long-term recovery.

If we are to get the economy back on its feet, remain competitive on the global scene and sustain growth, we must now invest wisely into developing a skilled, motivated workforce, think about changing the Apprenticeship Levy to an Apprenticeship and Skills Levy for all workers to ensure businesses have the talent they need now and in the future, continue to invest towards higher level apprenticeships to raise the skill levels of the UK workforce, and introduce a rebuttable right to retrain to empower workers to request further training and development. If such measures are adopted, we might then really be able to drive real-wage growth, address social mobility and become a productive economy.

We are now at a crossroads – the choices we make now will make or break our success.

Andrew Harding

Chief executive, Management Accounting, The Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, part of the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants

Short circuit

You appear to advocate for a short “circuit breaker” (Editorial, 29 September). It would be worth looking at the experience of Melbourne, Australia, before going down this road. There, even with a much greater level of lockdown than we ever faced, it took many weeks to bring the daily case rate down from the high hundreds to the low tens.

The virus has a long latency time, and we mostly don’t live alone, but in households with others. It can take much more than two weeks for everyone in the house to get the infection and reach the point where they are not a risk to others.

We can either adopt the most stringent methods, as in New Zealand and Australia, for as long as it takes, or direct our efforts to protecting the most vulnerable and the NHS, and otherwise get on with our lives. Tinkering at the edges with opening hours and group sizes will only make things worse.

Rachael Padman

Newmarket, Suffolk,

Do-do

I read Alastair Campbell’s column with great interest. It concerned the lamentable ineffectiveness of our current government’s actions, or more precisely, their ideological based inaction, in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Alloying the fact that Baroness Dido Harding’s previous employment with TalkTalk would enable his conclusion to see Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock, Baroness Harding et al, “who do a lot of talk, talk. It is the do, do that is going less well.”

This is where my perception differs; from the outset of Mr Johnson’s leadership, I so often only detect the noxious whiff of “do-do” in his bid to defile the reputation of this once proud, stable and reliable nation.

Nigel Plevin

Ilminster, Somerset

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