Dear Editor,

Your elegant pages are being slightly disfigured at the moment by a rash of letters seeking to attack me. I am more than happy to respond to them.

I greatly admire Simon Lennane as an excellent local GP, and he and I have worked together on several issues over the years. But his letter to you is unfortunately a mixture of confusion and error. I have almost always voted with the Government because (a) I think the Government’s policies are generally well-advised, (b) I was elected on a Conservative manifesto, and (c) one of our most basic constitutional principles is that the elected government of the day has both the right and the duty to try to carry its policies into law.

Since 2016 I have been a Minister, and that has placed a further duty on me: to vote with the government or resign my position within it. It means that I cannot Campaign as loudly in public as before. But I think it is greatly in the interest of my constituents, and the county more generally, for me to serve as a Minister, because it gives me more authority in my efforts to represent them. But of course I might be wrong about that, and if so the voters can remove me at the next election if they choose; after all, this constituency was held by another party till 2010. In the meantime, I will continue to fight for local people at Westminster.

Thirdly, not all votes are the same. When I have decided not to support the Government, on the Lords Bill and on bombing Syria, it has been on major constitutional issues of governance and war, and at some personal cost. In each case my vote made a difference, and in each case the Government lost.

For her part, Margot Williams accuses me of being against rented accommodation that is fit for human habitation, and "seeking to dismantle the NHS". But again, both claims are untrue. As the Minister said during that housing debate, "We believe that all homes should be of a decent standard, and that all tenants should have a safe place in which to live regardless of tenure. But local authorities already have strong and effective powers to deal with poor quality and unsafe accommodation, and we expect them to use them." Quite so.

As for supposedly seeking to dismantle the NHS, this is a piece of silly party politics, which Gazette readers are far too savvy to fall for. The truth is that there is cross-party support for the NHS; NHS spending has never been higher; it continues to grow above the rate of inflation; some private contracting is worthwhile (e.g. spectacles); and the level of private contracting is very small, at just 7.6% of NHS revenue spending in 2015/16, according to FullFact. As for me, I think I am still the only MP to have waged a campaign that saved their local hospital trust, which includes Ross Hospital, several millions of pounds in unnecessary PFI costs.

I wrote in my column last week that “It’s a general rule... that when someone is trying to get you to hate or despise someone else, you’re better off ignoring them.” I stick to that view, and would encourage others to do the same.

Jesse Norman MP