John Reid and the font that gives the game away

John Reid, former Labour cabinet minister under Tony Blair and described by Jeremy Paxman as "an all purpose attack dog" has appeared on the General Election campaign trail.

Or rather, his signature has.

In a small, A5 letter to the constituents of Airdrie & Shotts, of which I'm one, our former MP invites us to vote Labour becuase:

Voting for the SNP in this election in order to kick the Tories out is a massive gamble. It could mean that Labour is not the largest party and the Tories get back in by the back door.

He then tells us:

If we vote Labour and elect Labour MPs, Labour will be the largest party and the Tories are gone.

Of course, we all know, thanks to the excellent work of Wings over Scotland, that the largest party only gets to form the government if it has more than half of the MPs in the House of Commons. In a hung parliament, where no party has more than half, then it clearly doesn't matter which party is largest - all that matters is which parties can form alliances so that their combined total of MPs is more than half the number of MPs in the House of Commons.

But the font used in this letter is strikingly similar to the font used in the purported letters from friendly, neighbourhood constituents encouraging people to vote Labour, as exposed by this article from Wings over Scotland.

The font is one found in Microsoft Word and is called Bradely Hand ITC and a brief description of it can be found here, which describes it as

...based on the handwriting of British designer Richard Bradley. ...and lends a personal touch to computer generated copy.

So it looks as though someone in Scottish Labour has been playing around with all the fonts in MS Word to find one that they believed would fool Scottish voters into thinking that Labour personally cared about them. Now they are using the same technique to send out letters purportedly from former Labour cabinet ministers.

However, given John Reid and Jim Murphy shared Irn Bru crates during the independence referendum, Labour's "attack dog" might actually have loaned a computerised image of his signature to Scottish Labour's campaign headquarters so they can print out anything they choose.

We doubt he actually wrote the letter or even knew anything about it.

Is this what Scottish Labour has become? A few people pouring over fonts to find just the right one that will appear friendly enough to constituents to make them vote Labour. We've heard of the air war and the ground war but now it looks as if Labour's last, desperate battle field is the font war.

I think they'll need more than fonts to avoid what Iain Macwhirter describes in the Sunday Herald as the oncoming "Nat-aclysm."

This is the full letter:

Have you received any letters recently written in Bradley Hand ITC, the font of deception of the Scottish Labour party? If so, do let us and the wider community know.

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