Carla Laemmle and her uncle, Carl, the founder of Universal Studios, in 1928

Carla Laemmle, who has died aged 104, was one of the last surviving links to the golden age of silent movies. As an actress and dancer she succeeded in navigating the precarious passage to “talkies” — a tricky transition that famously formed the backdrop to Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and The Artist (2011).

Her career was launched by “Uncle Carl” — the movie mogul Carl Laemmle, who formed Universal Studios in 1912. “I wasn’t that naive that I didn’t know my uncle was held in high esteem in Hollywood, and that my being his niece helped to propel my career chances,” she recalled in 2011. “But I wouldn’t say that I was given any special privileges. I can recall attending a party at Uncle Carl’s where I heard Jack Warner chatting to Albert Einstein about the theory of relativity. ‘I have a theory about relativity too,’ joked Warner, ‘I never employ them.’ Uncle Carl shared a slightly different perspective on it, signing me on a long-term contract in 1928.”

Her screen test was directed by Erich von Stroheim. She made several silent movie appearances during the 1920s, often dancing her way through choreographed numbers. However, it is for her first on-screen spoken dialogue — delivering the opening words of Dracula (1930) — that she will be best remembered.

^{Poster for Dracula (1930)}

Dracula marked Universal out as the premier studio for the horror genre. A series of classics was released in quick succession, but Dracula remained the best known. Carla Laemmle opened the film, playing a bookish girl reading to her fellow passengers in a coach trundling through the mountains of Transylvania. “Among the rugged peaks that frown down upon the Borgo Pass,” reads the bespectacled Laemmle, “are found crumbling castles of a bygone age…”

The brief but celebrated appearance afforded her a place in film history. “It’s incredible that my scene took only one day to shoot and yet it has earned me screen immortality,” she said earlier this year.

She was born Rebekah Isabelle Laemmle in Chicago, Illinois, on October 20 1909, the only daughter of Joseph and Carrie Belle Laemmle, and first danced professionally aged six. Five years later, when the family moved to California, she enrolled in dance classes under the tutelage of Ernest Belcher.

She changed her name to Carla in 1922 (in honour of her uncle). Belcher put his pretty, willowy protégé to work in a series of film musicals he was choreographing, including The Phantom of the Opera (1925), with Lon Chaney, and La Bohème (1926), alongside Lillian Gish.

After the sudden death of Carla’s father in the late 1920s, Carla’s family were invited to move into a bungalow on the Universal lot near a New York street set. They remained there until the studio was sold in 1936.

“Growing up on the studio lot was a magic time of my life. I loved living in that fantasy world,” she recalled. “There was a zoo on the back lot and you could hear the lions roar in the morning. There was a camel that would get loose and come graze on our lawn. I’d go out with a dish of oatmeal and lure him into one of the empty garages.”

In 1928 she won promising reviews for her role on screen in the comedy The Gate Crasher (1928) and on stage as the prima ballerina performing with the Los Angeles Festival Orchestra at the Shrine Civic Auditorium. Other Los Angeles stage roles followed in the musicals Wildflower (1928) and No, No, Nanette (1929).

That same year she was loaned to MGM for The Broadway Melody — the first “talkie” to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. “Working on that picture was terribly difficult,” said Carla Laemmle. “The main problem was where to hide the microphone, which had to be close enough to record voices. Consequently Broadway Melody was the most static song and dance movie ever made.”

With the advent of sound, she was quickly put to work in a series of early film musicals, each showcasing her classical dance talents. These included The Hollywood Revue of 1929, and The King of Jazz (1930), in which she danced on the keys of an enormous piano to Rhapsody in Blue.

In 1936 she starred in the film serial The Adventures of Frank Merriwell directed by Ray Cannon. In a matter of weeks she and Cannon had become lovers, and he went on to write the play Her Majesty the Prince for her; it opened in 1936 and ran for more than 200 performances at The Music Box Theatre in Hollywood.

