It will no doubt be many years before we know the precise role of the senior civil service in helping to prepare the ground for the coalition before the 2010 election, but, as Martin Kettle says, some people suspect civil service influence was excessive or, rather, inadequate (Comment, 23 December). The civil service accepted that the coalition agreement document as if it was the manifesto of a single party endorsed by the electorate, but it was no such thing. There was no democratic endorsement and the agreement was cobbled together, as far as is known, entirely after the election. The result is the only peacetime coalition government not to have had its programme endorsed by the electorate – extremely remiss, considering the scale of the constitutional changes it proposed.
If the civil service expected a hung parliament, did it prepare scenarios to be followed based on all the possible outcomes of that kind of result and, if so, should it not have included some form of legitimisation for a highly controversial programme not endorsed by the electorate? This could have included detailed examination by a Commons select committee or some form of citizens assembly, no doubt inadequate, but better than nothing. Instead, the coalition was ushered into power in an unseemly haste that was quite unnecessary, and the result is the least legitimate government in modern times.
Tony Judge
Twickenham, Middlesex
• Gus O'Donnell is still a civil servant, yet comments on areas which are clearly political. Before the last election he travelled the world, finding out how other countries dealt with the formation of coalition governments. The subsequent election gave only one clear message, that our current electoral system was unfit to show, in any clear way, the wishes of the electorate. The main requirement was an interim administration, while an acceptable voting system was introduced for a rerun election.
Not so for O'Donnell. He knew about coalitions, so that was what we got. And we now have the self-appointed coalition, which immediately gave itself a five-year term, and implemented policies for which it had no mandate, just what it could agree on so that it could stay in power.
Chris Orton
Nottingham
• If the job of the cabinet secretary is steering the ship of state, one might have hoped for a more imaginative and inspiring world vision from Gus O'Donnell. Faced with the world at a critical point in the process of globalisation and its discontents, and the inexorable closing down of options due to global warming and resource depletion, Whitehall's big beast utters a squeak. It surely reflects the poverty of imagination and congenital isolationism of the English establishment. It's the diplomatic equivalent of counting the paper clips.
Neil Blackshaw
Little Easton, Essex