SIR - John Shearon's assault on Claire Short tells us much more about him than it does about this decent, principled woman.

Watching Blair's sick-making self adulatory posturing at the Labour "conference" makes me wonder why anyone but the seriously self-serving or the cretinously gullible retain their membership of this pale shadow of a political party.

To cap it all, Uncle Sam's representative Bill Clinton arrived to bless Saint Anthony and deliver a speech more vacuous than the one our blessed Prime Minister made himself.

But perhaps old Labour never stood a chance of introducing civilised social democracy in to Britain. America has run this country as a puppet state since the post-war Labour government gave them a fright and introduced a welfare state.

Since then, America has used its might and influence to sabotage the Claire Shorts of this world and impose Anglo Saxon economics on us.

I once spent an hour in the presence of that well known socialist MP Robert Maxwell - and nothing that has happened to British politics since has surprised me at all!

JIM EVANS, Worcester.