Geoffrey Wheatcroft (The natural party of government? After five PMs in seven years, the Conservatives seem all at sea, 25 August) wonders whether the Conservative party has run out of ideas. The inescapable fact of demographic change means that the number of individuals who wish they were living in the 1950s, and would choose to vote for a party of inequality, is reducing by the day. The Conservatives’ renowned shapeshifting has brought them this far, but to become a party that believes in equality is a transformation that is beyond them. Whether the Tories are nice or nasty isn’t the issue. The real issue is that they are an anachronism. Dr Dominic Horne Ledbury, Herefordshire Geoffrey Wheatcroft skirts around the fundamental reason for the failure of the current Conservative government. It is more than lacking competence and ideas. He is right to cite the 2019 purge of “honourable people”, but above all it is down to being bereft of values and integrity. It is worth noting Hermann Hesse’s comment in his 1943 novel The Glass Bead Game, which was rejected for publication in Germany at that time. Hesse wrote: “People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of the mind is no longer operative ... the engineer’s slide rule and the computation of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue.” It feels in many respects as though our country is not functioning as it should. Let’s hope for a change of government before chaos ensues. Colin McCulloch Marlow, Buckinghamshire The main reason the Tories are in power, despite being responsible for a long series of utterly incompetent governments, is that Labour has failed the nation. Keir Starmer doesn’t offer the real changes needed: no ideas on housing, no discussion about failing privatised services, no real ideas to reduce the chaos in the NHS. And he daren’t even mention one of the main causes of the disaster: Brexit. But on that last point, I blame Labour under Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn should have been telling people that their problems were nothing to do with the EU, or immigrants. The issues were created by the untrammelled neoliberal economics that the Tories under Margaret Thatcher set in motion, and the 13 years of Labour government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown failed to change. So Britain’s future is bleak: a worthless opposition with no ideas for change will not unseat a Tory party with its support from the bulk of our press. No change is coming. David Reed London I am no fan of the Tory party, but there is a certain residual pity for its longstanding membership, which is ever decreasing, to witness the party embroiled in divisive culture wars and lowest-common-denominator rhetoric. I think it died on the Brexit hill, because its arrogance would not countenance a less than wonderful future. Geoffrey Wheatcroft is correct that something has indeed gone wrong or missing: the Tories’ once-reliable political compass, moral or otherwise, I suspect. Now the party is left in the wilderness, with no one to guide it out. But MPs have only themselves to blame. Judith A Daniels Great Yarmouth, Norfolk