YOUR correspondent (October 18) makes the excellent point that it is inconceivable that a responsible and competent minister would have dumped anything of a private nature into a public waste bin.

The Daily Telegraph reports that amongst others were letters containing a constituent’s NHS problems and personal details of an Equitable Life policyholder. Sounds like “of a private nature” to me.

And that’s before considering the correspondence with Andrew Tyrie MP of the Security and Intelligence Committee and the material relating to Pakistan and al-Qaeda.

So far Mr Letwin has actually been done a service by the media which has tended to make fun of the “unworldly intellectual” doing something daffy.

In fact, what we have seen is the tip of an iceberg – regular breaches of security, which would probably have had a civil servant subject to instant dismissal.

JR BURNS, Moorland Crescent, Upton