Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Alex Bell, and Anna Chazinski, and once again,
we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days,
and in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, James Harkin.
Okay, my fact this week is that when she was Prime Minister,
Margaret Thatcher ordered that all government documents should have slightly different word spacing,
so that if a letter was leaked to the press, they would know who it came from.
Are we sure she wasn't just trying to make up the word count and make it look like she'd written more,
because that's what I did.
How did this work?
Well, if you can imagine a load of text on a piece of paper, and each of the...
Whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm still trying to picture that.
So yeah, imagine a load of words on a piece of paper,
and each of the letters or each of the words has a space between them.
You could make that space slightly bigger or slightly lesser, depending on the word processor you're using,
and say the ones that came from you had a 0.2 millimeter gap,
and the ones from Dan had an 0.3 millimeter gap, then when they found the leaked document,
they would know whether it came from you or Dan, depending on the space.
But I mean, was there someone employed, because it's obviously going to have to be extremely tiny margins of error,