AS MPs begin their three month break (perhaps with expenses-paid 'fact-finding' trips to exotic foreign lands), pocket their 26 per cent, £9,000-a-year rise and go on to draw until the end of April the unbelievable 74p-a-mile allowance for gas-guzzling Jags, Nigel Evans, Ribble Valley Tory MP (LET, July 22) rounds on the postal union for striking to end six day working and the Tube workers for wanting managers to honour their agreements.

This Honourable Member, whose cries of 'stench' and 'hypocrisy' have been his grating signature tune ever since the last election, is gearing up for the next by trotting out the hoary chestnut about trades union paymasters bankrolling the Labour Party.

He extravagantly goes over the top with "Tony Blair and his dark cohorts" (do they really talk like that in Swansea?) and warns of "Britain paralysed by trades union power ... as it was under the last Labour administration."

Any time now he will do his party-piece about the Winter of Discontent!

By a twist of irony your Opinion that day was about reports of the Tory fund-raising wheeze through the Premier Club, whose members pay as much as £100,000 to dine with ministers, including Premier John Major, and are advised to disguise their gifts to the party in company accounts as 'entertainment.'

The club is chaired by a property tycoon who is said to want to buy £2.5 billion-worth of social security property on top of Ministry of Defence homes. Payments to political parties by any pressure group are undemocratic and should be replaced by government funding.

But at least the unions' support for Labour is open, whereas the Tories' coffers are secretly filled by shadowy foreign millionaires, fugitives and, according to the bizarre revelations, tycoons who have no ulterior motives: these sad people just want to be with John Major!

G E RAYNER, Whinney Lane, Langho.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.