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.
But Mr Brown’s handwriting also shares something with that of the Revd Dr William Spooner — anticipation. He jumps the gun, so that in writing immediately the ‘l’ is merely continued below the line as if it were the tail of the ‘y’. This can produce the impression of inability to spell. Thus, on a memorandum from Tony Blair he wrote: ‘mudled’. Mr Brown knows how to spell muddled. He just got on to writing the ‘l’ before he had finished with the ‘d’s. In 2009 he got into trouble with similar hiccups in a letter to the mother of a dead soldier.
Mr Brown’s great achievement is to carry over illegibility into typescripts. One page is headed: ‘ibrown has to sweout own agenda blair suppriting it.’ Bearing in mind the layout of a typewriter, suppriting is meant, not for surprising, but for supporting. I and O are next to one another, and he hit R first in error. I’m still not sure why he typed ibrown. Perhaps one of the many bananas he ate each day fell on the typewriter.
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