Mugwumps: a wizard way to beat the Tories | Brief letters

Venezuela’s regime | Osprey cam | Mugwumps v Tories | Tees Valley mayor | Grandparental names

The brief letter on Venezuela from John Pilger et al (Letters, 29 April) refers to widespread fear in the region about a highly improbable US intervention. That is nonsense. If anything related to Venezuela is widespread in Latin America it is concern about how the country is going to rid itself of a dictatorial and corrupt regime that is inflicting great damage and suffering on its people.
Malcolm Deas
St Antony’s College, Oxford

• The 128 hours of deer migration being screened on Norwegian TV sounds wonderful (Report, 27 April), but my own personal slow-footage fix is closer to home: the osprey nest on the Dyfi estuary will, all being well, be providing live 24-hour entertainment between now and late August.
Margaret Farnworth
Liverpool

• Boris Johnson has called Jeremy Corbyn a mugwump (Letters, 28 April). Harry Potter tells us that a mugwump is “a superior kind of wizard” – which is just what we need to get us out of the mess the Tory party has got us into in the last six years .
Ron Kirkby
Plashett, Carmarthenshire

• If, as Simon Jenkins suggests (28 April) the mayor of Middlesbrough is “essentially a regional governor”, what will be the role of the mayor of Tees Valley after he or she is elected on 4 May?
Jeremy Beecham
Labour, House of Lords

• Jean Holmes (Letters, 28 April) asks how to refer easily to our grandchildren’s other grandparents. My sister and I have long been referring to these (otherwise described as our children’s in-laws) as the by-laws, as in “it’s Christmas with the by-laws again this year”.
Tricia Kelly
Maldon, Essex

• After declining to give her grandson a second biscuit, my sister-in-law was told that his “real granny” would have given it to him.
John Murray
Aberdeen

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