Yeah, but they all do that these days, produce some named individual out of the blue to put flesh on some statistic or whatever. Someone must have told them it works. It probably does work for a bit too, till people start recognising what's happening and getting sick of it.

It's a bit like turning up at people's bedside after a disaster, or the incident Bush quoted of him hugging some unoffending bloke who'd alrady got quite enough to worry about with being flooded out.

When Maggie Thatcher was still hanging over us here, like some evil miasma, a lot of people genuinely people used to carry cards like kidney donor cards saying that in the event of an accident they did not want to have her visit them in hospital.