With Universal under new ownership, however, Carla Laemmle’s career began to founder. Away from the security of the studio, she freelanced, finding work where she could. She appeared in The Great Waltz (1938) ; alongside Frank Sinatra in Step Lively (1944); and supporting Cary Grant in Night and Day (1946).

She also appeared in Showboat in 1951, and that year, having split up with Cannon, she met Donald Davis, a singer who had just returned from the war in Korea. The pair married. “He was so handsome and charming,” recalled Carla Laemmle. He was also married to another woman. The union with Carla was annulled after three weeks.

In 1952 she rekindled her relationship with Ray Cannon, and the couple embarked on a 12-year study and exploration of the rich waters of the Mexican state of Baja California (Cannon’s book The Sea of Cortez was a bestseller in 1965). A few years later, Cannon suffered a stroke, after which Carla devoted herself to his care. Cannon died in 1977.

In later life her longevity made her a rare eyewitness to a bygone era. She treated interviewers to tales of Lon Chaney in costume and the stinking sets built for All Quiet on the Western Front. “Director Lewis Milestone had managed to recreate the smell of trench warfare,” she recalled. “It was very moving.”

^{Carla Laemmle celebrating her 102nd birthday in Beverly Hills (ALAMY)}

Retired and living in quiet seclusion in Los Angeles, she was the subject of interest amongst horror-film fans, including Steven Spielberg . She narrated a documentary, The Road to Dracula (1999), and returned to the screen to play an elderly vampire in The Vampire Hunter’s Club (2001).

In 2009 she celebrated her centenary at a party in Hollywood which was attended by her former contemporaries Gloria Stuart and Lupita Tovar, and the then Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

She published her autobiography, Among the Rugged Peaks, in 2010. The title was taken from her debut line of dialogue, first delivered in Dracula 80 years before.

Carla Laemmle, born October 20 1909, died June 12 2014

The dismal, hateful attempts to “sanitise” central London (How hostile architecture keeps the unwanted away, 14 June) are of a piece with this government’s attitude towards the poor. Not content with driving people out of their homes by a combination of selling off social housing, the bedroom tax, and allowing an unregulated frenzy of greed to control the housing market, together with low wages and zero-hours contracts, which drive people into the arms of Wonga and debt misery, this government now wants homeless people, and in fact anyone who isn’t moving along or buying something, to simply vanish from the streets. The sight of these people, of course, may be offensive to obscenely wealthy foreign “investors” (ie tax-avoiding companies and individuals) who may wish to “invest” in central London properties (ie drive up prices even further out of reach) that are left empty while they increase in “value”.

Rather than paying for spikes, unusable bus shelter seats etc, why aren’t councils like Camden challenging the government on its despicable, inhumane policies of poor-cleansing?
Max Fishel
London

• Your article omits to mention the damage done by skateboarders to the benches and other structures they vandalise in their pursuit of self-gratification. Earlier this year, within one day of being installed by Transport for London, nearly all the beautiful wooden benches around the newly configured Euston Circus had been defaced. Unsightly gouges can be seen on once attractive seats, walls and ledges everywhere. Most of us want to live in nice surroundings and respect our environment and fellow citizens.
Belinda Theis
London

• In time for the third anniversary of his death, on 18 June, the first public memorial to peace campaigner Brian Haw has been installed in Whitstable, where he spent his teenage years. The generous response of mainly local people to a campaign launched a year ago (Letters, 18 June 2013) has funded an oak peace bench on the beach which is dedicated to Brian. The memorial was opened by family members and artist Mark Wallinger at the start of this month.

The situation in Iraq is a stark reminder of the continuing relevance of Brian’s legacy. His demand that our politicians and their advisers are held to account for the consequences of their muddle-headed hypocrisy and his signature call to “Wage Peace” are as vital now as at any point during the 10 years that he sustained his Parliament Square peace camp.

