Sir Jocelyn Stevens surveys the site of the Rose Theatre in Southwark in 1998 Photo: Stephen Lock

Sir Jocelyn Stevens, who has died aged 82, forged a formidable reputation for himself as a saviour of ailing institutions, first in the newspaper industry and later as head, successively, of the Royal College of Art and English Heritage.

Stevens was at his best in a crisis, for his style of management was based less on his intellect than on the overpowering force of his personality. He carried with him an air of impatience and, though capable of great charm, he did not shy from ruthless, even brutal, behaviour where necessary. Private Eye christened him “Piranha Teeth”.

Indeed, at times there appeared to be no form of exercise that gave him greater pleasure than taking an axe to those he perceived as dead wood. Stevens was, par excellence, a sacker — he once dismissed 11 professors from the RCA in an afternoon — and there clustered about him a fund of oft-repeated stories about his towering rages.

Such was his reputation for belligerent cost-cutting that when he was appointed chairman of English Heritage in 1992, one commentator described it as “like putting Herod in charge of childcare”. It was an image in which, in public at least, Stevens revelled.

^{Sir Jocelyn Stevens at the The Crescent, Buxton (Paul Armiger)}

Rich from birth, Stevens had first come to prominence in 1957 when, as a 25th birthday present to himself, he bought Queen magazine. He proceeded to transform the staid fortnightly — founded by Mrs Beeton’s husband — into the house magazine of the Swinging Sixties, helped by contributions from his friends Anthony Armstrong-Jones and Mark Boxer, whom he employed as Queen’s art director.

In truth, in 10 years Stevens only managed to increase his publication’s circulation by 60,000, but such was his flair for publicity — much of it self-publicity — that he quadrupled Queen’s advertising revenue within two years. Stevens undoubtedly had a sharp eye for business opportunities, and in 1964 he became one of the principal backers of the pirate radio station Radio Caroline.

It was at Queen that he first began to acquire a reputation for insensitivity and tantrums. Among stories told about Stevens were the occasion when he sacked an underling over the tannoy, the time he threw the fashion editor’s filing cabinet out of a fourth floor window, and the day he cut short one of his reporters’ telephone calls by cutting the wire to their receiver.

Years later, one of his art directors still quailed at the memory of being picked up by Stevens and shaken like a rat by a terrier, while change from his pockets cascaded on to the floor.

In 1968, Stevens sold Queen and became personal assistant to the chairman of Beaverbrook Newspapers, Sir Max Aitken. “I hear young Stevens bites the carpet,” said Aitken of his protégé. “That’s no bad thing.” Stevens became a director of the Beaverbrook group in 1971, two years after he had been appointed managing director of the London Evening Standard. The Standard was then failing and Aitken’s brief to Stevens was terse: “Save it”.

Within three years Stevens had placed the newspaper on a sounder footing and was rewarded with the post of managing director of the Daily Express, the fortunes of which were also in long-term decline. Between 1972 and 1981 it was to lose a million readers and six editors; Stevens himself twice refused the editor’s job.

Though Stevens’s tenure coincided with the peak of print union truculence, his frank approach won their admiration, so much so that when he left the Express in 1974 he was “banged out”, the traditional send-off by printers for one of their own. By then he had persuaded them to accept the closure of the newspaper’s Scottish operations — with the loss of 1,800 jobs — and had transferred printing to Manchester without disruption.

Stevens became the managing director of Beaverbrook Newspapers in 1974, and continued as its deputy chairman when the group was bought out by Trafalgar House under Victor Matthews.

In 1979 he and Lord Matthews started the Daily Star, but they had different ideas about the future of what had become Express Newspapers, and in 1981 Stevens was sacked after he had told his chairman once too often what he thought of him. Many in the City suspected that Stevens hoped to buy the group himself, but he was never able to.

