THE PLANK NOVEMBER 10, 2009
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Meanwhile, in other Gordon Brown news, the P.M. is involved in a nasty public dispute with the grieving mother of a British solider killed in Afghanistan who didn't appreciate the misspellings in a handwritten condolence note Brown sent her. This is pretty much the definition of a no-win situation for a politician . . . and it makes me think that the worthwhile practice of handwriting condolence letters (something that Robert Gates does, as I learned in Crowley's terrific profile) is precisely the sort of thing that risk-averse political advisers will eventually put an end to.
3 comments
I swear, these days he's the Charlie Brown of politics, isn't he?
- Crock1701
November 10, 2009 at 12:45pm
There's something very wrong about the coverage of this. Isn't it incredibly likely that the fact that Brown is almost blind makes it difficult for him to hand write letters and that the mere act of writing it is a genuine personal attempt to recognize the service and sacrifice of the fallen. And the press response is to fan the flames of a row with an understandably distraught mother.
- twright
November 10, 2009 at 1:09pm
Reading the article (and as an otherwise intelligent, winning person with horrible, atrocious handwriting) I felt enormous sympathy for him and creeped out by the story. The entire conversation is taped and released to the tabloids, and he's desperately trying to offer real condolences and just gets hammered for it. I have a signed autoletter on my wall from Franklin D. Roosevelt, expressing condolences for my grandfather's sacrifice in World War II. It's not handwritten, and given the circumstances is possibly autopenned, but it demonstrates a real care and concern on the behalf of Mr. Brown to write a personal letter of condolence (and really, the Queen should be doing this too; as head of state she's the mother of the country, and really isn't doing much else during the day). It's disgusting Fleet Street brutalizing a good man and marching on a dead soldier and a mother's grief to do political dirty work.
- Crock1701
November 10, 2009 at 1:54pm