I heard Vince Cable put the boot into David Cameron’s immigration policy yesterday and wondered how Central Office would spin it. What they came up with was:

“…Vince is a member of the Government and supports Government policy.  The words he chooses to do that are up to him….”

I grit my teeth, ignore the appalling grammar and instead turn to the way in which Mr. Cable chose to express his support for the Government. 

ANDREW MARR:
The Prime Minister has seized upon this as one of the big things that he is fighting about. He’s made it very, very clear that he is personally behind this. He’s going into an argument with the Europeans, currently the Bulgarian president, I think. Can you actually stop this happening, the 75,000 cap?

VINCE CABLE:
I think it isn’t going to happen. Nick Clegg’s made it very clear he’s not going to allow it to happen. I think there’s a bigger picture here. We periodically get these immigration panics in the UK. I remember going back to Enoch Powell and “rivers of blood”, and all that. And if you go back a century, panics over Jewish immigrants coming from Eastern Europe. The responsibility of politicians, in this situation, when people are getting anxious, is to try to reassure them and give them facts, and not panic and resort to populist measures that do harm.

Well, there’s spin and there’s self-delusion and I think Central Office have crossed the line.   What they are saying, if I understand them, is that Cable is choosing to say the words, “…it isn’t going to happen…” but what he actually means is “…it is going to happen…” No wonder everyone is confused.

I might have expect someone supporting the Government’s policy on immigration to say something along the lines of, “…I support the Government’s policy…” and not “…The responsibility of politicians, in this situation, when people are getting anxious, is to try to reassure them and give them facts, and not panic and resort to populist measures that do harm…”

I suppose that just goes to show how much I know about the English language.

A couple of discoveries have impelled me to revisit the topic of literary fiction.  Incidentally, I trust you notice that I have forborne to flank the term with the accustomed quotation marks, thus indicating my open-mindedness in the matter of this genre (if I am allowed to use so debased a term).

I have had a number of encounters with writers who are of the opinion that I am simply uncultured, untutored or just plain dim because I fail to appreciate the grandeur of their prose.  Now, in the face of such an onslaught, only a fellow with the self-assurance of the self-deluded could fail to have experienced a modicum of concern lest the supposition be true. Therefore,  I admit there have been times when I have thought, to put it crudely, that “it must be me”.

One of these times was when I recently encountered the work of John Farris.  I am not so ashamed as some might think I ought to be by the fact that I had never heard of him until two weeks ago but I’ll admit to being rather surprised by his fame.  I’m given to understand that he is a popular writer of scary stories, whom some believe to be rather more literary in his style than others of his ilk.  For example, according to Amazon, Farris has been “…long a master of the literary thriller…” and Richard Matheson claimed that he had “…raised (sic) the terror genre into the realm of literature…”.  Whilst I agree that this is not a particularly significant accolade (Matheson gave us the marvellous sentence, “…Talbot’s toes whipped like pennants in a gale…”) it nevertheless points to the respect Farris enjoys amongst some writers.

It was when I encountered some of this “literature” that I began to realise that my antipathy towards a certain kind of pretentious writing might be difficult for some to understand.  For instance, amongst the turns of phrase Farris offers are such marvels as:  “…He watched the rise and fall of her breasts with blurred yearning…”  (I know: breasts again – cf last month’s blog)  I googled the term “blurred yearning” and turned up three genuine results; two of which post-date Farris and one of which pre-dates him.  That one, though, is from a poem where it makes even less sense.  And there was this wonderful thing, which is either an appalling translation of a website hoping to flog protein drinks or some kind of catch-all tagfest.

“The focus is that silky with less than unrivalled compose, lifting depressed albatross with blurred yearning overturn up muscle worry up and muscle growth. And if you penury to develop muscle throng, you're luxuriant to persuade to abuse up "more" protein, to not at worst vouchsafe the muscles you participate in at this quite two seconds but to fullness more.”

Whatever the case, the term appears to me to be nonsensical but I mustn’t let that lead me to think that it’s just rubbish because, apparently, this type of conjoining of words is perfectly acceptable in some quarters.  I offer (from various sources),  

“…her sexually ambiguous Timex…”

“…swathed in stratagem…”

“…Spiers’s eyes popped extraneously from their sockets…”

Quoted in “Wretched Writing” Petras and Petras

And one more thing I noticed:  To me, this sentence “…He gravely touched her shoulder, tapping it twice, dropped his hand…” is not only clumsy, it is grammatically incorrect yet this sort of thing peppers Farris’ writing.  It also peppers the writing of lots of people whose work I have criticised.  Am I to take it that this is also acceptable? 

I am drawn to the conclusion that this is a species of writing certainly more common in, if not unique to American literature; however, I’m still not convinced that it’s good writing and I give thanks that I am not, as I had believed, alone.  For in my search to find out what it was that led some writers to believe that stringing unusual words together in unusual combinations automatically endows it with literary merit, I discovered that there is a respected group of naysayers, whose mission is to reveal that the Emperor’s dangly bits are on display.

Of these, I have chosen to begin with “The Readers’ Manifesto” by M.R. Myers, in which the author picks apart some of the ghastly prose that was infesting American literature at the turn of this century.  Needless to say, the work appears to be just as valid today.  I shall report back  presently.

