A career of lows

I read Christine Richard's letter (13 May) with some incredulity. Her claim that Gordon Brown puts country before ambition goes against all the evidence. His jealousy of Tony Blair meant that as chancellor he tried to stop anything Blair tried to achieve. The wasting of the years 1997 to 2007 happened as a direct result of his action and his ambition for prime ministerial office.

Add in his incompetence as chancellor in not reducing borrowing during the boom, his wasted investment in public services because he did not monitor spending and his destruction of the solid base he was given by John Major's government, and this hardly is the actions of a great politician.

His conversion to PR was a one- minute-to-midnight one (despite having opposed it for the whole of his political career), cynically designed to keep his failed administration in power.

He is not going to be shown in history as a great prime minister. He never won an election, he lost a working majority and had a result as bad as that of Michael Foot, who was up against Mrs Thatcher on a roll.

He has left the country with the biggest deficit ever, his party very short of funds and dependent on the super-unions with their own agendas and with a weak list of replacement candidates.

History is going to show that Tony Blair's biggest mistake was not Iraq but instead was allowing Gordon Brown to set up a rival team pushing his own ambition for power within the Labour government. What Tony Blair could have achieved without the drag of Gordon Brown could have been much greater.

BRUCE D SKIVINGTON

Pairc a Ghlib

Strath, Gairloch

Wester Ross