ALTHOUGH being heir – or spare – to the British throne has clearly never been all it is cracked up to be, one might still have believed that Princes Charles and Andrew, at least in their youth, must have been among the most eligible bachelors on the planet. This is especially the case as, joking apart, neither is particularly thick nor physically or socially repugnant.

How come, therefore, given the fact that they did not even have their options confined to the aristocracy, they ended up marrying arguably the two daftest young ladies in the realm?

DAVID DIMENT, Riverside Court, Oxford