Only a fool would send a letter such as this without having someone check it first.

It seems like a metaphor for everything that's gone wrong with Labour. The moral outrage at yellow streak Brown's gaffe is almost as depressing as yellow streak Brown's wretched attempt at letter writing itself. However, whichever way you slice it, the letter is pretty insulting, purely because he clearly took absolutely zero time or care over it. He might as well have scribbled it on the back of a fag packet. It does seem "hastily scrawled", although I think it admirable that the yellow streak PM bothers to hand write each letter himself; he certainly follows each death. It seems indicative of Britain today- do something in an half-hearted manner, shrug one's shoulders and say "lighten up". None of this, of course, detracts from the questionable motives for having soldiers put in the line of fire to begin with. It might have carried a little more sincerity had it not been for the fact that he wrote a similar letter of condolence to the Chelsea captain John Terry after he'd missed a penalty in the European Cup Final - hardly on a par with laying down your life for your country.
It's also pretty embarrassing that our yellow streak PM can't string a brief letter together without screwing it up (or even do what Thatcher and Blair did when they wrote private hand-written letters to families, they put in a printed copy, a detail yellow streak Brown might adopt.)