Having acquired a reputation as an ardent free marketeer, in 1984 Stevens was asked to enter the world of arts management and accepted appointment as Rector and Vice-Provost of the RCA. By the time he left eight years later, so had two-thirds of the staff, their 17 departments trimmed to four. But Stevens had also balanced the College’s books, introduced business sponsorship of students and increased the numbers applying to the RCA by 25 per cent.

Stevens was an equally unsympathetic but effective chairman of English Heritage. He was no philistine but nor was he a natural conserver of things, his instincts always favouring change. He presided over several well publicised sackings and rows — on one occasion ejecting the secretary of the Twentieth Century Society from his office with the words “Get out! And take that ghastly little man with you,” the latter being a highly respected city surveyor who had been left a hunchback after childhood polio.

But Stevens’s virtues included fighting tenaciously for causes he believed in, and at English Heritage he succeeded in keeping open more listed churches, presided over the restoration of the Albert Memorial and persuaded the Blair Government to improve the setting of Stonehenge by sinking the busy roads next to it. He retired in 2000.

Jocelyn Edward Greville Stevens was born on Valentine’s Day 1932. His mother, the daughter of the newspaper magnate Sir Edward Hulton, died shortly after giving birth to him.

Jocelyn’s father, Major Greville Stewart-Stevens, could never bring himself to forgive his son for the loss of his wife, and as a small boy Jocelyn was sent to live in his own flat in Marylebone, complete with a staff of cook, maid, priest and chauffeur — for the child’s Rolls-Royce.

His father afterwards remarried and Jocelyn grew up with his stepfamily in Scotland; his stepbrother, Blair (later Sir Blair) Stewart-Wilson, would became Master of the Queen’s Household.

Jocelyn was educated at Eton, where he reached the final of the Public Schools’ Boxing Championship. He then did his National Service in the Rifle Brigade; when, as a cadet, he won the Sword of Honour at Eaton Hall, his father declined to attend the passing-out parade.

Stevens went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he proved himself an accomplished oarsman but was sent down from the university for skipping tutorials to go skiing in Switzerland. Stevens had sent his tutor a postcard marked “Wish you were here”; from an early age he was no respecter of authority.

^{Sir Jocelyn Stevens with the sculpture of the Allied leaders on New Bond Street (Eddie Mulholland)}

On his 21st birthday, Stevens inherited a substantial fortune from his mother. He rapidly acquired a standing in the gossip columns, partly because he was regular escort of Princess Alexandra, partly because he had a predilection for driving sports cars into lamp-posts.

But Stevens had ambitions beyond being a playboy and, having put himself through a course at the London School of Printing, in 1955 he went to work as a journalist at Lilliput, a magazine owned by his uncle’s Hulton stable. Two years later he bought Queen.

Stevens was tall, jut-jawed and fearless. He was immensely hard-working and possessed great brio and vitality. He was also a generous giver of parties, notably in company with his consort for many years in later life, the heiress and philanthropist Dame Vivien Duffield, one of the few people who could match him for wealth and temperament.

Though seemingly impervious to insult, Stevens was sensitive enough of his reputation to raid the libraries of newspapers he managed in order to confiscate the cuttings held on him. He also did much work for charity, spurred by the condition of his disabled son Rupert. He cared deeply for his family, and when his daughter Pandora fell prey to drugs, he broke down the door of her squat, carried her to hospital and had her dealer hunted down.

Jocelyn Stevens was appointed CVO in 1993 and knighted in 1996.

He married, in 1956 (dissolved 1979), Janie Sheffield, a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret. They had a son and two daughters. His son Rupert predeceased him. After he and Vivien Duffield separated, in 2008 he married Emma Cheape, daughter of the late Sir Iain Tennant.

