WHAT A pleasure it was to see my honest colleague, Jim Bulpitt, write in your pages about his decision to vote Tory in the forthcoming election with such unremitting frivolity (THES, April 18).

How I rocked with laughter at his jokes, particularly his merry little characterisation of the Tories as the party of "underdogs".

I like to think that those jolly old underdogs, Messrs Baldwin, Churchill and Macmillan must have joined in the laughter among the shades.

Even more delicious was the shrewd rhetorical blow with which he characterised John Smith's pre-election budget in 1992 as an act of "idiocy".

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It proved idiotic, indeed, to take money off professors of politics and give it to the poor, the more so when you suppose, as John Smith did, that such an idiotic bout of honesty will be respected by the electorate.

How good it is that we have realistic professors of politics to show us in your pages what realism truly is.

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Fred Inglis

Professor of cultural studies University of Warwick