PAT Cartledge wasn't accurate (Your View, June 25).
When I was first elected MP for north Oxfordshire, for a number of years I rented a cottage in Wroxton as my second home.
It was some 15 years ago when my children were older that I moved to my main home to Bloxham.
Family circumstances of MPs change over the years, like everybody else.
But this misses the point.
Whatever the rules, the controversy over the secon
d homes allowance has reduced the standing of MPs and with it our ability to stand up for our constituents.
I thus stopped claiming a second homes allowance in May and don't intend ever to claim again.
Tony Baldry MPI find the letter from Pat Cartledge regarding Mr Baldry and his mortgage interest payments disingenuous to say the least.
I have no political axe to grind at all.
I too am irritated by the abuse by some MPs of the expenses system and I can quite understand a certain pique felt by Mr Cartledge in losing his county council seat at the latest elections after his good work over a number of years. But the reason for the loss is not down to our MP.
The comment and innuendo is out of order. His assumptions that Tony Baldry obtained his second home soon after election may well be correct.
The suggestions that as our MP for 25 years (the normal period of the average mortgage) he should therefore no longer have a mortgage, or that maybe by changing his second home he will have benefited at the taxpayers' expense by turning an undeclared profit, simply rekindles the spitefulness that some political activists can not resist.
Any notional profit made on selling of a property only ever becomes cash in hand if the vendor has no need to buy another at the latest prevailing value.
There can be any number of reasons for needing to move home, none of them any business of ours.
Come on Mr, Cartledge cut out the political dogma and concentrate on facts rather than supposition.
Chris Ringwood
Adderbury West