This entry was posted on
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at
9:15 am and is filed
under Gordon Brown.

———————- | SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT – JANUARY 2009 |———————-

Gordon Brown’s Downing Street team is no longer accepting email for the Prime Minister. This service has been down since August 2008, and some of us have been left wondering out just how hard it can be to accept, store and process a few emails.

So I’ve decided to find out.

For the next 24 hours 7 days, I will be accepting email for Gordon Brown via the following address, and hand-delivering these emails to 10 Downing Street:

This is a strictly limited offer, and is available at this stage only for the following 24 hour 7-day period:

12:00 midday 26 January 2009 – 12:00 midday, 2 February 2009

Please note that if you use this service, you must be willing to share; your email will be read/scanned by me and used for statistical purposes.

Besides, people who want to write letters privately to Gordon Brown need looking at.

24 hour A one-week window, folks. Then I’ll collate, run an executive summary up and drop it by Downing St. Just to see how hard it can be.

UPDATE (5 Feb) – I’ve been reliably informed that an ’email the PM’ facility should be back in service by the end of February.

And now back to our regular programming…

———————- | SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT ENDS |———————-

[archived post continues below]

Sending an email to Gordon Brown couldn’t be simpler… and I should know, because I wrote the specs for the system. Of course, I haven’t been paid for that yet, but I live in hope.

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Option #1

All you have to do to send an email to the PM is visit the page linked below, choose a category or write your own, and take it from there:

10 Downing Street – Email the PM

Please be aware that the e-mail system involves your email being read by a series of staff members and grouped into a monthly report. If your message is important, sensitive and/or confidential in nature, you’ll be better off sending a letter to 10 Downing Street, London SW1 2AA (which will, at least, result in your message being read by fewer staff members).

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Option #2

You could try sending an email via Gordon Brown’s parliamentary address – browng@parliament.uk – but during Blair’s time as PM, all emails to his version of this address went into a deep, dark hole without so much as a ‘bounce’ message, so I’d wager that it might be more effective to scream into a pillow in a sound-proofed room.

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Option #3

If you have the public on your side and you wish to rattle Gordon’s cage electronically, you may wish to instead reach out to the PM via a petition, and you can now do so online:

10 Downing Street – E-petitions

If you get enough people behind you, you might (eventually) receive a satisfactory reply. I say ‘might’, because 5,098 people signed my petition and neither Brown nor Blair have seen fit to respond to it. So far.

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Option #4

The fourth option is a little more difficult and time-consuming, but deeply satisfying; simply run a blog for a few years and subject the PM and/or his government so much trouble or embarrassment that you rate regular visits from Downing Street’s web-watch team.

Then all you have to do is go public with your email. This system allows for the use of HTML (as opposed to plain text), which is a far more elegant way to communicate, in my view.

Below is my latest public email of this type, and my first to Gordon Brown (not counting this little intervention to mark the long-overdue departure of Tony Blair):

To: Gordon Brown

From: Tim Ireland

Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2008 9:15 AM

Subject: I’m feeling frisky

1. Gordon. I can fix this little problem for you:

Get in touch when you have a mo. (Oh, and you’re using a system that I wrote the specs for and your predecessor has yet to pay for. We might have to settle that matter before I start on any new projects for Downing St. Sorry to be so obsessive persistent.)

2. Iraqi employees. This issue will fuck you in all sorts of unexpected ways if you’re not a lot more careful (and a hell of a lot faster) than you have been in the past. It doesn’t help that your boy Miliband is widely regarded as a joke. I’ve faced the guy down myself, and he’s lucky to be regarded as bush-league.

3. When are you going to sack that S.O.B. Jack Straw? He’s a walking roadblock. If you want my trust, he needs to be out on his arse. And I’m not alone.

Cheers

Tim Ireland

PS – SOCPA: I’d like to bring it to your attention without the usual rigmarole of having to stalk your wife. Ta.

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So, there are your current options for electronic communication with the Prime Minister. Use them wisely.