UK Government Investments is still the majority shareholder (54.7%) in NatWest, so will it be basically taxpayers who’ll pay most of the £264m fine recently given to NatWest at Southwark crown court because the bank failed to spot that huge amounts of cash deposited in black bin liners might be a bit dodgy (Natwest fined £264m after taking deposits of laundered cash in bin bags, 13 December)?
Paul Tattam
Chinley, Derbyshire
• Susanne MacGregor (Letters, 13 December) tells only part of the Sir Omicron story. Anthony Trollope’s high-society physician is surnamed Pie – a play on the two neighbouring letters of the Greek alphabet: omicron and pi. Was Trollope presciently signalling the next Covid variant?
Michael Dunne
Brighton, East Sussex
• We puzzlers notice details, and I couldn’t help but notice that in your Wordsearch of 15 December, of all the 15 bands and artists from the 1980s, only one, the Pixies, included a member who was a woman.
Rachael Lukowska
Beckenham, London
• I fear for Pedanticus’s blood pressure when he reads the headline “Son calls the shots as king lays low” in your print edition (16 December).
Sue Jenkins
Thame, Oxfordshire
• As a friend once said to me: “Even an eider duck cannot lay down.”
Roger Bardell
Welwyn, Hertfordshire
• The penultimate letter above was amended on 19 December to correct the date of a print edition referred to in the cross-reference.
