I worked for Margaret Thatcher for the two years before 1979 as her correspondence clerk. She was always very particular about replying in her own hand to people in serious distress. Like Gordon Brown, she worked late, making the day fit her work rather than the other way round; and it was never too much for her to spend half an hour more in the small hours on a pile of letters of comfort or consolation — letters she was unexpectedly good at penning, the warmth she often seemed to lack emerging in her emphatic, blue-felt-tip hand — with lots of underlining.

The only difference I can see between her letters and Mr Brown’s to Jacqui Janes, the mother of the dead soldier, is that her handwriting was clearer, and that if she had misspelt the name of the deceased she would not have tried to correct it, but ripped the letter up and started again. We, her staff, saw her letters before we dispatched them, but I cannot remember ever needing to suggest a correction.

But none in her small, close-knit, loyal team, would have hesitated. I can easily imagine Caroline Stephens, Diane Stevens, Susie Shields or Alison Ward saying: “Er, Mrs Thatcher, the name you got wrong there and corrected was that of the dead soldier. Can we get you a fresh sheet of headed notepaper — just in case you had a moment . . ?”

I do just wonder whether Mr Brown’s staff would dare.

Only connect

I listened this week to The Sun’s recording of the Prime Minister’s conversation with Mrs Janes about his handwritten letter of condolence. I admired her ferocious and informed attack on the lack of equipment for our Armed Forces in Afghanistan, but as I listened to Mr Brown’s painful attempts to make headway, I experienced what is for me a new, strange and unsettling sensation: sympathy for Gordon Brown.

I’ve watched, at close quarters, our past four prime ministers in their dealings with the public, so I can compare. I think Mr Brown handled that conversation (which it was right and good of him to undertake) as well as we can possibly expect any politician to handle it, in the circumstances. Tony Blair would have infuriated Mrs Janes: he would have been too slick, tried to blind the bereaved mother with science, then gone all schmaltzy over the death. Mrs Thatcher would have been absolutely hopeless, becoming coldly emphatic about arithmetic, or helicopter technology. John Major is the only PM I can imagine handling that phone call better than Brown.

As I listened, unexpectedly moved by both Mrs Janes and Mr Brown and their desperate inability to connect, I remembered visiting a constituency couple, as their MP, after they lost their son in the Falklands conflict. They were beyond consolation or — to be frank — reason. I just had to brace myself and take the force of it, trying to stammer out arguments they were obviously not disposed to hear. Broadcast on YouTube, the exchange would have made me look tongue-tied and clumping.

Sound logic

BBC News Channel call. Could I do a quick interview? I’m at Broadcasting House, I reply, in central London. I’ll pop into a studio there. Embarrassed silence ... “You’re not going to believe this . . .” They spent squillions to rip BH apart, but couldn’t find room for a single television camera. BH is for radio, you see. Thus do behemoths ossify, and die.

Justwhingeing

This is going to cost me. If I go ahead and write it, then a good friend who has just explained how to sponsor her for charity will guess what triggered my graceless little moan. So I’m doubling what I promised (she’s a wonderful person who deserves tremendous support) in order to show this isn’t personal ...

But (gulp) ... am I just being silly, or do others too have to suppress a very slight and entirely unfair irritability at being directed by a friend’s e-mail to the justgiving.com link to sponsor them? Justgiving is a brilliant concept. It saves the donor the time and bother of sending a cheque. It saves the recipient the embarrassment of chasing debts. Nor is it in any sense sleeve-tugging because you’ve already decided you want to give. In this, it’s not unlike internet wedding-list links to a department store.

Yet both, by introducing a sort of mechanism — by waving you away, as it were, to a third party who’ll sort out the details — seem in some indefinable way to break the link with the person you’re obliging. I felt the same when, as an MP, I had been asked (and was honoured) to take a presentation stilton to Buckingham Palace as a wedding gift for Prince Charles and Lady Diana. I rang the palace. A functionary told me to leave it at a depot-like address nearby, with a note attached so the letter of thanks could be arranged.

Well what did I expect? Prince Charles meeting me at the gates and gushing with gratitude? Of course not. The depot was simply a practical way of dealing with a deluge of gifts from the public. But ... oh, I don’t know; I can see I’m being ridiculous, so I’ll stop.

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