I have nothing but sympathy for Jacqui Janes. I can’t begin to imagine what she’s going through. No parent should have to bury their child, but it must be near-unendurable to wonder whether more could have been done to save Jamie Janes’ life.
I’d love to know if the Sun has passed money to Mrs Janes. I don’t begrudge her it, but if the PM called me up out of the blue, I doubt I’d have the presence of mind to record the conversation. It’d take me a minute or two of fiddling with the phone to work out how to do it. Unless, of course, I’d been primed to do it by person or persons unknown.
I think putting a private letter in the press is a little tasteless. I do wonder how this ended up in the Sun’s hands; was it sent from Mrs Janes’ initiative or were the Sun speaking to each bereaved family, just on the off chance?
It’s no great secret that Gordon Brown is visually impaired and doesn’t write particularly legibly. Perhaps he should have rewritten the letter; perhaps not. If it has be checked by someone else, it probably would have been rewritten; there’s the rub. Instead of the PM’s honest & personal feelings, future letters will be drafted, scrutinised and typed up by a Wykehamist and then just signed by the PM, with all trace of human emotion and fallibility erased lest it end up on the front page of the gutter press.
The Sun seems to be using the anger occasioned by the loss of a son and soldier to score party political points. That dishonours his memory.
xD.
UPDATE 2150 – lots of other people have expressed similar sentiments to me, but there are a couple of particularly apposite posts by Bob Piper that I’d like to flag up. One is also called Exploiting Grief; the other is a fill-in-the-blanks form from 1916 that passed for a letter of condolence.