Brian Haw was surely the prime example of those who, as Owen Jones has reminded us (Comment, 13 June), foretold the nightmare that would unfold. He is worthy of our remembrance.
Richard Stainton
Whitstable, Kent

On any view, this is a dangerously misconceived reaction. As Home Office staff were scrambling to deny that there was any backlog, staff within the Liverpool office could see that officials were not being truthful. Faced with an official reaction which belied the truth, it is understandable that those working within the office wanted to expose the reality of the situation. If the response had been honest in the first place, press leaking would not have been of any interest whatsoever and the evidence and embarrassment of a cover up could have been avoided.

To make a bad situation worse, a culture of fear is now, no doubt, engulfing staff in Liverpool. Good people trying to do their best are being painted as incompetent, and the threat of misconduct proceedings hangs over everyone. What surveillance techniques will be used to uncover the surreptitious leaker? The oppressive sense that “big brother is watching you” will permeate the workforce.

It is sad to see yet again a story where the cover-up is the real problem, rather than the issue being looked into by the media. The last time I looked, we lived in a democracy where challenging and exposing dishonesty in response to problems in government is entirely right. We should expect nothing less from our officials. In every workplace dissent and questioning should be encouraged as the sign of a healthy culture, not investigated and squashed by a culture of fear.
Cathy James
Chief executive, Public Concern at Work

Chris Huhne argues that parliament voted for the Iraq war because the House of Commons was too intimately bound up with the executive (Blair was only unstoppable because of a democratic flaw, 16 June). His proposed remedy is a constitution more like that of the United States, with the legislative branch being separated from the executive: “If we want … independent votes before we go to war … we need to divide prime ministers from their Commons troops.” I am not aware that the American Congress stopped George W Bush from going to war.
Ralph Blumenau
London

•  Blair was unstoppable because he wielded all the residual powers and patronage of the crown, even to the extent that he thought he could declare war without consulting parliament. Any directly elected prime minister would be even less accountable to parliament. He would have even more power to declare war without consultation. Chris Huhne is a member of the only major party to oppose the Iraq war and the only major party to propose major constitutional changes as the only way to stop an overmighty executive. The fact that we now have secret trials means that curbing the power of the executive through a new constitutional settlement is more urgent than ever. His proposal would make the executive mightier still.
Margaret Phelps
Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan

•  The basic flaw in our parliamentary system is not just that “ministers have to be MPs or peers”. It is that they continue to be MPs or peers once they become ministers. Since the 18th century the rule has been that any MP accepting an “office under the crown” ceases to be an MP, to preserve the independence of the Commons. However this has been sidestepped by the pretence that jobs in the government are fundamentally less incompatible with such independence. That is a distortion of the truth. Acceptance of a ministerial post should mean ceasing to be an MP, at least for the duration of the job, or at the very least, standing for re-election at the time. Get rid of the payroll vote, which corrupts parliament.
Kevin McGrath
Harlow, Essex

•  Chris Huhne does not need to go the convoluted lengths of a second vote; the French have already squared the circle regarding parliament and members of the government. French parliamentary candidates all have a suppléant elected alongside them who takes the place of any member of parliament appointed as a minister. This additional elected man or woman remains in the assembly until the elected MP ceases to be a minister.

It is the size of the “payroll” vote in the UK parliament that is the problem. The French system removes this flaw without undermining the electoral accountability of the individual.
Michael Meadowcroft
Leeds

•  Chris Huhne writes: “In the week when Isis rebels began to rewrite the Sykes-Picot settlement of Iraq and Syria, and were feared close to Baghdad, Hague decided that his most useful immediate role was several good photo opportunities with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.”

How depressing to see him sneer at William Hague’s laudable efforts to render visible and challenge the horrifying crime of systematic rape, violence and sexual assault against millions of women and girls in conflict zones.

Is it because these human rights violations happen primarily to women that they are so less important than the rising conflict in Iraq? Is Angelina Jolie, whose commitment to this issue has been sustained, serious and effective, to be dismissed because she is beautiful? Is their partnership, dedicated to bringing these horrors to the attention of the world, to be treated with contempt because they benefit from partnering the very different attributes of a government minister and a film star?

Brutal sexual violence in war has been a silent and growing emergency for years, while the world has stood idly by. All credit to them for demanding attention, taking committed action and forcing it centre stage. Sadly it is in large part because the more “masculine” dramas of the current Iraqi crisis typically demand all the attention that these atrocities against women and girls have remained hidden for so long.
Gerison Lansdown
Chair, Child to Child

• Remember Colin Powell’s dictum on Iraq borrowed from the US home furnishing store, Pottery Barn? “You break it, you own it.” Presumably, Tony Blair is now banned from these shops.
Michael Wharton
Darsham, Suffolk

The Royal Colleges of Physicians and GPs are opposed to Nice proposals for population-level prescription of statins (Doctors call for rethink on prescribing statins, 11 June). As one of the designers of the Newcastle University simulation on healthy ageing, it is gratifying to see this scenario being played in the real world. Coming in the same week that we hear that one-third of the population is at high risk of type 2 diabetes, perhaps we can consider an even more interesting scenario: tagging obese patients with stepometers? If this is combined with rewards and penalties, the question is also ethical and philosophical, not medical: by what moral authority should doctors control behaviour? A scenario today, but reality tomorrow?

Prevention of avoidable diseases is starting to look like the only way to save the NHS from bankruptcy, but this requires the NHS to become a behavioural-change organisation that promotes certain lifestyles. The power is there to do this. The GP contract can pay doctors to fill this new role, but isn’t that morally dubious? Health follows an income gradient: the lower the income, the more unhealthy the “lifestyle”. Unhealthy lifestyles of people on lower incomes are not freely chosen. Low pay, unemployment, and low social and economic status funnel through to low self-esteem. Stress and depression increase the risk of self-treatment via tobacco, alcohol, sugar and fat. Lower income also increases your likelihood of living in poor housing, and not being able to afford healthy food or exercise properly.

Doctors can intervene by filling people up with statins or forcing patients to wear new technology to monitor activity, blood sugar and cholesterol. Delivered at the population level, these measures will work by skating over the biggest cause of poor health, which is low income. Are doctors prepared to do this dirty work? They have a choice. Physicians and GPs are firmly camped in the top 1% of income. As inequality is becoming a hot topic and we are heading towards an era when unequal incomes might be addressed, might the colleges set an example by voluntarily limiting doctors’ pay to a multiple of average income? Taking a hit in your own wallet is a powerful step, as befits the hallowed status of medicine.
Kenneth Charman
Visiting fellow, Changing Age Network, faculty of medical sciences, Newcastle University

• I was interested in Sarah Boseley’s mention of the “nocebo effect” (Professor at centre of statins row says public being misinformed, 14 June), although it didn’t quite explain the nature of this phenomenon, which really has little if anything to do with middle age, and perhaps more to do, as she says, with people just not wanting to be on pills. My late father, Dr Walter Kennedy, first coined the term “nocebo reaction” in a medical paper back in 1961. He used the Latin nocebo (“I shall injure”) as the opposite of placebo (“I shall please”) to indicate any unpleasant response to real or dummy treatment, this being a response within the patient themselves, and not due to the pharmacological action of a medication.

In other words, there is not a “nocebo effect”, only a “nocebo response”. Unfortunately, the term nocebo is sometimes used incorrectly for an active drug’s unwanted pharmacologically induced negative side-effects. Kennedy clearly stated that nocebo responses should never be confused with true pharmaceutical side-effects.
Dr Peter Kennedy
Wivenhoe, Essex

Sir, Rachel Sylvester writes that the education secretary believes that deprivation need not be a barrier to success (“Gove’s rallying cry: don’t patronise the poor”, June 17). Indeed. But his policies will not achieve that goal for most poor children.

By the time children begin school there are very marked differences in children’s abilities based on parental income and class. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, and while schools generally raise the attainment level of all children, they do not close these class-based differences. Hence the importance of those interventions before children start school that aim to close these fundamental differences in cognitive and social skills.

