WITH reference to John Warmingham’s letter (May 6) “Madman in the Kremlin”, it is very easy, when criticising someone of whom you strongly disapprove to shift the vocabulary from ‘bad’ to ‘mad’ (the tabloids do it all the time).

So I’d like to ask Mr Warmingham if he would consider that Winston Churchill was ‘mad’ for telling the police to lock up the Suffragettes and throw away the key, or was Mrs Thatcher ‘mad’ for being responsible for the deaths of hundreds of young Argentinian sailors when she ordered the sinking of the ship that was taking them home from the Falklands?

No sir, Vladimir Putin is not mad.

On the contrary, he is cool, calculating and devious and knows exactly the consequences of the evil he is perpetrating.

I am certainly not a supporter, but, in terms of the people in the Russian Federation, he is the most popular leader on the planet.

Your correspondent must pray to a strong god when he prays that another human being (yes, Putin is a human being!) died horribly of cancer.

Some people might take a similar view of Boris Johnson, in many people’s eyes he is ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’. I would never wish such a horrible death on him, just perhaps a little prayer that he might retire to an allotment in Norfolk and grow petunias.

Michael Travers
Beveridge Road, Carlisle

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JOHN Warmingham has forgotten about free will. God did not 'create Putin' in the version we now see, but He (or She) gave him free will i.e. the right to choose good or bad conduct, standards, attitudes and live with the results.

Everyone gets this gift from God, who then hopes to bring the best out of them.

Nor should we pray for cancer to devour our enemies.

Jeremy Godwin
Drovers Lane, Penrith