In defence of Dawn Butler

Though not quite as scandalous as the Zinoviev letter, a lot of flack has been flying around the internet over the last couple of days with reference to what we shall term ‘the Obama letter’, the letter hosted on up-and-coming MP Dawn Butler’s website which is signed by Barack Obama.

Unity has been kind enough to provide us with a Photoshop analysis of what went up on the website, but it seems rather inconclusive.

We thought that all of this prompted a bit of further investigation, so we went to Brent to have a chat to the team behind Dawn to find out what exactly happened. Not only did we interview the team members who were meant to be behind all of this malarkey, we also took a look at the scan of the letter itself. But we don’t have a copy though, I’m afraid, so I’m afraid Unity is going to have to trust us on this.

The artifacts around the signature on the page pretty much replicate everything else on it. The original scan is covered in them; not just the portcullis logo, but also the words. This is either a problem with the settings on Dawn’s scanner, or her office staff have somehow compressed the picture.

We went on to ask one of Dawn’s staff members how the situation with regard to the letter had unfolded. Apparently Dawn’s team had already asked and obtained a quote from Obama’s people prior to them knowing that she would meet him and that his people were more than happy to give a quote to the first black female MP to ever serve in a British Government.

Now this is the boring part: they were told at very short noticed that she would be meeting the now President during his whistle stop visit to the UK, and say that as soon as they knew she was meeting him, they printed off the quotes ready for him to sign. They used the letterhead of the parliamentary crest to print it on as it was in the printer at the time but later removed this from the website when they became aware (presumably via Iain Dale) that it was actually present.

There were two slightly different statements signed by Mr Obama (yes, they were actually signed by him), one of which was for press purposes, and another for communicating with constituents.

The team acknowledge that the staff member responsible forgot to edit the portcullis out of the picture and had been planning to do this anyway, so that website visitors would look at the content of the note rather than the crest.

OK, so slightly slapdash stuff, but the mistake was an innocent one, and has now been rectified.

We’re often tempted to distrust politicians because they are politicians. This can be healthy, but it often leads us to unreasonably assume the worst. This is often not fair. In this particular case, we’re not even talking about the politician, but a member of her staff who simply made a mistake.

It’s a lot more boring when we find stuff like this out, but it’s encouraging too.