Sir Jocelyn Stevens, born February 14 1932, died October 12 2014

So Labour is being urged to get tough on immigration (Report, 11 October)? Fifty years of Labour party history suggests that they will do just that, only to be immediately outflanked by the parties to the right of them. No amount of policy-hardening can quell anti-immigration agitation. What is needed is a political party that will stand up to celebrate the contribution that immigration and the free movement of labour make to the UK while challenging those who attribute all our ills to immigrants.
Professor Robert Moore
University of Liverpool

• Labour’s high command have allowed a series of policy vacuums to emerge, leaving them open to getting involved in a bidding war in which the likeliest winners will be those who pander to, rather than challenge, prejudices. In common with many others, I believe that Alan Johnson may be Labour’s most underused resource, but he alone is not the answer to the individual and collective timidity that has beset the party and a shadow cabinet that seems determined to lose the general election so as to stage a leadership election in the months that follow. Labour must tell us what it stands for, and the ways in which Britain will be changed by defeating Ukip – not simply list cuts that match those being offered by the coalition partners as they square up to one another in the dog days of their administration.
Les Bright
Exeter

• I could see a “frontline role” for Alan Johnson – as Labour leader. He might be a rightwinger but at least he lives on planet Earth and had a real job before entering politics (Review, 11 October), which makes him a hundred times more attractive to the electorate than the current cohort of complete wonkers “leading” the party into the abyss.
Alistair Richardson
Stirling

• I feel increasingly baffled as to what Ed Miliband expects us to vote for if we vote Labour. We do not want Tory/Ukip-lite. When politicians talk about the disengagement, especially of young voters but increasingly of older people, do they really not understand why? When we were younger we knew which party supported which view of the kind of society they wanted and we could vote accordingly. When all parties appear to believe to some extent that it is ethical to penalise the poor for the mis-management by the rich, where does that leave us?

It used to be a basic tenet of the Labour party that the rich, however they had come by their wealth, should share with the poor. The view now seems to be: well, maybe a bit, if they don’t mind.

I accept that some areas of the country have specific problems related to sudden immigration and no money to help with schools etc. But that is not the cause of the country’s problems and it is dishonest and futile to pretend that it is.

I believe Ed Miliband to be a decent and thoughtful man, but unless he and his advisers remember what a Labour party is, they might just as well give up. (No, you’re right, there aren’t that many Labour voters in Bishop’s Stortford, but some of us haven’t given up yet.)
Angela Barton
Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire

• It was surprising to read that John Mann MP (Labour, Bassetlaw) believes that immigration is responsible for “too much housing” and thus, indirectly, Ukip’s recent political success. Official estimates anticipate household growth in England is of the order of 221,000 households per year; if combined with official estimates of migration levels, net inward migration accounts for 27.8% of growing housing need. Since recent figures suggest we build barely half the number of homes needed to meet this demand (with 112,000-odd completions in England in 2013/14), it is factually not correct to state that immigration has led to too much housing.

It would be much more plausible to suggest that too little housing has led to political discontentment, with housing costs rising far faster than incomes, and increasingly those on lower and middle incomes finding that the sort of housing their parents expected is way out of their reach. That could only be addressed by building far more homes than we currently are.
Dr Ed Turner
Aston University

• Like it or not, Ukip’s rant and razzle-dazzle is working far more effectively than the Greens’ worthy exhortation, the Tories’ weasel-worded promises, the Lib Dems’ darkly comic somersaults and Labour’s floundering attempts to make Miliband and co look effective (Letters, 11 October). To a large extent that’s because their well-crafted policy statements, eloquently expressed objectives and (mostly) slick presentations are not resonating with us plain folks, something the policy wonks, spinners and party elites seem unwilling/unable to acknowledge. Well, as they are all discovering, commitment and belief is of limited value if it isn’t accompanied by insight and some sort of wow!
Jim Gillan
Huddersfield

• Much of Britain’s Tory-dominated media managed to hype the Clacton and Heywood byelection results as nothing too much to worry about for Mr Cameron, the end of days for Mr Miliband and the start of a period of Faragist world domination. By contrast your editorial (11 October) is a model of careful consideration and balance. The way for Labour to deal with Ukip is not to move further right but to tackle the root causes that motivate those who may vote for the party – namely the continuing pay squeeze and job insecurity.

