Weirdness is in the eye of the beholder of course. But I think I’m on safe ground on this one.
Cast your mind over the many things Gordon Brown has and hasn’t done. Plenty to criticise. Plenty of criticisms made.
But what did The Sun wheel out yesterday? In amongst the story about his letter-with-spelling-mistakes to a dead soldier’s mother was this:
He also wrote the letter “i” incorrectly 18 times – mostly by leaving the dots off them.
Yes, verily – The Sun decided to criticise Gordon Brown for not dotting all his i’s. Let’s hope he crosses his t’s or we are all doomed.
As I said: weirdest criticism of Gordon Brown, ever – FACT.
Also one that, at best, leaves me with a rather distasteful feeling. Getting the dead soldier’s name wrong was a crass mistake. But using that as a hook to throw in this sort of weird criticism? That seems to me The Sun getting perilously close in to trying to exploit the tragic death for its own political ends.
P.S. If not dotting an “i” is a reason to criticise a Prime Minister, I look forward to The Sun report on the Shocking Secret Shame of Winston Churchill as evidenced by the surname in his signature. Not to mention the Hidden Horrors of Mrs Thatcher who was known to neither dot her i’s nor cross her t’s but instead go for composite splodges that left both the i and t shamefully wrong.
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5 Comments
Having just listened to the Sun’s ‘exclusive’ I actually think Gordon brown handled the call very well.
He was clearly willing to spend time talking to Mrs Janes even though she was clearly upset and he appeared to give her a lot of space to get her anger out.
Two other things struck me:
1 Before listening to the call there was an advert for a Family Guy DVD featuring a gag about horse sperm. Is this really appropriate?
2 Are Gordon Brown’s handwriting difficulties really a more important failure than the catastrophe that is our prescence in Afghanistan in the first place?
I was quite taken by the interview with an ex-prime ministerial aide on ITN. To paraphrase, to receive a hand-written letter from the PM – not a typed letter from some flunky – into which he has clearly put some time and thought, and which has not been style-read by the spin doctors, is something that we should look upon favourably.
However, he clearly has literary problems, probably owing to his poor eyesight, so naturally he will be demonised by the Sun .
This really is scraping the bottom of the barrel by the Murdoch press. You should see the way the Tory nutters are foaming at the mouth about this over on Mental Health News, sorry politicalbetting.com.
How many personal handwritten letters did Thatcher send during the Falklands conflict?
Looking around, the Sun is really getting an even bigger pasting for this then Simon Cowell from the public – even on its own comments board. The majority of comments I’ve seen seem to be saying that Brown is basically doing the right thing, and handwriting the letter actually makes it more personal.
As for the so-called spelling mistakes, the ones identified are words with “es” at the end (eg “condolences”) where it looks like the “e” is missing. My handwriting, like Brown’s, is pretty poor, and one of the things I often end up doing is merging the “e” and the “s” together so it looks like there’s no “e”. Yes, the guy has bad handwriting, but at least he took the time out to try.
the sun critiscising opthers for correcty use of language is deeply ironic