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10 September 2006: A letter signed by a number of PPSs and a junior minister triggered the crisis. A couple of days before the letter was delivered, that minister traveled 300 miles to a Scottish hotel and then made an hour-long car trip to Gordon Brown's house "to drop off a present" for the Brown baby.

They played with the baby and didn’t talk politics. That's the line. So, Brown denies any knowledge of the letter. Or does he, actually? When Andrew Marr asked him whether he knew, he replied: "There were rumours about all sorts of things that were happening in the course of that week. If anyone asked me about the contents of that letter I would have said it was completely ill-advised."

That isn't a straight forward denial, notice. Conditional clauses are always a sign of linguistic evasions in the new Labour grammar.

This is what he's said about the resignations:

"Any suggestion that I or those acting for me were directly involved in this is absolute nonsense."

It is possible for forensic linguists to show how this statement could be correct. But they will charge overtime.

More straight forwardly, Brown said the idea that "personal tension" between himself and the prime minister had prompted an argument in their Wednesday meeting in Downing St was "completely wrong". When he talks with clarity we can see what he says is obviously untrue.

But may I suggest a variation? Word's spellcheck dictionary can be modified so that whenever the word 'Brown' is typed it is automatically changed to 'that **** Brown'. 

An obsessive anorak with time on their hands - assuming such a person exists in Downing Street - might doctor the dictionaries of many machines with many variations. 

PS: A LATE-NIGHT ADDITION It seems the correction field in Word's auto-correction facility is capacious. I've fixed mine so that every time someone types "Gordon" it corrects to the current Downing St line-to-take: "That autistic, bellowing, mendacious **** whose head I'd like to tear off every time he gets out of the bath with thirty four pints of own-brand gin streaming out of his enema-hole . . . ". Who knows how much more it would have taken? I felt things were getting out of hand, so quit.