Spare a thought for Mike Phelps of Somerset, a Daily Mail letters page correspondent dreading the prospect of having to sit through dreary World Cup fixtures such as 'Bongo Bongoland v the Former Soviet Republic of Bulimia'

In 1930, Fifa staged the inaugural edition of the World Cup, a festival of football bringing together 13 nations in the glamorous city of Montevideo. Meanwhile the Daily Mail was embarking on a decade which would see it rain editorial plaudits on both Adolf Hitler's Nazi party and Italy's fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

Eighty years on, the World Cup can no longer be contained within a single city, 32 teams now competing for the prize. Conversely, the Mail's horizons have, if anything, shrunk. Today, whichever goon edits the newspaper's letters page chose to run the missive above.

Whether anyone has the right to castigate Mr Phelps for his bilious and aggressively unpleasant personal opinions is a moot philosophical point. But what is certain is that the Mail and its letters editor should know better than to publish hate speech.

In their defence, however, Mr Phelps' letter does at least fit in with the general editorial tone of the page. The letter printed directly afterwards relates the tragic tale of a man from the Home Counties who has been forced to listen to a Northern Irish accent:

I can't understand the popularity of the woman on The One Show on BBC1 each evening [Christine Bleakley]. Her accent is almost indecipherable. Lord Reith must be turning in his grave.

Jonathan M Balcon

Tunbridge Wells, Kent

Nurse! Quick! Quintuple gin for Balcon!