Blair launches a nutters' charter

The Sunday Telegraph ^ | 24 August 2003 | Stephen Pollard

[Tomalak]

I pity Tony Blair. The questioning he will face on Thursday from James Dingemans QC will most likely be polite, if firm and pressing. As he is about to discover, however, something much ruder, much less purposeful and much, much more stupid lies in wait for him when he has finished at the Royal Courts of Justice.

Last week, Downing Street launched a website through which we can all offer the Prime Minister whatever thoughts we wish to share with him: www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page821.asp. It sounds like a wonderful exercise in direct democracy. In reality, it will turn out to be a nutter's charter.

Last year, Mr Blair received more than one million letters. It is a fair bet - a certainty, in fact - that a good few hundred thousand of those were what is technically known as "green ink letters", from correspondents known to experts as "nutters".

Those letter writers, however, at least had to make the effort of putting down their point on paper, addressing an envelope to the Prime Minister, buying a stamp and wandering off to a post box. Not so with e-mail, which combines instant delivery with minimal effort. Given the ease of email, the number of nutters making contact with Mr Blair will soon start to look positively frightening.

I know from personal experience. I have had my own website - www.stephenpollard.net - for the past year. My in-box will never rival the Prime Minister's, but he has the advantage of a staff to deal with his. I must read everything which arrives from my site. I feel safe in revealing the existence of the site to discerning, intelligent Telegraph readers, knowing that any emails they send me would indeed be worth reading. Would that that were always so.

Since my site's title is "Never Knowingly Understated", you will appreciate that it is meant to be provocative. That seems to be working: I now receive around 50 emails a week in response. About two-thirds of those are mad.

That includes the usual anti-semitic rantings - my name, it seems, is not Pollard but Jew Boy - and the occasional rather implausible threat of violence ("We are coming to get you"). One fellow responded to a rant of mine against tennis - surely the most boring game ever invented? - with the almost sublime insult that "the only reason you hate tennis is because you are a fat bastard".

I had to concede that he had a point. Another chap - they are almost always men - told me that he so enjoyed my writing, he would let me in on a secret: Churchill was the Queen's father. As I said: nutters.

Mr Blair will have the luxury of being given a precis of his correspondents' views and need only respond to a random sample. I make it a rule to reply to mine, however batty. On Thursday I was asked by one correspondent where my "venomous anti-Islamic outbursts come from"?

I replied that I have never made a single such outburst. Aha! As he then informed me: "You are far too clever to explicitly state anything anti-Islamic in writing but we both know what your agenda is." It is the words behind the words which matter, you see.

I regularly receive emails which make Tolstoy appear a slacker in comparison: many thousands of words purporting to prove that we are all descended from inhabitants of the planet Zarg, or outlining an entire new structure for the global economy. I imagine that the Prime Minister already thinks that a large proportion of his fellow Brits are veering towards madness. The more comments he sees from his site, the more he is likely to be confirmed in that view.