Letters: Petrol trickery

The question isn’t whether David Cameron and Francis Maude have turned a small question mark about fuel supplies into a full blown crisis, but why.

Could it be to deflect attention from the fact that their chief fund raiser had been hawking the opportunity to influence government policy via access to the Prime Minister all around the business community?

Nothing like a petrol shortage to get bad news off the front page. But then again, who’s to blame? The Prime Minister and Maude for recommending fuel hoarding as a new way of life, or the media, which headlines their daft statements and provokes a state of panic in our breesties?

Anyway, a false boom in petrol purchases will give a bounce to the next quarter’s trade figures… and for our inept government. It’s win-win all round.

David Fiddimore

Calton Road

Edinburgh

I cannot believe the stupidity and sheep mentality of 90 per cent of people at the pumps yesterday – queues of 20 cars or more at Asda at The Jewel.

If a strike was held, there would have had to be seven days’ notice, so everyone filling up would have been empty next week anyway, unless they kept diving in every day and topping up.

My dashboard warning told me that I had 25 miles left to empty, so I put my normal £20 worth of petrol in.

That’ll do me until Wednesday, and my miles per gallon will remain high due to the light fuel load. If everyone just behaved sensibly then we’d all be fine, but the selfish again caused chaos.

Mike George

Carlisle