LEFT-wing letter writers are few and far between these days.

I wonder why? Labour’s symbiotic pals appear sunk almost without trace.

The moderate Left’s correspondence prior to the elections – people owing their modicum of success entirely to Labour – was a whimper rather than a call to arms. But breathing life into the dying is no easy task.

As Labour died, the chattering classes chattered ever more frantically.

To keep their spirits up they whistled: “Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head up high, and whistle a happy tune.”

A better tune would have been the slow movement from Chopin’s A Minor sonata.

Although no avid newspaper reader, I noticed the new chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life gave MPs an astounding dressing down as he opened the Committee’s first evidence session, right as another Parliamentary purloiner was uncovered.

Elsewhere, John Philpott, chief economist of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, presented some devastating evidence.

He forecast “a bloodbath in public finances” and claimed the Government’s fiscal squeeze will mean 350,000 job losses in the public sector alone.

Insiders think a £2 trillion-plus national debt might eventually require international bailout.

Education and training are at such low levels that even when the global crisis ends, the UK won’t be able to take advantage of a changed world.

Presumably Brown, like Blair and others, will hightail it to more welcoming climes.

Though God knows who will require his unedifying lectures, books or advice.

STEPHEN WARD, Tudor Close, Oxford