One hopes Mr Miliband and the rest of the Labour leadership will be on the TUC’s Britain Needs a Pay Rise demonstration on 18 October, and when the Mail and Sun attack them for it, they should see that as positive.
Keith Flett
London

• Owen Jones’s tale of woe about rootless, soulless political parties (Opinion, 13 October) needs a comment about a national institution that should be providing roots and soul to political thinking: the Church of England, which, despite all its faults, I love. We are both part of the problem and could be part of the solution by our input to a debate about a political system that is not serving the needs of all UK citizens. We are locked into and are beneficiaries of the extreme free-market politics and economics that have infected a rootless and soulless parliament. It has required low- and middle-income households to carry the burden of austerity.

As a church we tinker with staffing food banks and credit unions when what is needed is noisy, sustained and effective lobbying, drawing the attention of comfortable households to the innocent suffering of a substantial minority of the UK population in hunger, substandard housing, unmanageable debts, rent and council tax arrears. Nowhere is that noisy lobbying more absent than in London, where the bishops and archdeacons of the diocese of London, are all but silent in the face of the oppression of the poorest tenants by the state.
Rev Paul Nicolson
Taxpayers Against Poverty

• I agree with Owen Jones that “British politics has become a careerists’ playground creating disillusionment that charlatans can exploit”. It is a pity, though, that he doesn’t mention the Greens as a credible alternative, when he exemplifies what the party stands for: “politics should be about hope, about satisfying people’s needs and aspirations”.
Jacqueline Dent
London

• Now, let’s see if I’ve got this right. Nigel Farage says vote Tory and get Labour. David Cameron says vote Ukip and get Labour. Presumably Ed Miliband would say vote Labour and get Labour. What could possibly go wrong?
Roger Carruthers
Derby

In the debates on university tuition fees, raised again by Peter Scott (Let’s fight the idea that high tuition fees are inevitable, 7 October), one relevant point seems to be continually ignored or glossed over. Comparison is often made with fees in the US, and very high fees are quoted as if they were the norm there. However, these figures always relate to the well-known private universities, especially the Ivy League schools, but it would seem that a more reasonable comparison for England is with the fees charged by public universities for in-state students. These are all lower than those currently levied by any English universities, in some cases considerably so. The most expensive, such as Berkeley and UCLA charge around $12,870 [£8,000], but at Chapel Hill (North Carolina) fees are $8,340 and at the University of Florida $6,630. These are major research universities, but most states also have schools with good undergraduate and MA programmes with fees at or below $5,000 per annum.

When the issue of fees is raised, especially with respect to lifting the “cap”, the claim is often made that fees in England are low by comparable international standards, and this seems to have become received wisdom. But such assertions do not become true by dint of constant repetition. Fees in England are already as high as anywhere comparable in the world.
Professor Martin Durrell
Cheadle

• I went for a meal with a friend, where we discovered that the waitress had recently graduated with a degree in mathematics. I have met this in several other restaurants, where young people 10 times smarter than I am are serving my table.

My silly companion told me that this proved that it had always been a mistake to send so many students to university. I think it proves that we live in the most badly governed country on Earth, where a nation’s most valuable resource is deliberately discarded into a moronic private sector of dreadfully poor judgment.

The intelligence of these youngsters could resurrect the most important part of a modern economy, the public sector, driving research and analysis to higher levels, to rebuild our nation and its commerce, to civilised standards of honour, integrity and reliable erudition.
CN Westerman
Brynna, Glamorgan

Jonathan Powell (Shall we talk?, 7 October) has little to say except repeated rewordings of the near slogan: there is no military solution [to terrorism], you have to talk. His favourite example is Northern Ireland, but this is actually a very poor example. He writes: “No British government was ever going to concede a united Ireland against the wishes of a majority of the people in Northern Ireland [but] once discussions were begun with the Irish Republicans, we discovered that they were prepared to settle for something else.”

Not for 25 years they weren’t, so Britain had to face down the insurgency, which Britain did. Eventually an older, perhaps mellower, IRA leadership accepted that they weren’t winning, and settled for an agreement that they could certainly have got with the Heath government in the 1970s.

And the IRA had a comprehensible political agenda (a united Ireland). Does Islamic State (Isis) have a correspondingly comprehensible agenda? The nearest is a pure Islamic state purged bloodily of all dissenters, somewhere in Syria and Iraq. But this is envisaged to be permanently at war with the rest of the world, fighting to oppose all real and imagined grievances of Muslims everywhere.

Maybe Isis will eventually develop a meaningful agenda, and maybe will one day even be willing to compromise about it. But at present we are at 1970, not 1996, in Northern Ireland terms.
Roger Schafir
London

• Jonathan Powell is right; talking to terrorists is the only way to establish some sort of peace. He is also right that building trust takes time – “I spent a good part of the next 10 years [from 1997] flying back and forth across the Irish Sea to meet Adams and McGuinness”.

NGOs engaged in similar work also need time. And resources. But there is little funding from governments or the EU, because peacebuilding is regarded as too difficult, too risky, with no guaranteed outcomes.
Rev Donald Reeves
Director, The Soul of Europe

“Family” novels by women writers featuring bad mothers (Tim Lott, Family, 11 October) were a standard trope in 19th-century literature. Jane Austen’s lazy Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park prefers her pug to her children. Charlotte Brontë’s cold Mrs Reed in Jane Eyre spoils her children and believes her bullying son’s lies. Elizabeth Gaskell’s hypocritical Mrs Gibson in Wives and Daughters neglects her daughter. All are described with compassion and wit. Perhaps that makes them not quite bad enough?
Michele Roberts
London

• Pairing socks, hoover, dishwasher and the Guardian crossword were my late husband’s responsibilities when he was ill-health retired (Letters, 10 October). In his last few bedbound weeks he tried to hand over the crossword, but even after his intensive training it is still too cryptic for me. I have kept Radio 5 Live.
Miriam Bromnick
London

• Excellent idea, Tristram Hunt: I’m sure your “Hippocratic oath” for teachers (Cartoon, 13 October) will help to weed out those who begin their careers determined to lower standards in the classroom and ensure their students’ failure.
Tim Boardman
Stafford

• I was surprised to see that the nurses testing Britain’s readiness for an Ebola outbreak did not have the whole of their heads covered (Report, 13 October). Suppose someone was sick over their neck? These protective garments are nothing like as good as the photographs I have seen in the Guardian of Médecins Sans Frontières workers in Africa. And MSF has had fewer deaths than the US and Spain. No point skimping.
Teresa Goss
Cardiff

• As a female letter writer (Open door, 13 October), I do my best to emulate Bradshaw, as quoted (in part) by Sherlock Holmes. My language is “terse, but limited”. Though not “nervous”.
Margaret Waddy
Cambridge

• Delighted that Martin Rowson (Comment, 8 October) explained the meaning of the “fur cup” in some of his cartoons. I’ll enjoy them all the more from now on.
Andrew Vaughan-Jones
Turvey, Bedfordshire

Sir, It was refreshing, but deeply frustrating, to read that the government now admits that the Health and Social Care Bill was a huge mistake (report, Oct 13). Frustrating because in 2011-12, when medical professionals were united as never before against the proposed changes, there was little if any media reporting of that opposition. Instead, we had to read Andrew Lansley’s repeated assertions that doctors backed the legislation.

Those of us who urged our professional bodies, and in particular the Royal Colleges, to adopt a unified stance against the Act now see that we were right in telling them that they could make a difference. In 2012, David Cameron was indeed realising what a can of worms had been opened by his health secretary, and could have been persuaded to drop the legislation. I hope it isn’t only George Osborne who is “kicking himself” for failing to act.

