WHAT MATTERS - DECENCY OR HANDWRITING?

ANYONE who has received a hand-written letter from Gordon Brown knows two things. It will be hard to read but it will also be sincere - and, for most, the scrawl and the mis-spellings make the sentiment more personal.

That is why the Prime Minister is ‘mortified’ by the furore caused by his well-meaning letter to bereaved mother Jacqui Janes on the death of 20-year-old Guardsman Jamie Janes.

In what has become the pattern for his Premiership, yet again he finds himself pilloried for trying to do the decent thing and a week that saw him launching important government initiatives on national and international issues, has been dominated by his perceived defects and his own complex character.

Because of reservations about how a mother’s grief and Brown’s physical disadvantage have been exploited for crude political motives, public opinion seems to have swung in support of him on the letter and the excruciatingly embarrassing follow-up phone call.

But there will be an inevitable after-effect to what his own circle admit is a public relations disaster as people ponder failures for which he is ultimately responsible and the confusion and doubt about why our troops are dying in Afghanistan.

My own interest should be declared: in front of me is one of the now-legendary letters on 10 Downing Street notepaper, with words that seem to be stabbed onto the surface in thick black ink. It says: “Great to hear of sucess of your treatment.”

What should I have done? Sent it back in a fit of pique at the missing ‘c’ in ‘success’? It mattered more that the Prime Minister had taken the trouble in the midst of international and domestic crisis to pen a private note, at a time when the encouragement of friends and well-wishers meant a great deal.

Alastair Campbell (who was, to put it mildly, always an arm’s-length colleague of Brown’s) has recalled the letter he received when his father died: “He didn't have to, but he did. Some of the words are a bit difficult to read. 'Alastair' with three ‘A’s looks suspiciously like 'Alistair' with two ‘I’s.

“But it talks about his feelings for his father and his feelings when he died and it was a nice gesture at a difficult time for me and my family. Given all the other pressures on a Prime Minister's time, that meant something.”

Why bother?

In the light of the bitter reaction from Mrs Janes and the cynical manipulation that followed, with no credit given for good intentions, it would be easy to say: “Why bother?” However, the affair will not stop Gordon Brown writing individual letters to the relatives of soldiers killed in action (although it is to be hoped more care will be taken with the details).

It seems to be forgotten that Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair both wrote individually to the families of the British soldiers who died in the Falklands and Iraq – and both received some angry responses from families who did not accept that their loved ones had been killed in worthwhile wars. Those who received letters from Blair were outraged that he wrote justifying their sons’ sacrifices, long after his ‘weapons of mass destruction’ claim had been disproved.

Convention says British soldiers die in the service of their Queen and it  has been suggested such letters should be written by Her Majesty. But it is not her job and no-one believes such letters would be anything other than stiffly formal expressions of condolence and gratitude from the head of state.

The PM is not ‘commander-in-chief’ like the US President but he is the head of the government that sent them to war and is responsible for seeing that they have the arms and equipment to do the job. He did not ‘inherit’ from Blair our increasingly bloody involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan; he was a leading member of the collective government which took the decisions and the Chancellor who found the finance.

With Brown, however, the contact with the bereaved is more than a mere Prime Ministerial gesture. He genuinely believes their sacrifice – and the suffering of their bereaved families – merits more than the ritual roll-call of the recently dead he has to read out every week in the House of Commons.

Gordon Brown once told me of the impression made on a young boy by the procession of hard-luck cases to the kitchen door of the manse, including ‘the bereaved and the troubled’: “I suppose it's not a bad training for politics.”

It is also in line with the concept of duty learned from his father. Church of Scotland minister Rev. John E. Brown, preached sermons on ‘Doing More Than Others’, in which he said: “Privilege brings responsibility … we have to be above pettiness and go the extra mile in service, doing that something more which may cost us much.”

If the motive was worthy, however, the execution left a great deal to be desired. It is easy to see how an outsider like Mrs Janes would be taken aback by what looks like a hastily-scrawled note; those around the Prime Minister fail to realise that the fact we have a partially-sighted Prime Minister is not all that widely appreciated.

Eyesight

To Brown, his barely-legible handwriting, the result of the loss of one eye in his teens, is a fact of life. There is a perhaps naïve belief that people will understand it is an obstacle that he has had to overcome and accept the effort he is making.

When speculation about his eyesight reached its height six weeks ago, he said in a TV interview: “I feel I have done absolutely everything to show people I can do the job even with the handicap I have had as a result of a rugby injury.”

However, that does not excuse the mis-spelling of a dead hero’s name – even less, the failure to correct what seems like a basic failure of courtesy. As I say, the other twenty (count ‘em) doubtful words are more understandable and could be the result of a tired man writing with his usual thick black felt-tip pen and failing to pick up the errors.

Letting that letter go to the post was a miscalculation that would not have happened under previous regimes. It is impossible to imagine Alastair Campbell or Bernard Ingham looking at such an error-strewn missive without tossing it back and saying “That just won’t do, Prime Minister” (or something more forceful).

The difference is that there is no-one in his team in the Number Ten bunker with the licence or the courage to do that. By all means, he should continue to do the decent thing and send understanding messages in his own handwriting - but he must be big enough to admit his vulnerability and allow someone to make sure no accidental offence is caused.

