Prime minister Gordon Brown has admitted that his handwriting has been the cause of every major tactical error in the war in Afghanistan. The revelation came shortly after he was forced to apologise for misspelling the name of a soldier killed in action in a handwritten letter to the soldier’s mother.

In an unscheduled briefing, Brown conceded that his poor penmanship had been responsible for numerous errors in foreign policy, troop deployments and supply of equipment to Afghanistan, including an infamous episode where 15 Chinook helicopters failed to arrive in Helmand province in 2008. In their place, Brown had apparently approved the deployment of 15 members of the Vancouver Canucks ice hockey team.

This was just one mistake in a catalogue of ill-transcribed orders, which have also included supplying troops with thousands of salted trifles and Kevlar body armadillos. While the latter have occasionally proved useful to soldiers when worn over a standard issue helmet, servicemen and -women have complained that the trifles fail to maintain their integrity when used as ordnance, and taste unpleasant.

Brown even suggested that British soldiers might not be fighting in the Middle East were it not for his illegible scrawls.

The prime minister intimated that an order to “withdraw troops” had been misread by advisers as “plunge us irredeemably into a hopeless and ultimately self-defeating clusterfuck”. Expert graphologists commissioned by Cultsha to decipher the message have yet to corroborate this claim, having become bogged down in the quagmire of his opening sentence.

One of the prime minister’s former primary school teachers has come forward to confirm that Brown’s handwriting has seen little improvement since his early years. “Ay, he wa a wee sod back the’ an’ a couldn’ae wrate fo’ shet,” said Jock McScotland, who also passed us a copy of a creative writing assignment from 50 years ago, in which Brown appears to express an ambition one day to become “democratically elected leader of the Untied Condom”.

No word has yet been given on the prospect of an apology for the handwriting of Brown’s predecessor Tony Blair. This is despite his name having been found written in faeces on the door of every public convenience in the Palace of Westminster.