For more than two months I, like tens of thousands of others, have been volunteering with my local coronavirus community support group, doing four hour shifts on a community helpline and helping to recruit volunteer drivers, so that infected, vulnerable and self-isolating people would be able to stick to the government’s guidelines by staying at home.

I now see that the same government is repaying us and the rest of the country by treating us with contempt and arrogance in defending Dominic Cumming’s blatant, unjustifiable and unrepentant breaching of those same guidelines with self-serving and dishonest arguments.

They are thereby undermining both the general observance of these and future guidelines as well as destroying respect for and trust in the government itself.

By not only refusing to sack him but by actually defending Dominic Cummings’ conduct in his own personal and party political interests and at the expense of the country’s communal effort, the Prime Minister is ultimately to blame, as are those of his ministerial and parliamentary colleagues who support him in this.

Yours sincerely

Duncan Toms, Machynlleth