Many of your readers will have been as appalled and upset as I was about Rishi Sunak’s failure to fully represent our country at the D-Day Remembrance events.

What I find incomprehensible is how that can have happened. He proudly talks about being a Winchester boy, schooled at our famous college. Whilst there he will have been in the Combined Cadet Force doing military style training in preparation to do his duty as an officer if the time was to come. He must have thought it a good idea as he is proposing reintroducing National Service.

The college has the largest private war memorial in the country where hundreds of his predecessors at the school are remembered for their ultimate sacrifice. He will have visited and passed through it many times. Remembrance services are an important annual event in Winchester with its long association with the Army. He must surely remember this?

He is reputedly known for being “all over the detail”.  When he called the election did he not check his diary? Did he decide some time ago, as has been suggested, that he could skip some of the events? Or was a recent invite to do a TV interview just too tempting?

Whatever the reasons Sunak’s dereliction of duty to represent our country and his lack of respect reveals he is not fit to lead one of our great political parties nor be our PM. 

Mike Biden,

Northbrook Close,

St Giles Hill,

Winchester