AHEM. We have a confession to make. We have, not to beat about the bush, been had.

If you have read, in this and other newspapers in recent days, an uncomplimentary analysis of Tony Blair’s character based on doodles from his notepad at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, erase it at once from your memory. We, along with other titles of varying respectability, may have got the wrong man.

Graphologists enjoyed their most lucrative day’s work in years when a pad of scribbles was left behind on the platform after a press conference given by Mr Blair, Bill Gates, the Microsoft tycoon, and Bono, the Irish rock star.

From a few idle doodles, the experts were able to offer a thorough assessment of Mr Blair as an aggressive, unstable man under enormous pressure, struggling to keep his irritability under control. We do not profess to know how they do it, but we do know that Downing Street insisted yesterday that the scribblings were not the work of Mr Blair at all, but of Mr Gates.

We plead bandwagon defence. The story first surfaced on Friday in the Daily Mirror, whose last Editor lost his job for believing a set of staged photographs that purported to show British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. It was taken up by the London Evening Standard and by Saturday even The Independent had given over most of a page to an in-depth doodle study by its specially hired team of snake-oil analysts.

“He is not a natural leader, but more of a spiritual person, like a vicar,” The Independent’s team averred.

We also plead that Emma Bache, our own graphologist, entertained a few healthy doubts. Mr Blair’s writing, she thought, had changed noticeably since she last examined it. “There is more than a hint of megalomania about him which I haven’t seen before,” she said.

As for the Downing Street spokesman who denied his master’s involvement, he would say that, wouldn’t he? But he was quite insistent on the matter.

The spokesman expressed astonishment that no one had checked with No 10 whether the doodles were the Prime Minister’s, particularly as it was obvious to anyone that the handwriting was so different.

Mr Gates’s camp appeared supremely unconcerned, and had nothing to say beyond confirming that the doodles did, indeed, appear to belong to their man.

Surprisingly, there were no calls for the graphologists to explain how an unstable megalomaniac under enormous pressure became the world’s richest and most successful software entrepreneur, and a hugely generous charitable giver to boot.

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