ROBERT Sinfield’s sneering, Nasty Party diatribe against Jeremy Corbyn (website comments, September 30) is manna from heaven for the progressive left; thank you, Mr Sinfield, for your spectacular “worldie” own goal.

It will no doubt be news to Mr Sinfield that rather more intelligent parts of the establishment and its supine media lackeys are starting to realise just what a threat a popular, Corbyn-led opposition will be to Tory hegemony and to the obscene concentrations of power and wealth in Britain.

Let me supply some more examples of what the Nasty Party is really like.

On Monday, August 17, a report in the Daily Express newspaper quoted “A Number 10 source” (thus implying a direct line to the Prime Minister himself) as saying, “We've just got to set the Looney-left narrative and kill this new leader in the first month’ ”. And on Sunday, September 20, the Sun on Sunday reported that “Tories plan to ‘exterminate’ the Lib Dems with a blitz on their eight remaining MPs… in a bid to wipe the party off the political map”.

This is the disreputable Machiavellian context which everyone needs to understand regarding the ideological assaults currently being orchestrated by a ruthless Tory Party intent on quasi-authoritarian one-party rule in Britain.

Voters therefore have a clear choice: either devious, top-down politics where we’re ruled by a privileged public school cabal intent on controlling us through fear, manipulative propaganda and jingoistic patriotism; or a new bottom-up, participative politics underpinned by honesty, decency and straight talking, and in which the views of the majority prevail over those of a tiny self-serving ruling elite. If it’s to be nasty Machiavellianism versus virtue and honesty in 2020, I, for one, just can’t wait for the contest to begin.

So I hope that thoughtful voters will bear these facts in mind when they go to cast their votes in elections in the coming months and years; for do we really want to be ruled by people like this?

Dr Richard House

Stroud