10 SEPTEMBER 1988, Page 24

Sir: I happened to be reading the last issue of

The Spectator (13 August) in the idle hours between deliveries doing night shift in the obstetrics department here. During that night I delivered six babies all heading for an untrustworthy existence of lying and evasion, moral and intellectual deadness in the private enterprise version of East Germany with thriving snoopers and police informers under which we live, according to David Pryce-Jones.

Actually, the baby boy born at 3.40 a.m. was a Turk, so Charles Glass will have to take care of his dreadful moral inheritance.

I have been getting The Spectator for more than eight years by now and have enjoyed every single issue. Yet I still fail to understand how a journal which actually takes a studied and detached view of European and World studies, relishes put- ting our country on the same level as Ceausescu's Romania or Kim Il Sung's North Korea just because a majority of the electorate thought that a man who had been qualified to head the United Nations for ten years was qualified to open agri- cultural trade fairs and music festivals the duties of an Austrian president.

I am probably bone-headed and Richard Bassett will be baffled by his inability to like me but if he can introduce me to the snoopers and informers and to the `aristoc- ractic elite' neither of whom I have ever met, I promise to give him many photo- graphs of really 'happy Austrians' — like the ones taken with our Polaroid camera last night.

Christoph Brezinka

Elisabethstrasse 12, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria