Nicola Sturgeon knew that Boris Johnson couldn’t accept her invitation

“Welcome to my parlour”, said the spider to the fly. This old saying comes to mind when I contemplate Nicola Sturgeon’s invitation to Boris Johnson to wait on her in Bute House while he is in Scotland.

Ms Sturgeon knows perfectly well that a prime minister has his diary arranged long in advance, and that two days’ notice is not enough for him to change his plans, barring an emergency.

This invitation – issued on Twitter as well as by post – was designed to receive a negative response. It was couched as a proposed meeting between two persons of equal stature, and no doubt the two saltires that greeted Theresa May at Bute House would again have been pressed into service, to impress on Johnson that he was on Sturgeon’s territory, in her fiefdom.

Johnson – whose fan I am not – is entirely correct to remind Ms Sturgeon that discussions involving all the devolved leaders are on the agenda. He had the grace not to express disbelief at Ms Sturgeon’s disingenuous claim that she was always ready to cooperate with him. As if.

Jill Stephenson

Edinburgh

In Letters, Nick Donnelly requested help from readers to suggest an alternate, less ill-eat-ist name for the dessert known widely in the UK as Eton mess.

May I proffer (it-a-roll) the following for consideration: Eatin’ mess, or even Glorious eatin’ mess or GEM. Berries and Cream Merringooo. Or even a potentially enigmatic, yet maintaining some geographical reference, “Winds’a’burr”, foreshortened “Windsor Borough”.

I hope one of these is judged to have found the sweet spot!

Nigel Plevin

Somerset

When you have a cabinet stuffed with incompetents, it becomes impossible to sack anyone.

And we still have another three years of this parody to come, with the same characters and script.

Liam Power

County Louth

I did appreciate Salma Shah’s piece on 5 August. It resonated with my own experience as one who scraped through the 11-plus in 1969 and qualified for the lower stream of Spen Valley’s state grammar school.

Our borough motto “Industry Enriches” (no Latin there) stood me in good stead, for by the summer term I’d been elevated to the L-stream. The second year brought Latin on the menu, and I recall how our first lesson involved, in its entirety, our teacher explaining convincingly why Latin was going to be helpful to us.

I lapped it up, since it was a subject I could learn by rote and excel while others larked around, and I ended up being the only boy in a class of girls who successfully took the subject to O-Level.

Maybe I could have sweated a bit more over maths and physics, and certainly Latin wasn`t essential for 20 years around the manufacturing industry. However, it did prove mighty useful when an unexpected change of tack came along in my late thirties, where a smattering of New Testament Greek was required for ministry in the church.

So I conclude that enrichment can be multi-faceted, and, although I’d never have made a prime minister, had it been my calling then I’d have wanted us to believe once again in education for education’s sake.

Rev Peter Sharp

High Peak

One can’t help feeling that the fact that 16- and 17-year-olds can be vaccinated without parental approval is going to be a blueprint for disaster in some families, especially those where one or other of the teenager’s parents is an anti-vaxxer.

That the government would specifically stipulate “without parental consent” is contentious and has slightly sinister undertones as they clearly anticipate problems may well arise with stroppy adolescents, empowered by this dictate to do exactly what they like. It sets an “unhealthy” precedent which may cause serious disruption in the delicate balance of the dynamics between family members.

Linda Evans

London