Oh God!  I’m sympathising with Godfrey Bloom.  The hapless Bloom is the UKIP M.E.P. who has scandalised the country, not by the use of the term “Bongo-Bongo Land” to describe the Third World, nor by his assertion that Britain ought not to be sending financial aid there; nor, it should be said, by the fact that he appears to see nothing wrong with producing a UKIP conference brochure whose cover bears the images of several score of face not one of which bears pigmentation other than a rather insipid and sickly beige.  No, Bloom has brought scorn upon himself by using the word “sluts” to describe a group of women.
Some context:  Bloom had earlier made a comment that women should spend more time cleaning behind the fridge (yes, this is looking more and more like I should leave him to his fate) and was questioned on this by one of his own supporters, a woman, at a fringe meeting, who said that she had never cleaned behind her fridge either.  When the vexed question of behind-fridge cleaning was put to the floor, all the women, with one voice, exclaimed that they had never cleaned behind their fridge either.
At this, Bloom “joked”,
“I’m surrounded by sluts!”
There was some laughter but the general consensus, soon expressed, was that he had gone too far this time.
The word, “slut”, it would appear, is now a word that has come to mean what we used to call “loose” and its former use, to mean less than houseproud, has fallen into disuse so that people have taken him to have meant that he was surrounded by women of dubious morals and not merely dirty cows.
Now in this, I feel he has been unjustly pilloried.  As an old fool, Bloom cannot be expected to have kept abreast of all the changes to the language since he first crawled from under his rock.  I’m convinced that he meant his remark to be taken as a comment on the cleaning abilities of his audience rather than their morals.  The word was not uncommonly used in this manner, when I was a lad along with its male equivalent, "sloven".  Occasionally, you would hear the word "slattern" - which I've always believed is related to "slut" and which means "to slop" and from which, of course, we get "sloppy".  An interesting etymology has it derived from Old Norse, "to slap", which may or may not find echoes in the modern, "slapper" (which I had always believed was a reference to being over made-up or covered in "slap".
Now you might say, “So what? The upshot is that Bloom got what he deserved” and in many ways, I’d have to agree.  However, there is such a thing as justice and a person ought to be tried for the crime they committed rather than the crime we wish they’d committed.  Bloom is guilty of having been educated over fifty years ago and of being a buffoon.  The hypocritical outrage of Nigel Farage has been a wonder to behold but his desire to ditch a former comrade so speedily should tell the electorate that UKIP are learning fast and that’s something I’m rather pleased about, to tell the truth.  They are the best chance we’ve had in many years of splitting the Tory vote and for that, I wish them all the luck in the world.

A very British furore has been entertaining people of the U.K. for the past few days.  Briefly, the matter concerns a Conservative Party Chief Whip who, (for the sake of overseas readers unacquainted with some of the more bizarre aspects of what we are pleased to call a modern parliamentary democracy) is one of those people whose actual job it is to persuade, cajole, bully and utterly terrify members of the party into voting for favourable motions.  They are called “Whips” for a very particular reason.

The Whip, Andrew Mitchell by name, found himself barred from riding his bike through the gates of Downing Street. (Gates, which incidentally, appeared one morning during John Major’s premiership in order to prevent people from walking down the street – a practice which had hitherto been uncontested for around two-hundred years).  Anyway, the police on duty asked Mr. Mitchell to wheel his bicycle through one of the smaller gates at the side of the main ones, a request to which he appears to have taken offence.

Apparently, he was of the opinion that exiting through a side gate was beneath him and he told the police this in no uncertain terms.  He harangued and swore at them for several minutes (an act for which any lesser mortal would have been banged up and no mistake).  He allegedly called them “morons” as well but the thing which has caused the most offence was his contention that the police were “plebs”.

Now, the word “pleb” is pure Public School, by which (again for non-British readers) we mean a private school.  No space here to explain what this all means but suffice it to say that practically the entire Cabinet consists of former public schoolboys; in other words, the sons and heirs of the "Ruling Classes".  Amongst the public school elite, a pleb is a member of the lower classes - someone who works for a living, (a fact which of itself renders them less useful to society).  It derives, of course, from the Latin, “Plebeian” – a member of the non-aristocratic classes, higher up the social scale than slaves but of no rank - and being Latin for the lower orders, it has the added attraction that the lower order British would not have come across this term, since Latin was taught only in public schools for many decades.  The idiots, you see, don't even know they're plebs!

Although in reasonably common usage amongst the ruling class, few would dare use such a word in public nowadays and this is Mitchell’s real offence.  Not that he used the word so much as that he used it within earshot of someone who would not have heard it used, much outside of Downton Abbey.

Mitchell made it clear that the term was at the very heart of his (and every public schoolboy’s) vocabulary

But for me, Mitchell's denial spoke volumes. At first he denied that he had called the police “fucking plebs” but later retracted this, admitting that he said “fuck” but not the word “pleb”. So, deliciously, “pleb” now wields more political power than the word “fuck”.  I’m reminded of the wonderful line in Armando Iannucci’s practically faultless political satire, “The Thick of It” where Malcolm Tucker, Downing Street fixer, responds to a repeated knock on his door with,

“For fuck’s sake, come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off!”  Had he added, “…you pleb!” it might have proved too much for the BBC censors.