KEITH Mitchell, leader of the county council and clearly on the more progressive wing of the Conservative Party, suggests that the vandals who stole copper cabling from the railway in Tilehurst should, you report, be put in stocks and have rotten fruit thrown at them by passengers left stranded for up to 90 minutes.

Or just stones, maybe.

Imagining that many travellers will be sorry that certain punishments will not be available to magistrates or crown courts to hand down, he refers to the perpetrators of this crime, as, for want of a less ‘polite’ term, “morons”.

Can anyone come up with a courteous expression to describe those in his position expressing such views?

MARISOL BRADBEER, Old Road, Headington, Oxford