12 FEBRUARY 1977, Page 18

Comparisons

Sir: When the Daily Mail—once a great newspaper—follows the Daily Express to the dinosaur's graveyard, someone seeking a deeper cause for the long decline may dig up David English's article (29 January) from your files, and much will be made clear. The neurotic, not to say narcissistic, obsessions of Fleet Street editors and proprietors are boring to their readers. The childish crowing of your contributor is more suited to a brochure of his advertising department than to the columns of a serious journal. To invite comparisons between the 'new' Daily Mail, and the 'new' Daily Express (or between the 'old' Mirror and the 'new' Sun) is like asking the consumer to tell Stork from Stork, Ian F. H. Lord Carmel, Chelsfield Lane, Orpington