Arnie's X-rated email was 8 billion-to-1 'coincidence'

As an action hero, his catchphrases ranged from "hasta la vista" to "I'll be back". As a cigar-chomping legislator he branded "gutless" opponents "girlie men". Now Arnold Schwarzenegger has expanded his political lexicon into the time-honoured realm of bar-room vulgarity.

And be warned - it's not for the faint-hearted.

The Governor of California yesterday found himself attempting to play down the revelation that a blunt email he sent to one of San Francisco's Democratic Assemblymen contained what US news bulletins have somewhat prudishly described as an X-rated rebuke".

At first sight, the message that Mr Schwarzenegger sent to Tom Ammiano, explaining why he'd vetoed a boring bill about financing the city's port, seems straightforward enough.

It begins "for some time now", and concludes: "I believe it is unnecessary to sign this measure at this time."

However, a vertical reading of the first left-hand letter in each of the seven lines of the main body of the email suggests that the former Kindergarten Cop actor, who is due to leave office next year, was passing on an altogether less statesmanlike message. It reads: "F-U-C-K-Y-O-U."

The Governor's press secretary, Aaron McLear, insisted yesterday that it was simply a "weird coincidence" that the email had acrostically spelled out an obscenity.

He claimed that the sheer volume of the vetoes that Mr Schwarzenegger has been forced to pass in recent years meant "something like this was bound to happen".

In recent months, Mr McLear noted, the left-hand margin of the Governor's veto emails has spelled out such harmless words as "poet" and "soap". That's as may be.

But the claim met with a healthy dose of scepticism: the words cited by McLear are four letters long, a length relatively likely to crop up at random. The mathematical probability of the seven-letter phrase "f*** you" doing the same is 26 to the power of seven - or about 8,031,810,176 n to one.

Mr Schwarzenegger certainly has "form" for tasteless political gestures. This year, he sent a bronze statue of a pair of bull's testicles to California's Democratic senate leader, urging him to have the cojones to take tough budget choices.

Adding to suspicions that Mr Schwarzenegger was merely trying to goad Mr Ammiano is the fact that the duo recently enjoyed a very public falling-out.

Earlier this month, they crossed swords when the Republican governor decided to show up, unannounced, at a Democratic party fundraiser that was being held at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.

Video footage of the event shows that Mr Ammiano began heckling about a string of budget cuts that had recently been passed in an effort to ease California's spiralling debt. He shouted "you lie!" before leaving the room hollering that Mr Schwarzenegger could "kiss my gay ass!"

Though Mr Schwarzenegger's obscenity caused much controversy on the airwaves, a spokesman for Mr Ammiano said that he was neither fazed nor offended by it.

"Kudos to the governor for his creative use of coincidence," he said. "You certainly have to have a sense of humour in politics... We will call it even and start with a clean slate with the governor from here on out."

- THE INDEPENDENT