The news that the sultan of Brunei has made gay sex and adultery into offences punishable by stoning to death has met with silence from Theresa May and only whimpers of dismay from ministers. The Foreign Office, in the same tone that marked its attitude to Hitler during Neville Chamberlain’s premiership, says threatening to remove Brunei from the Commonwealth is not the “best way” to encourage Brunei to uphold its human rights obligations. Really?

Your report (Dorchester hotel loses bookings over Brunei move, 6 April) says the sultan pays the UK for 2,000 British troops to remain in Brunei. Since the agreement does not expire until 2020, what better way of making him feel a little insecure than for Britain to break it and withdraw our troops at once – and to hell with the Foreign Office’s bland mouthings.

Nicholas de Jongh

London

• Unaware of who owned St John’s Lodge in Regent’s Park, central London, a group of friends recently scattered ashes in the adjacent public gardens (Holidays and arms deals with Brunei don’t trump gay people’s right to exist, theguardian.com, 5 April). These were of the historian Roger Lockyer and the actor and theatre director Percy Steven, an inspirational gay couple of 52 years, among the first in Britain to enjoy a civil partnership in 2005 and a same-sex marriage in 2014. Both reaching adulthood when their sexuality made them criminals, they were overjoyed by the changes they had seen in their lifetimes.

The current barbarism in Brunei would have broken their hearts. It gives us satisfaction to think that the sultan can now look out of his window and watch Roger and Percy helping to make the roses grow – and perhaps to reflect that LGBT people are all around him and that our hopes and dreams can never be stoned out of existence.

Alan Clark

London