Apologies and Letters: Theodore Dalrymple explains why he feels sorry for Gordon Brown

Theodore Dalrymple is overcome with sympathy for the Prime Minister.

No one, I think, would take me for an admirer of Gordon Brown, much less an apologist for him; but in the matter of the letter that he wrote to Mrs Janes, mother of the soldier killed in Afghanistan, I feel sorry for him. He has become a victim of the ideological sentimentality so assiduously promoted by his odious predecessor, and now so fully a part of our national character.

The letter he wrote to Mrs Janes seemed to me a perfectly decent one. It was legible (perhaps, as a doctor, my standards of legibility are low); the sentiments expressed are decent, conventional ones, without the kind of extravagance that might lead you to suspect insincerity.

The offence of the mistake in the name - Mrs James instead of Mrs Janes - does not seem to me a hanging one. Mr Brown is a very busy man (would that he were less busy!) and the mistake is one that we could surely all envisage ourselves making, given the relative frequency of the two names.

The grief of Mrs Janes was perfectly understandable, of course; the loss of a child is like the loss of a world. But grief is not necessarily the midwife of truth, and some of the things that Mrs Janes said are simply not true. Surely only someone determined in advance to find the letter disrespectful would have found it so; one might even think that a hand-written letter from the Prime Minister was a sign of respect, when he could so easily have written nothing or have ordered someone else to do it on his behalf.

I simply do not believe that she found the letter difficult to read: or if she did, it says more about her reading ability than about Mr Brown's intentions. I read the letter without difficulty in facsimile form in a newspaper, which is unlikely to have improved its clarity, as I am sure did millions of others. Moreover, I could not find the twenty-five spelling mistakes that she claimed to find in it, unless one counts the slight ambivalence sometimes created by the Prime Minister's inelegant hand. I am afraid that Mrs Janes, worthy of sympathy as a grieving mother as she is, was not telling the truth.

Of course, Mr Brown could not say this because we live in a world of immaculate victimhood. He who exposes the mistakes or lies of a victim is now a barefaced villain. A spokesman for the Prime Minister is reported as having said of his subsequent telephone conversation with Mrs Janes that "He apologised for the letter and the way that she feels about the letter".

This is a weaselly way of putting things, but typical of our times, and now de rigueur. There is no reason why the Prime Minister should have apologised to Mrs Janes for the way she felt about the letter, unless the way she felt about the letter was reasonable - which it was not.

Then he might have apologised for having caused her distress, rather than for the distress that she felt (a subtle but important distinction).

In short, he had no reason, other than that of political expedience, to apologise to her. If anything, the apologies were due the other way round, from Mrs Janes to Mr Brown: first for having publicised a private letter, and second for having allowed or encouraged the dissemination of a private telephone conversation. We cannot complain of the intrusiveness of government and officialdom if we do not ourselves respect the very idea of privacy.

The weasel-words of the Prime Minister's spokesman are a symptom of the horrible elevation of emotion over thought in our culture. "I feel, therefore I'm justified," seems to be our neo-Cartesian credo. When, for example, someone complains unreasonably about something done in the National Health Service (and, God knows, there are enough grounds for reasonable complaint), one is supposed to be as apologetic as if there were something really to apologise for. Thus all apologies are created equal, and none is sincere.

I thought this disgusting, and the only time someone complained about me, to the effect that I had not been helpful in giving him a sick note, I replied, in writing, "Mr C…. is a drunk who beats his wife, and I'm not signing any sick certificate for him". I am glad to say that I heard no more from Mr C…., for what I said was true.

The points Mrs Janes made about the state of equipment of the British army are another matter. She was saying in forceful terms what many others have said, including American officers. But it seems to me that she could have brought these matters up in a different way, at a different time, and more forcefully because less obviously the consequence of immediate grief.

What she evidently did not consider was the overall effect or impression that she was creating. Let us leave aside the vexed question of whether British forces should be in Afghanistan at all, or that of what they are trying to do there: Mrs Janes herself believes that they should be there. And even those opposed to the whole business can hardly want the Taliban to win.

Did Mrs Janes not consider, therefore, that Taliban morale might be immeasurably improved by a row such as the one she has stirred up? What will the tribesmen think of an enemy that turns a single death into a public display of competing emotion? Will they not be encouraged to think that, if only they can bring about a few more such deaths, they will win? A military enemy that considers a few losses intolerable is, after all, not a very formidable one.

The mere fact, now known to the whole world in a way that it was not before, that the Prime Minister writes personally to the relatives of soldiers killed in action will encourage the Taliban greatly. An enemy so solicitous of the life each individual (a quality admirable in its own eyes) will surely be seen by Taliban as weak and vacillating, one that cannot stay the course.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. He is the author of the author of Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy and In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas.