With Friends Like These . . .

The Sun (of all papers) manufactures a controversy about . . . Gordon Brown.

The time line is telling. Brown, blind in one eye and of notoriously illegible handwriting (something I can say that I understand), pens a letter to the mother of a fallen soldier expressing sorrow over her son. The illegible scrawl could be interpreted as clumsy, hasty, and riven with sloppy spelling (including, allegedly, her surname). Jacqui Janes, the mother, with the help of The Sun, decry the obviously anti-military inclinations of the PM.

The story leads the news for a day. The PM phones the mum. The mum has a rant.

And it's conveniently on tape.

What is lost in this furor is the more important issue: the British services are under-equipped, and it's entirely possible that more helicopters in the theatre might have increased the probability that her son's life was saved.

Rather, what we have is a typically shrill manufactured tabloid critique of a Prime Minister that The Sun is already on record as not supporting.

But at least Rupert Murdoch regrets his papers' anti-Brown stance, a man he considers his friend.