Unfortunately Michael Gove shows little if any interest in this area, building an education policy based on his own experience. I admire the way he drives through his policies, but schools can only achieve what he wishes for them if the foundation years give children the skills they need before school to help to trump their class background.

Frank Field, MP

House of Commons

Sir, Rachel Sylvester suggests that I think the poor should not be educated. Really? What I do say is that every child deserves a richer education than that provided by a traditional academic curriculum. See Michael Reiss’s and my An Aims-based Curriculum (2013). I stand by the claim that many (not all) non-middle-class children find it hard to adapt to a traditional academic curriculum. Your graph would seem to bear this out. It shows that 72 per cent of poor white British boys failed to get five good GCSEs.

John White

Emeritus professor of philosophy of education, Institute of Education, University of London

Sir, The education secretary believes deprivation need not be a barrier to success. I agree, but where I grew up in industrial South Wales in the 1950s deprivation was regarded as a spur rather than a barrier.

Emeritus Professor Edgar Jenkins

Leeds

Sir, Your leading article (June 16) says: “The most important component of a good school, unsurprisingly, is the teaching staff.” Whether or not that is true depends upon the definition of a good school. If that definition is concerned primarily with results, it is certainly not the case. In grammar schools, for example, but also in other schools that are in effect selective, the pupils and their parents are the most important components of success.

Ron Jacobs

Farnham, Surrey

Sir, In criticising active learning (“The trendy teaching methods that replace facts with ‘activities’ ”, June 16), you say that “rather than learning facts [students] engage in activities”, as if those two things are mutually exclusive. In reality, activity-based strategies ensure that facts are learnt more thoroughly than if the student was simply engaged in rote-learning.

The activities do not stand alone, but take place between more traditional classroom activities and at the end of detailed units of study — usually as a means of consolidating knowledge and getting students to think about things in a fresh and original way. Good classroom teachers have the flexibility and experience to use the best methods from both traditional and progressive approaches — sometimes in the same lesson.

Russell Tarr

activehistory.co.uk

Sir, I find it disturbing that Sir Michael Wilshaw sees nothing wrong in setting national policies on the basis of his own idiosyncratic approach as a head teacher (“Fine parents who don’t read to children, says schools chief”, June 17).

Notwithstanding this weakness, it is bizarre to blame parents who have often been failed by the education system for being unable to support their children or their schools. It would be logical, if the chief inspector were able to impose his own ideology, that provision also be made so that any young person who on leaving full-time education is illiterate and/or innumerate should be compensated for the failure of the state.

John Gaskin

York

Sir, Twenty years ago the directors of the Rank Foundation made a grant to three primary schools in an inner-city area to provide material to assist parents with reading with their children. The scheme was partly hampered by the fact that a number of parents themselves could not read. Additional help with adult literacy was needed.

SJB Langdale

(Former director of grants, the Rank Foundation) Banbury, Oxon

Hands up: moulds for rubber gloves, photographed by Wolfgang Suschitzky (born 1912)  Photo: © Special Photographers Archive / Bridgeman Images

SIR – Henry Wickham did not smuggle rubber tree seeds from Brazil (report, June 14). Financed by the (British) government of India, he bought 70,000 seeds (at £10 per 100) in Brazil in 1876, and, chartering SS Amazonas, exported them, with the goodwill and co-operation of the Brazilian government, to Kew Gardens, where 2,800 germinated. Most of these were then sent to Ceylon, and a few to Singapore and Java.

The industrial rubber industry came about thanks to H N Ridley, scientific director of Singapore’s Botanic Gardens (known as “Mad Ridley” for his idea of a commercial rubber crop). In 1898 he advised Tan Chay Yan to start the first plantation in Malaya, with seven million seeds from the gardens. Malaya was the pre-eminent global producer of rubber by 1910, and Ridley’s dream was fulfilled.

Roger Croston
Christleton, Cheshire

KIng John seals Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 Photo: Alamy

SIR – Magna Carta is to be celebrated by David Cameron’s administration, even if Allan Massie says that it was not a “revolutionary” step in its time.

