Illustration by John Sadler www.johnsadlerillustration.com

• CALM down children!

I didn’t vote for the Labour Party and I’m not particularly impressed by its leader, but the alarmism expressed in the media about his arrival in Downing Street is frankly absurd.

At the weekend we were told in screeching tones that Sir Keir Starmer’s removal of a portrait of William Shakespeare from Downing Street signals the trashing of our proud nation’s culture and the dawn of a new Dark Age.

One idiot TV presenter whinged that the painting of the Bard had been replaced by “some Portuguese artist “ she’d clearly never heard of “whose thing was strong women”. It turns out that was the late Dame Paula Rego, now widely recognised as one of the truly greatest painters of all time. By the way, she lived the majority of her life in NW3 and had a studio in NW1. A migrant!

Does anybody other than foaming-at-the-mouth fanatics really think this is going to consign Shakespeare to the dustbin of history? Or that it truly shows contempt for the Bard.

I can’t believe your colleagues in the media think this. So it’s got to be infantile playground-taunting designed to “stir it up”.

I’ve no doubt Labour will give us real causes for alarm in the coming months and years. Please urge your media colleagues to calm down and grow up.

R HENDERSON, WC1