It has long been my belief that whereas the quality of gentiles drawn to Judaism is very high (Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, myself), the dregs are drawn to Islam. And leaving aside the dozy broads who gravitate to it for kinky reasons after watching one too many Turkish Delight ads (Vanessa Redgrave, Lauren Booth), there is something about this religion which attracts the very weakest of Western men.

We think of those often half-witted types who learn to build a bomb online. Then there are the imam-huggers of the left who never met a wife-beating mad mullah they didn’t like. A lot of the reason left-wing men seem to have so much time for Islamism is to do with suppressed feelings of resentment towards the march of feminism, which they could never in a million years admit to. Why, last year it was reported that the Yorkshire Ripper himself was about to take his place in this merry band.

This chain of fools would not be complete, of course, without its crowning clown, the Prince of Wales, whose liking for strolling around his ‘Islamic garden’ wearing a dishdasha and wittering on about wanting to be ‘Defender of Faiths’ have oft made me sing ‘God Save The Queen’ with especial emphasis. In the past I have ventured the opinion that he is fond of Islam because its monarchs are free to divorce unwanted wives at a whim. But a letter that came to light this week, written to his mentor Laurens van der Post in 1986 after a tour of Arab states, suggests that mistrust of Jews may be another reason for the heir apparent’s Islamophilia. Here are the humbuggy highlights:

‘Tried to read a bit of the Quran on the way out and it gave me some insight into the way they [Arabs] think…’ (That ‘tried’ really inspires confidence, doesn’t it?) ‘Much admire some aspects of Islam — especially accent on hospitality and accessibility of rulers…’ (Damn human rights — here’s a whole roasted sheep, get stuck in.) ‘The influx of foreign Jews, especially from Poland, has helped to cause great problems…’ (Are Britons allowed to get upset about the influx of Poles, or is it just an Arab privilege?) ‘Surely some US president has to have the courage to stand up and take on the Jewish lobby?’ (A classic anti–Semitic trope which conveniently ignores the fact that the world has been in thrall to the Arab oil lobby for decades.)

Little wonder that Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, described the note with classic Anglo-Jewish understatement as ‘unsettling, to put it mildly’.

It is understandable that someone who got a B in history and a C in French at A-level, yet was still accepted at Cambridge because of who his parents are, would feel antipathy towards the Jews, the ultimate clever and self-starting race: 22 per cent of Nobel prize winners are from only 0.2 per cent of the world’s population. It’s completely comprehensible that this most Marie Antoinettish of monarchs-in-waiting, forever yearning for a time when food was fresh and women were treated as a cross between children and livestock, would yearn for a bit of noble savagery.

Still, this is such a strange and creepy missive — the assumption that reading a few lines of the Quran gave him ‘insight’, the away-with-the-djinns reference to the ‘accessibility of rulers’. But it takes a truly ill-informed mind to bypass the horrendous historical events which drove so many European Jews to leave the lands they had lived in and contributed to so magnificently for centuries and ship out to a sliver of ancient homeland.

The letter ends on a horrible ‘humblebrag’, as I believe the young folk have it. ‘I must be naive, I suppose!’ By this, the Prince of Wales is suggesting that he sees the world with the clear eyes of a questing child, one undazzled by Jew-gelt, presumably. But my dictionary defines the word naive as ‘showing a lack of experience, wisdom or judgment’ — and I’m far keener to trust my dictionary than a man who received the finest education money can buy and still couldn’t manage one grade A. So for once, the clown prince and I agree about something.