The Torygraph publishes a letter from CAS today.
Sacking RAF trainees shows that the Government is wrongly directing our money - Telegraph
Interestingly, MoD has just published what it says CAS actually sent to the paper. The paper’s version fails to include a significant bit of trenchant criticism of the paper, including this
I was determined that this should be handled sensitively through the chain of command. However, despite knowing of our intent to provide accurate, timely briefings, your paper chose to publish an initial story which, being apparently based on hearsay, necessarily contained gross inaccuracies, making this task even harder for me and much more painful for those who will be affected. ......Speculation.......may fill your paper but it does nothing to inform those most affected.
I do have to say that CAS’ original is over twice as long as the paper’s version (442 words, as opposed to 192). He can’t have been very well advised by his
PR staff if they thought that an editor was likely to accept a letter as long as that. A short article might have been much better. But anyway, anyone who wants to get a particular message across in a letter needs to talk to the letters editor of the paper before sending anything in. It doesn’t sound as if anyone thought to do that.
Incidentally, the other bit the paper missed out was the fact that Dalton is Chief of the Air Staff, which I would have thought was somewhat germane to the whole thing.
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