The Two Ronnies weren’t the first to write about a dystopian world run by women when they came up with the sketch series The Worm That Turned (Is Sacha Baron Cohen and Rosamund Pike’s new gender swap comedy inspired by The Two Ronnies?, 20 April). This was all covered much earlier by Joe Orton’s screenplay Up Against It, written for the Beatles in 1967, but rejected by them before the playwright’s death later that year. A 1997 Radio 3 adaptation by John Fletcher was repeated on Radio 4 Extra last month.
John Kilcoyne
Loughborough, Leicestershire
• Your report exposes the real cost of treating security as a matter of war-readiness rather than human survival (US spending on ‘reckless’ Iran war could have saved 87m lives, says UN, 20 April). If the money directed towards confrontation with Iran could instead save millions of lives, the public should question not only the cost of war but the very definition of security that sustains it.
Molly Paton
Newcastle Upon-Tyne
• Regarding Shabana Mahmood’s exhortation to white liberals to “fuck right off” (Shabana Mahmood swears at ‘white liberal’ hecklers over Reform remarks, 21 April), I can assure her that as a white liberal I have already fucked right off. I’ll be voting for a party that promotes equality and solidarity rather than bigotry, and I won’t be going back to Labour.
John Coutts
Pontantwn, Carmarthenshire
• My favourite insult is not just “wazzock” (Letters, 16 April) but the expanded “spawny-eyed wazzock”, as used by the Yorkshire comedian Tony Capstick in the early 80s.
Sally Smith
Redruth, Cornwall
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