Letters: Andrew Roberts on Cameron, and a defence of Kate Bush

Advice for Cameron

Sir: David Cameron once saved my life from a school of Portuguese man o’ war jellyfish, so now’s the time for me to save his political life with this advice: to do nothing. The British people are a fair-minded lot; they will give him another term in office because he and George Osborne have delivered the best growth rates in Europe despite the monstrous overspending and boom-bust of the Blair-Brown years. Every newly incoming ministry since the war has been re-elected — except Ted Heath’s, which broke all the rules anyhow — and this one will be too. Douglas Carswell is an intelligent man who has made a stupid mistake. Whether he gets re-elected for Ukip, and however many Tory MPs follow him if he does, the electorate knows that if it wants a referendum on Europe it has to vote Tory. Clacton and everywhere else will revert to serious rather than protest votes in the general election, because that is the time when the British people sober up and make serious choices for the future.
Andrew Roberts

New York

State of emergency services

Sir: Mary Wakefield (‘999 emergency’, 30 August) highlights a grave danger of the NHS going backwards. From 1990 on, huge progress was made in ensuring that at least one of those on each ambulance had paramedic skills. Likewise, much work went into implementing prioritised despatch — getting ambulances promptly to those cases that really need them.

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Harry Mount

The Odyssey is more real than we thought

All ambulance staff are heroic. But paramedics, though poorly rewarded in relation to their fire and police colleagues, enjoy a unique capacity to translate their relatively inexpensive specialist training into lives saved and tragedies avoided. They must be treasured, not exploited. Mr Hunt needs to look at this urgently.
Tom Sackville,

Parliamentary Under Secretary for Health 1992–95, London SW1H