The Hindu : International : Misleading doodles

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Wednesday, Feb 02, 2005

International

International

Misleading doodles

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, FEB. 1. So, whodunnit? The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair? Or the Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates?

Well, for about a week, it was thought to have been Mr. Blair as experts pored over the clues purported to have been left behind by him, to portray him as an "aggressive, unstable man who is feeling under enormous pressure."

One even suggested that judging from the supposed evidence, there was "more than a hint of megalomania about him which I haven't seen before.''

But, on Sunday, Downing Street decided that it had had enough of speculation and issued a statement saying that Mr. Blair had nothing to do with it.

Actually, it had been the doing of Mr. Gates and — not for the first time — the British media had got things wrong.

It all started when a Daily Mirror journalist, covering the World Economic Forum in Davos, happened to stumble on a notepad from a session attended by Mr. Blair, Mr. Gates and the former U.S. President, Bill Clinton, among others.

The notepad was full of doodles and, inexplicably, the journalist assumed that it was a bored Mr. Blair who had been "doodling" while appearing to listen to his co-panellists.

The Mirror splashed the story with an analysis by a graphologist who gave the opinion that the author of the jottings appeared to be a man "struggling to concentrate."

It was picked up by other newspapers, including The Times, The Independent, and the Evening Standard with comments from their resident graphologists, all painting a rather alarming picture of the Prime Minister's state of mind.

Downing Street said it was "astonished" that no newspaper bothered to check its facts "particularly as it was obvious to anyone the handwriting was totally different (from Mr. Blair's)."

Red-faced journalists pleaded what The Times called "bandwagon defence'' in blindly following The Mirror report.

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