The furore, carefully stoked by The Sun tabloid, about UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s handwritten letter of condolence has revealed a shocking combination of misspelling and illegibility. Blamed on the loss of sight in one of his eyes and fading vision in the other, compounded by a natural tendency to slovenliness, the PM’s difficulties with the written word were not widely known until now.
Then the bereaved mother of a UK soldier killed in Afghanistan dismissed a letter addressed to the wrong name as a ‘hastily scrawled insult’ and quickly learned the art pf recording phone calls when the PM followed up with a bungled attempt to recover. The transcript was in The Sun next morning.
While one always makes allowances for anyone with a disability, one does begin to wonder how Number 10 manages to function when every written message from the leader of the country requires a team of graphologists to decipher it.
And that is what the backroom team in Downing Street have had to turn themselves into. Each morning, the Principal Private Secretary, the Assistant Principal Private Secretary, the Deputy Assistant Principal Private Secretary and assorted Private Secretaries, Assistant Private Secretaries and Deputy Private Secretaries, none of whom can type, pour over the lastest memos from the PM, like the priests at Delphi pondering the words of the oracle.
Mercifully, the PM is a man of few memos and most of those are one-liners.
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“OK, what’s he got for us this morning?”
“Well, I’ve had a first pass at it and I’ve got ‘Care we split camera positron only open it?’ Something to do with that atom-smasher thingy in Switzerland, do you think? Maybe we could ask someone from Science and Tech to nip round and have a look.”
“Hmm, I’m not sure. I thought it was ‘Canoe plot came reposition one rape, innit?’ though I admit the ending doesn’t sound at all likely.”
“No, Scots don’t say ‘innit’, at least not his generation. Though the rest of it sounds like it could be for MI5.”
“You know, I think it says ‘Crew ex-pilot cameo post on or E, for east, Rapier not?’ Rapier as in missiles, perhaps. Have we been selling these anywhere east?”
“So perhaps we quietly forward it to Defence and let them sort it out.”
[A telephone rings.]
“Yes, Prime Minister … your memo on European strategy? … Er, which strategy exactly, sir? … The Conservative Party joining the far right grouping in the European parliament, yes, sir, of course, sir … we’ll transfer it to the Leader of the House immediately, sir.”
“Ah, got it. ‘Can we exploit Cameron’s position on European rt, for right?’ Yes, you can sort of see it now. OK, that’s one out of the way. What’s next?”
“This one’s rather difficult. I’m guessing ‘Average plume cell tube remand millinery fashions.” He seems to have been a bit steamed up when he wrote this one, it’s very shaky.”
“Millinery fashions? What’s to get steamed up about?”
“Yes, I think you may be closer than me. I thought it was ‘Airing plane cello barmaid mild tiring failures’, which I admit is pretty hopeless.”
[The phone rings again.]
“Yes, Prime Minister … arranged what phone calls, sir? Like the one to Mrs Jones? I think you mean ‘Janes’, sir, you know, we passed it off as your handwriting. No, sir, ‘Janes’ with an ‘n’, not ‘James’. That was the mistake you made first time … I see, so having called one, you feel you will have to call them all. I understand, sir … yes, on it right away, sir.”
“We were miles off. Look at it again. ‘Arrange phone calls to bereaved military families’. It’s easy when you know, isn’t it?’
“Now this next one’s a real teaser since it almost seems to make sense. ‘Bottle milk spag cauli stuff in green jar wait rose.’ Almost sounds like a shopping list, doesn’t it?”
[This time the door to the PM’s study opens and the man himself appears.]
“Sarah just called me with some things to get and I jotted them down but can’t seem to find the list any more. I didn’t send it in here by mistake, did I?”
About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).
