Sir, The Prince of Wales’s passionate letter to the Qatari Prime Minister (report, June 24) is strikingly like those of Queen Victoria. Her letters were equally full of emotional words underlined, sometimes several times. Like Charles, she was also fond of exclamation marks. In fact, she usually deployed several exclamation marks for even the most trivial points.
If she really wanted to emphasise something, she would write it in capital letters, often underlined, and always with further exclamation marks. The trouble is, such letters often made their recipients question the Queen’s sanity. Disraeli thought she was “very mad”. But at least in the Prince’s case it can be seen as touching proof that we have a hereditary monarchy.
Dr Bendor Grosvenor
London W1