Yet it was the first, successful attempt to limit the state’s power. Clause 29, to this day, deprives the state of power to order punishment of a citizen, which can be decided only by a jury of the defendant’s peers. It inspired the American revolution.

Nobody has mentioned that Magna Carta never crossed into continental Europe. Continental criminal procedures are little known in Britain, even by the Government.

In 1215, Pope Innocent III was setting up the Inquisition, which, far from limiting the authorities’ power over the individual, made it absolute. When he heard of Magna Carta, he wrote to the English clergy saying they had done something “abominable and illicit”. In Europe, only England escaped the Inquisition. Centuries later, Napoleon’s new laws adopted and adapted an inquisitorial method, redirecting it to the service of the state. Napoleon’s codes underpin most continental legal systems today.

Brussels aims to create a unified European criminal code. The embryo “Corpus Juris” proposal was unveiled in 1997, and was denounced in The Daily Telegraph. It would abolish trial by jury, habeas corpus, and other safeguards considered normal by the British, yet ignored by the European Convention.

The European arrest warrant is a stepping stone towards Corpus Juris: a European prosecutor will issue European warrants. Yet Mr Cameron intends to reconfirm the European arrest warrant. This will trash the foundation stone of our freedoms in Magna Carta. So just what is Mr Cameron meaning to celebrate?

Torquil Dick-Erikson
Rome

Marrying for money

SIR – It is not inheritance tax that is the cause of the increase in marriages among older people (Letters, June 14), but pensions. I know of several people who have married so that their pension does not die with them. The surviving spouse gets the pension, even if the other has only weeks to live and the relationship has not lasted long.

Philip Baddeley
Cambridge

Life in jeans

SIR – At Easter, my husband and I returned to the village church where we were married 50 years ago, expecting changes. In our day it had been a tie, hats and gloves in a church with declining numbers. Now it is a place of worship with jeans, jeans and more jeans. It was vibrant with life.

Ginny Batchelor-Smith
Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire

No flies on me

SIR – S W Twiston Davies (Letters, June 16) wonders whether fewer squashed insects on windscreens mean that cars have become more streamlined or that we have wiped out much of the insect population.

I fear the latter is the case. My old four-by-four has the aerodynamics of a brick, but it does not get splattered with insects.

Adrian Waller
Woodsetts, South Yorkshire

SIR – The fly population is as alive and irritating as it has always been. Ask any motorcyclist. Helmets, visors and leathers have to be cleaned at the end of every trip.

I agree that the better streamlining of cars causes fewer of the little blighters to hit the glass.

Allen Booth
Horley, Surrey

Passport to Scotland

SIR – Andrew Black (Letters, June 13) points out that an independent Scotland, as an EU member, will have to say yes to the Schengen agreement. This will mean that passports will be needed to cross into England.

Will the Passport Office’s current problems be solved in time for my Scottish grandson’s birthday in November? Will the UK Passport Office be able to cope with the influx of Scottish citizens prudently applying for UK passports before September? And how much time should I factor into my journey to allow for delays at the Gretna border crossing?

David Harris
Cambridge

SIR – Presumably a Scot who is resident in Scotland will be obliged to swap his UK passport for a new Scottish one after independence. In the meantime, it is reasonable to assume Scotland will no longer be entitled to EU privileges.

Can we conclude such a Scot will no longer be entitled to free health cover while travelling within the EU? Who pays for the treatment if he has a heart attack in Paris?

Ernie Cochrane
Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire

Fine by me

SIR – Your report “Student racks up £4,500 library fine on book 61 years late” reminds me of how, as a schoolboy in the Sixties, I borrowed from the magnificent Huddersfield Town Library a first edition of a book by Sir Richard Burton about his African explorations, published in 1863.

To my shame, I lost the book (I think I left it on a bus), and informed the library. I received a letter stating that, according to library rules, I had to pay a fine of the costs the library had incurred when the book was bought some 100 years before. I paid the fine of a few pence and the matter was discharged.

