Percy's letter

[Eric Oppen]

No: HPFGUIDX 85242

There's been some discussion recently of Percy and his breach with his
family in OotP...and I thought of an interesting parallelism.

At one point in _Phoenix,_ Harry writes a letter to Sirius, but knows that
it may well be intercepted and read by people who do not, to put it mildly,
mean him or Sirius well.  So he writes a letter that, if it's intercepted,
will seem innocuous, but will be instantly understood by its intended
recipient.

Could Percy have been doing something of the sort with his letter to Ron?
If his superiors at the MoM were looking over his shoulder, or he knew
theymight well intercept the letter and read it (do they have censorship of
that sort?  I wouldn't put it past Fudge or Umbridge, and Percy knew that
Umbridge was clambering into the saddle at Hogwarts, where the letter was
going to go) he would have been in a pickle...how to warn Ron that trouble's
brewing, without jeopardizing his position at the MoM?

His mistake, if this was what he was trying to do, was to over-estimate
Ron's perceptiveness.  Ron, being Ron, just read the surface message.  Maybe
if he had written Hermione, instead...but Hermione might not have twigged,
either.

--Eric, originator of PUNIC FAITH (Percy, Undercover Near Idiotic Cornelius
Fudge, Accessing Information That's Helpful)