Personal letters

There is something hugely distasteful in the Sun's exploitation of a mother's grief this morning to take a political pop at Gordon Brown. It would surely have been far easier for the PM to have topped and tailed a typewritten letter that had been properly spellchecked by his staff.

Because he has decided - honourably - to write the letters himself in a handwriting that Sun journalists and editors must know to be authentically his, down to the poor spelling, we are treated to an excruciating example of the lobby at its worst. Gordon has never had Tony Blair's sureness of touch in dealing with such matters. But on this occasion, he was trying to do the right thing. As Iain Dale says, we should cut him a little slack for that.