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Doodle mix-up confuses Blair with Gates

After handwriting analysts said prime minister's "not a natural leader," media alerted to note's true author.

Reuters
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When a sheet of paper covered in doodles was found on U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair's desk at the World Economic Forum, handwriting experts delighted in analyzing it, concluding that the prime minister was stressed and under pressure.

Experts who examined the tangle of boxes, circles, loops and notes on debt and trade variously described Blair as "struggling to concentrate" or "not a natural leader" or "frustrated and tense."

But there was a problem.

The doodles, it later transpired, had nothing to do with Blair but were, in fact, the work of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who shared a table with Blair at the summit.

"Somebody from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has said that the notes are from Bill Gates rather than from Tony Blair," a spokesman from Blair's Downing Street office said Monday.

"We were surprised nobody bothered to ask us about this when the paper was made public last week, because the writing is obviously not the prime minister's," he added.

Psychologists and graphologists drafted by a number of British newspapers even noted how the prime minister's handwriting had changed for the worse since he first was elected to the post in 1997.

"We look forward to psychologists reassessing their conclusions of how these characteristics ascribed to the Prime Minister equally apply to Mr. Gates," the Downing Street spokesman said.