Leslie G Mallinson
Ascot, Berkshire

The the

SIR – Why do most people under the age of 50 never use the long e in “the” in front of a word beginning with a vowel?

Is it something new being taught in schools, along with the pronunciation of the letter h as “haitch”?

Try abandoning the long e for a few hours and you’ll find that it’s jolly hard work.

Cherry Cray
Whitehill, Hampshire

Persuading bats not to come home to roost

SIR – England’s historic church buildings are not here to play a role in the conservation of bats. Bats are incontinent little creatures who evacuate large quantities of faecal material (albeit in small portions) during flight. Infection from bats to humans remains a risk, however small.

Although bats hold protected status, they can still be persuaded not to roost in buildings. Upon taking the office of churchwarden three years ago, I found a tiny bat clinging to the white linen cloths of the Communion rail and I decided to do something about the problem.

I spent a week observing the entry and exit points of the bats, including flight paths to their roosting point. They were coming in through certain windows that were left open all day and night.

By opening the windows at nine in the morning and closing them at five in the afternoon, I encouraged the bats gradually to find elsewhere to roost, as the windows would be shut in the early morning when they came home to roost. A year later, they were no longer seeking refuge in this small, historically important medieval church, and none of the creatures was injured or killed in the process.

Dr R C Newell
Compton Beauchamp, Oxfordshire

SIR – Can it really be the case that bats are given priority over worshippers in our historic churches? They are living in a habitat that was never intended or designed for them.

Similarly, badgers are given priority over the livelihoods of dairy farmers and at the expense of hedgehogs and ground-nesting birds. The violent fox is valued over sheep farmers who are helping to preserve our countryside and over the country folk who have traditionally controlled their numbers.

Ian Matthews
Gwernymynydd, Flintshire

ISIS enforcer Shakir Wahiyib

SIR – You say that Tony Blair was right to identify Syria’s civil war as the “proximate cause” of the rapid advance of Isis. You then say that Isis was given a lifeline as a result of the barbarous struggle in Syria.

But you add that Iran and Russia bear some responsibility for today’s crisis by propping up Assad. It may seem strange to say this, but if the Western powers had done the same, instead of supporting the rebels, who include elements of al-Qaeda and of course Isis, then the latter would not have carved out a domain inside Syria, allowing it to sweep into Iraq.

Iraq has been in turmoil ever since Mr Blair and George Bush decided to invade it, and remove Saddam. There were no terrorists in Iraq then, but there are now.

John Warren
Wolverhampton, Staffordshire

SIR – If one imagined for a moment that the allied forces who invaded Iraq in 2003 had found nuclear weapons, or the capability to make them, few would now be saying that the action taken was unjustified or illegal.

The weapons would no doubt have been destroyed but in what other respects would the present chaos in Iraq have unfolded differently?

David Langfield
Pyrford, Surrey

SIR – If Mr Blair thinks he was justified in his actions in 2003, surely the Chilcot report should be published now, with no “redactions”, to prove his justification.

Robert Sunderland
Hitchin, Hertfordshire

SIR – The latest appearance of Mr Blair, urging (in his role as peace envoy) the need for war, has the characteristics of Professor Moriarty. Just when you think he is finally banished, up he pops again, with another plan to lead humanity to disaster.

Keith Flett
London N17

SIR – Would Mr Blair be so keen on military intervention in the Middle East if he, or members of his family, were in line for deployment to that snake pit?

Brian Farmer
Chelmsford, Essex

SIR – Surely those who earlier had concerns about Mr Blair’s sanity must by now have had all doubts removed.

S G Fowler
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

SIR – Aren’t there enough good Muslims in the Arab world ready and able to rise up and defend Islam and their own countries against the misguided, ignorant, evil men?

Rosemary Marshall
New Malden, Surrey

SIR – Boris Johnson was very much to the point. Tony Blair is the Sepp Blatter of international politics.

T J Tawney
Hildenborough, Kent