Painting too deer

So the NGS is appealing to the public to help raise the remaining £750,000 required to secure Sir Edwin Landseer’s iconic painting The Monarch of the Glen for Scotland (your report, 17 February).

Sir Angus Grossart’s eloquent letter of 10 November last year stated that Dia-

geo , “a company capitalised at £52 billion”, was prepared to “part-gift” the painting for just under half its anticipated worth of £10 million (£4m), instead of making the altruistic – one might add, brand-promoting – gesture of gifting it to Scotland,whereithadbeenon long-term loan anyway.

Diageo seems to have remained quiet in respect of their reason for insisting on exacting this, by their standards, paltry sum. It is ridiculous that Scotland’s National Galleries is having to scrabble around for the remaining, in Diageo’s world, small change, backed by donations from other countries, who must think this is a scandal. Diageo chose not to reconsider their offer in November, so it is to be presumed that they will not waive the remaining £750,000 to be found by March – and they will be responsible for Scotland losing this iconic painting.

KATHRYN SHARP Blinkbonny Road, Edinburgh

QT balanced

It seems some of your correspondents (Letters, 20 February) are suffering from short term memory problems as the BBC Question Time from Glasgow consisted of a Labour member of the House of Lords appointed by Jeremy Corbyn, a Tory Secretary of State and a former Lib Dem spin doctor – unlikely SNP supporters despite the Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs Mark Littlewood’s comments that he can see “no reason why Scotland can’t take its own place as a proud independent country”.

Also, for a refreshing change, the audience was reasonable and constructive in their comments.

Claims that the panel was a sop to the SNP forget that each of the four previous Question Times from Scotland had a majority of panellists against self-government or a recent Cardiff School of Journalism report that 73 per cent of the statistics used by the BBC come from the Tory Party.

MARY THOMAS Watson Crescent, Edinburgh