Dr Bob Bury
Leeds

Sir, Your headline “NHS reforms our worst mistake, Tories admit”, published on the day when caring midwives took industrial action for the first time in history, could, and perhaps should, have been written in June 1990. I said then that the introduction of Kenneth Clarke’s untried and potentially unworkable “internal market” could lead to the NHS standing for “No Hope Service” and ultimately “No Health Service”.

Sadly, despite a promise not to embark on “top down” reform of the NHS, the current government’s acceptance of the Health and Social Care Act, with its huge involvement of the private sector, accelerated the problems that flowed from the 1990 reforms. It reinforced my fears that, if I live long enough, I will see my 1990 prediction come true.

Dr John Marks
Chairman of the British Medical Association 1984-90, London NW8

Sir, Having just returned from the Royal College of Midwives picket line at the hospital I have worked in for the past 25 years, I stared with incredulity at your headline “NHS reforms our worst mistake, Tories admit”. A “mistake”? Billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money wasted because no one understood what Andrew Lansley was doing?

It sounds like a cruel joke but actually means that huge sums of money that could have been used to maintain and improve patient care have been lost, frittered away on “unintelligible gobbledegook”.

I am beyond angry. There is a great deal in the NHS that could be changed — and indeed needs to be. The fracturing and duplication of services, the failure to negotiate best price deals across the whole organisation, and the failure to invest, motivate and lead by listening and consultation instead of top-down diktat. A “mistake” that has led to increased waiting times, services buckling under financial and organisational strain and demoralised, increasingly militant staff. I am 55. I never imagined myself on a picket line. As important as it is to me and many thousands of other NHS staff who struggle to keep the service going, pay is but one factor in the impending disaster.

Heather Redhead RN, RM
Chester

Sir, Nowhere in your extensive coverage of the NHS (Oct 13) was there any reference to the fundamental dilemma facing the NHS — namely that there is a limitless potential demand for its services which has to be met by a strictly limited financial resource.

There is just one, and only one, way to resolve this dilemma, and that is to decide which services a tax-funded national health organisation can provide and which it cannot.

Professor Sir Bryan Thwaites
Fishbourne, W Sussex

Sir, Andrew Lansley’s talent for acting foolishly without regard to the financial consequences first became apparent when, as director of the Conservative Research Department, he changed the party’s manifesto for the 1992 election behind the back of John Major’s advisers while it was at the printer. It cost £50,000 to return it to the condition that the cabinet had approved. If the kindness of the party hierarchy had not saved his career at that point, the NHS budget today would be in a better state.

Lord Lexden(Deputy director, Conservative Research Department, 1985-97)
House of Lords

Sir, That the Health and Social Care Act was damaging to the NHS was made abundantly clear at the time of the debate around the bill by those both inside and outside the NHS who knew the consequences. The government should have kept its promise as enshrined in the coalition agreement of May 20, 2010, which stated: “We will stop the top-down reorganisations of the NHS that have got in the way of patient care.” Is there a lesson there somewhere for the electorate?

Professor Robert Arnott
Cheltenham, Glos

Sir, Since the start of the NHS in 1948 we have seen successive governments of differing political persuasions make inappropriate, poorly considered and often damaging structural changes.

Has not the time arrived to consider taking control of the NHS out of politicians’ hands and giving the NHS autonomy, governed by a board of trustees?

Dr Stuart Sanders, FRCGP
London W1

Sir, You report that David Cameron now regards the Health and Social Care Act as his greatest mistake. This is a ludicrous admission, as the reforms ushered in by the Act have yet to be fully bedded down. Andrew Lansley understood that there needs to be a means by which expensive hospitals are forced to become more efficient and the purchaser/provider split is the only way to do it.

