Gaunt gives Brown an English lesson

The Sun's Littlejohn-wannabe Jon Gaunt has been churning out a daily blog on the paper's website. His weekly column in the printed paper was dropped by new editor Dominic Mohan so we get a dose of his ignorant, 'I ain't no racist but...'- type views online instead.

His Monday blog attacks Gordon Brown over the letter to a dead soldier's mother. At time of writing, it is noticeable that the story is well down the Sun's homepage. The Guardian are reporting the Sun's political editor was unsure about the tone of the coverage and the comments left on the story by readers are more sympathetic to the Prime Minister than the Sun probably hoped.

Gaunt begins his outburst by calling him 'Brown Pants Brown', a woeful attempt to ape the woeful nicknames Littlejohn gives people. He refers to Brown as 'unelected' twice, which follows on from his Friday blog when he called him, errr, 'unelected'. Littlejohn also uses repetition instead of original thought and frequently calls Brown 'unelected'. And Littlejohn's column today also included an attack on the Prime Minister...

Brown is well known for suffering serious problems with his eyesight and having poor handwriting as a result. Gaunt says it was insult to all British troops that he was:

scribbling a note that even a five year old could have bettered.

Of course, Gaunt's blog is the absolute pinnacle of brilliantly written, grammatically correct English. Oh, no it isn't:

If they had spent as much time working out how we were going to finish this and the Iraq war as they did spicing up the dodgy weapons of mass destruction dossier perhaps less lads would be coming home in body bags.

'Less lads'?

Then there's this paragraph, about The X Factor:


Spot the missing apostrophe, the missing 'd', the missing capital 'T' and an erroneous capital 'T'. Like the rest of the blog, a few commas would help too.

However, hopefully that is a firm promise to go underground if 'Jedward' release a single. Because they surely will and then we could be spared Gaunt's tedious blogs and radio shows.

Oh, and his numerous errors, such as:
and:
and:
Would a five year old be able to better Gaunt's use of capital letters? Let's not forget, Gaunt is meant to be a journalist. He's meant to be able to write.

He also berates Brown for his spelling, saying he couldn't even:

be bothered to check the spelling of the lad's name.

Of course, Gaunt thoroughly proof-reads everything and would never, ever get any spelling wrong when it relates to dead soldiers. Would he?


'Wootten Basset'? Doesn't he mean Wootton Bassett? And surely it should be 'in' not 'at' Wootton Bassett.

Towards the end of his rant, amid a series of insults ('disrespectful buffoon', 'unelected, deluded fool') he adds that Brown:

has always exhibited disdain for our troops as emphasised by the 46 seconds he spent talking about them during his party conference speech.

He's criticising Brown for not talking about Afghanistan enough. Clearly Gaunt would never do such a thing. For example, in the 11 days since his blog began he has written about Afghanistan three times, and - being charitable - on two other occasions he's talked about poppies.

But that would be a lot less than the eight times he has written about something he clearly regards as more important: The X Factor.

Indeed, the Monday blog post has his views about Brown and Afghanistan sandwiched between two pieces about the tedious 'talent' show.

The Sun broke this story and has run with it - with help from their friends at Sky - so it was inevitable that their 'star' columnists would have their say.

But isn't it ironic that Gaunt accuses Brown of bad writing and spelling errors, while his own blog is so appallingly written?