Gordon Brown was drawn into a politically embarrassing argument over equipment shortages in Afghanistan as he tried to placate the mother of a dead serviceman over his handwritten letter of condolence that misspelt her name.
As Labour tried to hit back against the Sun, claiming the paper was trying to orchestrate a campaign against the government, the tabloid today printed what it said was the transcript of a 13-minute phone call the prime minister made to Jacqui Janes on Sunday night, plus a recording of the call.
Brown told her that though "maybe my writing looks bad", he did not consider what he had written was "disrespectful".
But Janes, whose Grenadier Guardsman son Jamie died in Afghanistan last month, asked him how he would like it if one of his children, "because of lack of helicopters and lack of equipment", bled to death.
Janes recorded the call, in which Brown said "I don't want to argue with you" and told her he had his own strong feelings on the issue and wanted to offer his condolences.
At one point in the conversation, Janes said: "I can not believe I have been brought down to the level of having an argument with the prime minister of my own country."
Brown denied spelling Janes's son's name wrong in the letter, and blamed his poor handwriting rather than his spelling.
"My writing is maybe so badly [inaudible] that you can't read it and I'm sorry. But I have tried to write honestly and honourably about the contributions your son made and ... [inaudible] can't be read."
He denied letting troops down, saying he would not send anybody abroad unless they were properly equipped.
Last night, before the Sun published the phone recording, Lord Mandelson defended Brown, saying that, although the prime minister's handwriting was "not great", it was "unthinkable" that he would want to show any disrespect to Janes, or to any other bereaved relative.
The business secretary said that the story had to be understood in the "context" of the fact that the Sun had chosen to "campaign against Gordon Brown and Labour" in the run-up to the general election.
According to yesterday's Sun, Janes had only read the first few lines of Brown's before she "threw it across the room in disgust".
Brown, who writes a handwritten letter to the relatives of every serviceman killed in action, has notoriously bad handwriting. Some attribute this to his eyesight, which has been poor since a rugby accident in his teenage years left him blind in one eye.
The prime minister's handwritten letter opened "Dear Mrs James", and continued with a series of further spelling errors and a scribble through the final letter of the name Jamie.
Janes, 47, described the letter as "an insult" to her son, 20, who died in an explosion while on foot patrol in central Helmand province.
"He couldn't even be bothered to get our family name right," she told the Sun. "That made me so angry. Then I saw he had scribbled out a mistake in Jamie's name. The very least I would expect from Gordon Brown is to get his name right.
"The letter was scrawled so quickly I could hardly even read it and some of the words were half-finished. It's just disrespectful."
Brown said in a statement yesterday: "To all other families whom I have written to, I can only apologise if my handwriting is difficult to read. I have at all times acted in good faith seeking to do the right thing. I do not think anyone will believe that I write letters with any intent to cause offence."
Downing Street dismissed suggestions that Brown had not spent enough time on the letter.
Brown's letter, written in black marker pen – often used by the prime minister because of his poor eyesight – appeared to contain four mistakes in the first sentence.
"It is with the greatst of sadness that I write to offer you and you family my personal condolencs on the death of your son, Jamie [which has the e crossed out]," Brown wrote.
The prime minister has form when it comes to misspelling names in sensitive correspondence.
In April the Tory MP Nadine Dorries made public a letter Brown sent her in the aftermath of the smear emails scandal. He spelt her name "Dorres" and also made mistakes with the words "politcal", "knowlege", "embarassment" and "advizer", prompting suggestions he might be dyslexic.
