TOM Newman’s further letter with its gratuitous, ad hominem attacks on me won’t fool intelligent SNJ readers (“Curiouser and curiouser indeed”, March 23).

To be fair, he did probably pen his latest ridiculous diatribe against Jeremy Corbyn before the recent Tory omni-shambles budget and associated internecine warfare, that makes Corbyn’s Labour Party look like a veritable love-in in comparison.

New opinion polls are now showing George Osborne’s ratings plunging, and Corbyn now more popular than David Cameron for prime minister.

How foolish we are when we forget Harold Wilson’s ‘A week is a long time in politics’, and Harold Macmillan’s ‘Events, dear boy, events…!’ There is no ‘contradiction’ in my letter around the 2015 and 1983 elections as Mr Newman claims.

Different elections are won and lost for different reasons.

Before the Falklands War, Thatcher’s government was polling the lowest ever recorded ratings in opinion poll history but then ‘Events, events…’ took over and jingoism swept her to an unlikely victory.

The ‘arguments’ Mr Newman’s gives for Labour’s losing in 1983 are merely commentariat post-hoc rationalisations.

As for Corbyn’s chimerical ‘arrogance’ – Corbyn is a principled republican, Mr Newman, and no doubt if he’d bowed and scraped to the monarch, he’d then have been panned by the media and people with your politics for being hypocritical.

The rightist media are very clever at creating “Have you stopped beating your wife?” scenarios for Corbyn, and they’ve been doing it relentlessly since last summer.

But with Corbyn now more popular than Cameron, at last the people are starting to see through their shameless propaganda and character assassination.

I’m faintly amused by the excuse of ‘denying someone the oxygen of publicity’ as a pretext for refusing to continue in these enlightening exchanges.

Mr Newman must surely realise that I don’t need him to exercise my democratic right on this esteemed letters page.

No, I think Mr Newman is being disingenuous about his true motivation.

My one regret when my political opponents take their ball home is that it’s then no longer possible to expose their threadbare arguments for what they are, which, incidentally, is why I think such people do run scared and just disappear.

They just can’t take the heat of having their vacuous arguments forensically dissected.

You’d be warmly welcomed back to the political fray by me any time, Tom.

Dr Richard House

Stroud