Once again ...

... I appear to be at odds with the rest of the blogosphere.

Now, it is true that the Gorgon is blind and hand writing is a very difficult process for him. And that makes his determination to hand write a letter admirable. He could so easily have had someone type up something and then just sign it. Or rubber stamp it, as they did in the old days.

But we have an entire apparatus of government that sits at his side. Could nobody have checked the fucking thing before sending it out? This is a letter of personal condolence, for fuck's sake. Did people think that just because it's from a blind cunt of a Prime Mentalist that it would excuse all the mistakes and crossings-out?

Instead of making the effort to check the fucking letter, he just bashes it off and sends it out. So the woman who receives it (who has just lost her son, remember) is rightly insulted by the cack-handed effort and does something that I find incomprehensible, but then this is modern Britain.

So now the fat fuck is on the front page over an entirely avoidable issue. And he calls her to apologise, whereupon he promptly proceeds to treat this raging woman (who has just lost her son, remember) like he treats his mates in the Commons. Firstly, he tries to shift the blame to the opposition:

My writing is maybe so badly (speech muffled) that you can't read it.

So, it's not entirely his fault, the silly moo couldn't read it, that's all.

Instead of sucking up the punishment, he then proceeds to tell her that she's wrong in the trivial matter of how many mistakes he made. Really. The man is so dysfunctional that he thinks he can browbeat an angry, grieving mother over a number, like she's Nick Clegg, stumbling over PMQs.

And then, for me, the money shot:

I've got the letter in front of me and if you feel that my writing was not right then I'm sorry about that.

Let's just look at all the ways that this is wrong:

• he apologises, not for the fuckups he made, but for the implication that she feels he shouldn't have written to her at all
• it's not directly related to the problem, it's the usual Brownian motion to deflect criticism by turning it into an implication of failure or spite by the person having a go at him
• he doesn't accept that she has any reason to be angry

It's his standard technique from PMQs. I'm surprised he didn't add something like "I won't take any lessons from someone who supported the illegal adventure in the Falklands".

And what staggers me is that nobody prepared him adequately for the phone call. They must have known or feared that she would tape it, surely? That is an astonishing display of hubris.

What little sympathy I have for Brown's medical condition is completely overshadowed by the fact that this is still our Prime Minister, at the head of a massive, bloated government. Is there no-one useful who can help him stop a disaster from turning into a catastrophe?

Update: Turns out CF is on my side and raises an interesting point:

... perhaps there's such a culture of fear and bullying in the bunker that no-one dared say anything, for fear of spending the rest of the day in A&E having fragments of a Nokia phone picked out of their skulls.

Update 2: I'm indebted to the Ambush Predator for bringing this slant to the story to my attention:

The evidence here is not the letter, but the story itself. That we can think/care about how our leader spells is proof enough that we need him out, a general election called, and a man capable of great oratory and gravitas appointed in his place.

(Although I am minded to point out that Hitler met those requirements as well.)

Update 3: John Miller points out in the comments that Gorgon had a copy of the letter when he phoned. So he or someone else photocopied it. You can't even pretend that he wrote it and bashed it into the envelope in a moment of human exhaustion or anything. The letter was handled before it was posted. Somebody could (and more importantly should) have stopped this all from happening.

I don't entirely agree with Oxford Spring. To me, this story is about monstrous incompetence around a small but important matter. It's not that Gordon is just a bloke on a walk - he's an arrogant fool let out without a leash. He's so used to bullying the simpering fucks around him that he's completely forgotten that there are people out there who won't put up with his shit just because he's a nasty, manipulative, duplicitous back-stabber.

That woman is currently in a place where it doesn't matter if you're the Prime Minister. In fact, she could reasonably blame him for the death of her son because he is spending money that should have paid for better equipment for her son, on dole bludgers and MP expenses instead. So instead of taking the punch and rolling with it, he chose to bicker with her.

All it would have taken for this to go away would be for him to have said: "I'd like to start by saying that I'm terribly sorry for sending that letter to you as it stood and I'm sorry that it didn't achieve the aim of expressing my sincere sympathies with you for your loss. I wanted to convey my respects and condolences in person and I hope that you can forgive me."

Even I wouldn't be able to fight that.

But no. He can't admit that he, James Gordon Brown, fucked up. Even his most recent apology (at today's press conference, I believe) was not an apology:

To all other families whom I have written to, I can only apologise if my handwriting is difficult to read.

Once again, he's trying to imply that it's all the silly moo's fault for not being able to read his handwriting.

Nuffink to do wiv me, guv!

Update 4: Once again, I find myself nodding in agreement with something CF says.