Let Libya split
Sir: Back in the days of Good King Idris, I did archaeological fieldwork in Cyrenaica in which I traced the main water supply of ancient Ptolemais from its source to the city’s cisterns. I came to know my patch pretty well and I feel that Peter Jones (‘The two Libyas’, 26 March) has got it right.
The most sensible course would be to return to the original frontier between Cyrenaica and the rest of the country, as the present state of Libya was a botched affair thrown together in the wake of the Italian defeat in the second world war.
The immediate problem as we all know is to stop the Barbary pirate of Tripoli from exacting his revenge on the people of Cyrenaica, and that is very much a European problem — unlike Iraq. How on earth would we cope with the flood of refugees that would descend upon the southern shores of our continent as the result of such an event?
Christopher Arthur
Durham
Well done
Sir: Congratulations to the Spectator (‘The Gorbachev files’, 26 March) for publishing a bit of the truth about Gorbachev. Using Putin’s words, the criminals should sit in jail.
Oleg Gordievsky
London WC1
Outward-looking Ukip
Sir: Rod Liddle is quite right to point out that Nick Griffin’s Question Time performance has done the BNP great harm (‘Has David Dimbleby killed the BNP?’, 19 March). In Barnsley some BNP votes did switch to Ukip, though they were fewer in number than the votes from Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives. The reason that Ukip came second in the by-election is that our support is from across the board. As the BNP slowly leaves its knuckledusters behind it is raiding our policy chest, as is for that matter the government with its proposals on merging National Insurance and income tax and Mr Duncan Smith’s pensions policy.
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