I AM afraid that I cannot congratulate Witham MP Priti Patel on her recent appointment as Home Secretary.

I cannot understand how she brought herself to accept a post from the mendacious narcissist who purports to be our current Prime Minister.

During his career as a journalist, Boris Johnson continually propagated fictions about the EU, and he repeated and exaggerated many of these during the EU referendum campaign of 2016.

Even today, he is pretending that the Irish backstop is somehow “undemocratic”, when in fact it was inserted into the withdrawal agreement at the request of the UK government with the consent of the EU27 to protect UK citizens.

While Mayor of London, Mr Johnson frivolously wasted hundreds of millions of pounds on failed projects such as the garden bridge, the cable car and the Routemaster bus.

He also claimed credit for the success of the London Olympics, even though most of the hard work had been done by his Labour predecessor.

As Foreign Secretary, he caused the UK to be regarded as a laughing stock in most capital cities abroad.

Mrs Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe still languishes in an Iranian jail, thanks to his incompetence and carelessness.

He is now embarrassing Ms Patel by requiring her to recruit some 20,000 police officers when he knows perfectly well that the Tory government policy which she has supported over the past nine years has been to reduce police numbers by more than this amount.

My respectful but fervent advice to Ms Patel is to quit this extremist government now, while the country is still in one piece, and to vote no confidence in it at the earliest opportunity.

David Martin

Bridge Street, Witham