Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 18 June 2011

Mr Brown’s writing

issue 18 June 2011

Mr Brown’s writing

In those secret documents in the Daily Telegraph, Tony Blair wrote ‘Do not copy’ on one page, to limit dangers of a leak. Gordon Brown needed no such precaution, because of his secret weapon: illegibility.

I am not making fun of Mr Brown, who has only one eye that works, and that not very well. But his thick marker-pen marginalia have a rare indecipherability. Like Linear A, some may never be cracked. It is not only that his letters are ill-formed, though they are — so that two scribbled words look like long termum. The U, however, turns out to be I and S, both with much the same shape and joined at the bottom.

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