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 Shriver.

I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Alex Bell and Aniches Ensky.

Once again we have gathered around 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 fat this week is that when she was prime minister Margaret Thatcher ordered that

all government documents should have slightly different word spacing so that different

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

had written more?

How did this work?

Well if you can imagine a load of text on a piece of paper and each of the space...

Whoa whoa whoa, still trying to make your lab.

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 a 0.3 millimeter gap then when they found the leaked document they would

know whether it came from you are done depending on the space.

But I mean was there someone employed?

...