The other Brown difficulty is that Scotsmen do not do emotion very well – ask any Scotswoman. The transcript of his 13-minute telephone call to an understandably emotional Mrs Janes, voicing her belief that her son’s death was preventable, shows him trying to be sympathetic but appearing defensive and stuttering.

He uses the word ‘sorry’ eleven times to little effect, whereas the smoother, more touchy-feely Tony Blair would have charmed and soothed her with promises that her every grievance was being dealt with.

The tragedy is that Brown knows the anguish of a parent who loses a child, which he tried to communicate in his letter: “I know that words can offer little comfort in a time of grief …”

In his remarkably revealing news conference in Number Ten the following day, he discovered the words he failed to find talking to Mrs Janes and journalists present were moved by his assertion that he does "feel the pain of those who'd lost loved ones".

In a clear reference to the death of his own baby daughter Jennifer, he pointed out: "I'm a parent who understands the feelings when things go dreadfully wrong".He added: "I understand very well the sadness she feels, and the way she has expressed her grief is something I can also clearly understand. I do feel the pain of people who are grieving, I understand the sadness and the anger sometimes of people who have lost loved ones ."

"I wanted to say that during my conversation with her but thought I could not really do so because I do not know her, that when there is a personal loss as deep and immediate as she has experienced it takes time to recover. That loss can never be replaced, you have got to take every day at a time."

Dirty election

There are many people who will not believe in the sincerity of Brown’s feelings, refuse to accept his apologies and sneer at what they see as a politician’s attempts at damage limitation. The Janes letter affair is a reminder, if he needed one, that the 2010 general election campaign is now on – and it will be the dirtiest, bloodiest political fight of modern times. The question is whether Gordon Brown has the stomach or the stamina for that.

It was comprehensible that a mother with a sense of unbearable and, in her eyes, unnecessary loss should take offence at a clumsy letter. It was something else for her to hit the ‘record’ button when the Prime Minister came on the phone (something for which I am not sure I have the technological know-how) and then make the recording available to the one newspaper that would make the most merciless use of it.

The mother said:  “'I felt Jamie gave me the strength somehow and I know he would have been so proud.” Would Guardsman Janes really be proud to know that his memory has become a pawn in a political media game?Labour now know the real worth of the years of Blairite flirtation with the Murdoch empire.

Brown was right not to embroil himself in rebuttal; as George Bernard Shaw said: "I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it."

In this age of personality politics, he can now be sure that nothing will be off-limits to his political enemies. The media are agog to find the memorable make-or-break confrontation like the on-air clash between Diana Gould and Margaret Thatcher over the sinking of the Belgrano or Tony Blair being challenge by Sharron Stone over the quality of cancer treatment her husband was receiving or even John Prescott’s punch-up.

Mrs Janes finds herself part of that personalisation of the political fight and Gordon Brown is being made the embodiment of his government’s inability to give satisfactory answers to the hard questions more and more people are asking as the coffins are flown back from Afghanistan: Why are British troops there? What do their deaths have to do with our security at home? What is the exit strategy?

Remarkably, as the blogosphere shows only too luridly, no other Prime Minister has provoked such strong feelings among the electorate. It is not just his politics, but also his character and his Scottishness that trigger extreme prejudice, especially south of the border where the anti-Labour, anti-Brown vote is stronger.

All parties are equally culpable, as the Glasgow North-east by-election showed in the highly personal attacks that were made, particularly on the hapless SNP candidate. It is a problem for modern politics – and one on which the parties should reflect before going over what could be a watershed.

In the wake of the expenses scandals, the public opinion of politics and politicians has never been lower. Deference to those in high office is dead, honesty is questioned, motives are derided and private lives are laid bare.

In the coming campaign, it should be possible to criticise politicians in a robust and open way but there should be a point of decency beyond which opponents do not go. Instead, recent events show it is more likely that British politics will get down in the gutter.

What does that mean for Gordon Brown? This week has been another wobble on the rocky road of his Premiership and has given more strength to those, not least within his own party, who have been predicting he will not survive to fight the 2010 election.

First, there was talk of finding ‘an honourable way out’ after his second anniversary last June; then, a showdown at the party conference in September; now, a sudden announcement in the Christmas recess.

As far as Brown is concerned, it is all the usual meaningless Westminster village fever and ferment; he has no intention of a humiliating resignation to be remembered as Labour’s shortest-serving PM.

He admits: "I accept I have to do better in the presentation area. I've got my strengths and I've got my weaknesses. I could present our message a lot better. I'm actually shy by nature rather than extrovert, someone who feels that your actions should speak for themselves, but that's not the way politics works these days."

A party leader on the ropes takes comfort where he can find it. He is encouraged by the numbers who sympathise with him over the machinations of the Janes affair and by Labour’s Glasgow North-east by-election victory with which he associated himself – even though a Labour defeat was unthinkable. He actually believes that a fair-minded electorate will give him his due for coping with global economic crisis.

Gordon Brown is in no doubt that he will be the Leader presenting Labour’s message in the 2010 general election. He might even let you have that in writing …