In your consideration of the future of the NHS you might include how market forces might be brought to bear on such a huge organisation, with all the benefits which follow market arrangements. I doubt you could find a better way to do it.

Roger Fox
Down Hatherley, Glos

Sir, Your coverage of the NHS is welcome. but you fail to make clear that the changes introduced by Mr Lansley apply only to England. The NHS in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have not had to cope with the madness of Lansley’s “gobbledegook”. Also, Simon Stevens is not the “head of the NHS”. He is the head of the NHS in England.

Professor Rhys Williams
Swansea

Essential for any WW2 soldier was the Burmese for ‘Do you have any Epsom Salts?’

Sir, With reference to your report (Oct 11) on the 1944 manual given to British soldiers, my late father was given, also in 1944 and while serving with the Royal Navy in the Far East, a booklet entitled Rubbing Along in Burmese. This contained useful phrases, translated into the local language, that every sailor would presumably find invaluable. Phrases included “Please shake hands, we have come in the cause of freedom”, “If you do as we tell you, you will come to no harm”, “Where can I find a bicycle?” and “Can you row a sampan?” It also included the Burmese for “Do you have any Epsom Salts?”

Robert Spicer

Colchester, Essex

If you want to see a full-size copy of the Parthenon, head for Nashville, Tennessee…

Sir, If the Elgin Marbles are to be copied (letter, Oct 13) may I suggest a visit to Nashville, Tennessee. Not only have all the sculptures been recreated but so has the entire Parthenon — faithfully and to scale. It was built for the 1897 Centennial Expo and reconstructed more permanently in 1931. At that time the city purchased casts of the Elgin Marbles which were then used by the sculptors Leopold and Belle Scholz to form the pediments in their original entirety.

The Nashville Parthenon is a sight as surprising as it is remarkable

Edward Hill

London W8

Hampton Court Palace is where Queen Anne ‘doth sometimes counsel take and sometimes tea’

Sir, It is good to see the return of the zeugma (letter, Oct 13). My favourite is Alexander Pope’s description of Hampton Court Palace as the place where Queen Anne “doth sometimes counsel take and sometimes tea”.

John Butler

Canterbury

The local Scottish population helped to inform the choice of names for Erno Goldfinger’s buildings in east London

Sir, Oliver Moody (Oct 4) extends his criticism of Ernö Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower to its name, which sounds to him like “an orc-ridden outpost of Mordor”. The inhabitants of the Stirlingshire village of Balfron will, I am sure, be dismayed. The adjacent building, also by Goldfinger, is called Carradale House, after the village on the Mull of Kintyre of that name, and the third substantial block was named Glenkerry House after a hamlet near Selkirk. There was a marked Scottish element in the population of that part of Bow in the 1960s, resulting in the choice of Scottish place names.

Balfron, incidentally, was the birthplace of the 19th-century architect Alexander “Greek” Thompson, so perhaps the name-chooser in the GLC was trying to suggest a subtle and not wholly unjustified affinity.

James Dunnett

London N1

Surely a slight reduction in crop yields is a fair exchange for not polluting the environment?

Sir, In his piece (Oct 6) on the impact of the moratorium on neonicotinoid use on farming, Matt Ridley asserts that oilseed rape crops are now being devastated because they are no longer protected by these chemicals, and that in some regions up to 50 per cent of the crop has been lost.

His figures are wild exaggerations: only days ago Defra revealed that in reality just 1.35 per cent of the crop has been lost. If that is the price for not polluting the environment with highly persistent neurotoxins, I suggest it is one we should live with.

Professor Dave Goulson

School of Life Sciences,

University of Sussex

Hampton Court Palace is where Queen Anne ‘doth sometimes counsel take and sometimes tea’

Sir, It is good to see the return of the zeugma (letter, Oct 13). My favourite is Alexander Pope’s description of Hampton Court Palace as the place where Queen Anne “doth sometimes counsel take and sometimes tea”.

John Butler

Canterbury