All the talk of using colours to determine authorship of the diary made me think of Mike Barrett's supposed attempt to replicate the diary author's style in a number of pages which were given to by Mike to Keith Skinner in March 2002 (claimed by Mike to be a transcript of actual missing diary pages). How well did he do?
The authors of Inside Story didn't think he had done very well because, in their 2003 book, they boldly stated that the content of those pages, which they didn't bother to reproduce for their readers, 'in truth, bore no resemblance to that of the Diary'. The problem, however, was that those authors (one of whom has special magical abilities to see words in colours) were obviously fooled by the fact that the pages were in Mike's handwriting (jumbling up capital and lower case letters) with his poor spelling and grammar. They evidently forgot that if Anne had been holding the pen, writing the words in the diary at Mike's dictation, she would have been able to correct those mistakes, at least to the best of her somewhat limited ability, and the handwriting would have been perfect.
Once the appropriate adjustments are made, this is what we get:
I defy anyone to tell me that the above is not similar in style to what we find the diary itself. Heck, the colours may even be the same!
Even Tom Mitchell, the Assistant to the Chief Diary Defender, agrees with me. He admitted in a JTR Forums post on 24 August 2022 that Mike's 'diary' pages, 'do indeed reflect the language of the Victorian scrapbook', and that:
'There's not a line written which doesn't sound like a line used in the scrapbook.'
For anyone reading this who is genuinely interested in the diary, it is to be noted that the 'diary' passage transcribed above, which we know for a fact was written by Mike Barrett (a former professional freelance journalist in case anyone has forgotten), represents only about 30% of what Mike handed over to Keith Skinner in 2002. The remaining 70% is being ruthlessly suppressed and withheld in typical diary defender fashion. The laughable excuse Tom Mitchell gave for keeping it secret was that the three pages he did reveal sufficiently confirm that Mike was able to reproduce the diarist's style so that, in his opinion, no more are needed, even though when he published those three pages in July 2020, it was to demonstrate that Mike was incapable of writing the diary.
There can't be any doubt that Mitchell released the three least impressive pages written by Mike because the intention was for us to laugh at them. Indeed, after Mitchell had posted one page, the Chief Diary Defender herself encouraged him, on 23 July 2020, to post 'more of Bongo's early DAiry work - particularly relating to CRicket weather'.
As we can see, she was still obsessed with Mike jumbling up his capital and lower case letters even though that could have no relevance to the authorship of the diary if written by Anne.
Of course, having been ordered to do so by his superior, Mitchell immediately complied and posted the page about cricket later that same day.
The wheeze having now rebounded on him, with his confession that all the lines sound exactly like they could have come from the diary, he's clammed up and no more pages have been forthcoming even though, in the current debate about Mike's writing ability, it would be extremely useful to see exactly what Mike was capable of.
Everyone needs to see those pages.
But no one can. Censorship is in place. The withheld pages are classified as top secret 'diary' pages even though there is literally no good reason for their suppression. Mitchell has them, he's allowed to post them, he just doesn't want to. It's yet another tragic example of diary defender document suppression.
LORD ORSAM
2 December 2023