YOUR Comment on Keith Mitchell (Thursday’s Oxford Mail, We prefer a maverick to a PR dummy) ends with the view that maverick Mitchell is in some way good for the health of democracy.

It could, however, be hoped that our political leaders might at the very least be people who are guided by concern for others, a concern Mr Mitchell does not readily express, preferring mockery, disdain and condescension to humanely informed argument.

Keith Mitchell’s remarks on the county council pension fund’s £20m investment in two tobacco giants in the same day’s paper starkly demonstrates his callous contempt for human decency: “If people are stupid enough to smoke tobacco it is no reason why this should not benefit county council employees in building their pension pots”.

The epidemiologist, the late Sir Richard Doll, who spent the concluding decades of his career here in Oxford, would certainly have knocked such a careless and heartless attitude well beyond the boundaries of Oxfordshire.

The incalculable cost in human suffering from smoking-related diseases and loss of life is echoed by the enormous financial cost to the National Health Service and, yes, to local government health and social care provision.

Although the link(s) between smoking and disease had yet to be made in 1952, would Mr Mitchell retrospectively dismiss King George VI as “a stupid smoker”?

It was on February 6 of that year that the Queen’s father, a lifelong heavy smoker, died, aged 56, from lung cancer, which is why we are this year marking the Queen’s 60 years as monarch rather than, say, 30 years, had the King lived to his daughter's current age.

BRUCE ROSS-SMITH, Bowness Avenue, Headington, Oxford