Michael Gove is not the only minister to be frustrated by the poor quality of letters drafted for his signature. One minister was horrified to find his reply to the Prime Minister starting ‘Good to here from you’. Another complains that his name is still spelt wrong, three years after he started in the job. But Gove is, probably, the only one who would send a memo to his ministers and civil servants urging them to read ‘George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, Jane Austen and George Eliot, Matthew Parris and Christopher Hitchens’ to improve their prose.’
The memo contains, what he dubs, Gove’s Golden Rules for writing a letter which I’ve reproduced in my Mail on Sunday column. But the introduction to these rules is also well worth reading. Here it is:
Thank you for your letter of the 17th asking me, on behalf of your colleagues, how I like letters to be drafted.
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