“Look, it’s not my fault, this is my second language”
My Norwegian wife says this more often than I’d like because her English is better than people who actually are. (Suella Braverman’s criteria aside) It’s idiomatic, instinctive and technical. She can talk to academics about complex issues in a language she learnt at school and I can just about ask basic directions in French.
However, every so often I will get the phrase above served at me because in the midst of everyday life I will sometimes hear what she says and either realise, or have to be told that, “what I meant was”.
To be honest you don’t need to have English as a second language for it to happen. In my experience people very often don’t say what they mean or don’t mean what they say.
One of the weirder bouts of jousting with the media I had as a special adviser was after Prime Minister’s questions in November 2023 where Alex Cunningham the then MP for Stockton on Tees accused my then boss James Cleverly of calling his constituency a “shit hole.”
Really, really, bad idea to slag off a Northern town and it’s voters. If he actually did.
The fact was, great story though it was, it wasn’t true. Despite insistence everyone had heard it, and even some monkey business with sound technology to isolate what was an indistinct recording at best, the then Labour front bench did not support Mr Cunningham’s performative outrage for two reasons.
First they had heard what Cleverly had really said: “because you’re a shit MP” not the comment against the constituency and second, because most of them privately agreed. Cleverly apologised for unparliamentary language, but nothing else because he’d said what he said, and he meant it.
Recently our Prime Minister has said some things he claims he didn’t say. Except that he did. There was no doubt about it. He claimed having attained the authority to ask that the Russians had interfered in the Brexit campaign and influenced the result.
I have to say I partially understood his actions and am pretty sure I understood exactly what he was saying. On a podcast hosted by two people who claim to be on different sides of politics but really aren’t – Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell – The Prime Minister of this country clearly claimed the Russian’s had influenced the outcome of the 2016 EU Referendum.
I already knew they’d tried. They haven’t stopped trying to influence – for which read disrupt – our politics in the following ten years and they’ll keep trying. However as the head of MI5 has made clear, and as was the conclusion ten years ago, there is little evidence it worked.
Ed Davey the current, for now, Liberal Democrat leader made himself the poster boy for believing what he wanted to hear, by congratulating Burnham for having the bravery to say something, even as Burnham rowed back explaining what he had meant.
Kemi Badenoch, no stranger to having her words pored over, did not need an invitation to pull the Prime Minister up on it in the Commons, twice.
Burnham’s predecessor had tried to sell the public on the idea she’d said she wanted a war, and that Nick Timothy had said Muslims were not welcome in public spaces. Neither thing had ever been uttered by either. It wasn’t that they had meant something different, but that they had never said those things in the first place.
Burnham has not learned yet, as he struggles to manage the move from Mayor to PM, that his words, more than anyone, have impact, meaning and weight. So it matters when he says something that isn’t true. After all one of things that removed his predecessor, was a habit for doing that.
I still marvel that the Conservative party persuaded themselves that Boris Johnson was the answer to their electoral prayers knowing full well what he said, and what he meant were not always in sync, or that what he said was actually true. He’d been found out on this before he was ever an MP.
Of course it meant when he did speak the truth, nobody really believed it, and he was, to use the banter of youth “shot down in flames” amidst accusations that he was incapable of doing so.
Speaking of shooting, I think Zia Yusuf and Robert Jenrick meant exactly what they said when proposing not only that they would deploy one of our cutting edge military weapons, the Royal Marines, as border guards in the channel but that they would be allowed to use ‘lethal force’. They wanted a certain audience to understand shooting migrants was not off the cards.
I don’t think either would have said it at all if Restore weren’t nibbling at their heels but both are astute enough politicians to know there is a core of voters who would admit if pressed that they believe shooting a few migrants would actually be the best deterrent there is. I suggested this was the case months ago, and was accused of smearing, but now some are less cagey about admitting it, not least a retired Royal Marine officer who was explicit about it, and whose words were shared widely by Reform.
It came to Nigel Farage himself, to explain that was not, apparently, what they had meant and that the Royal Marines, who I am confident wouldn’t do it anyway, and should almost certainly not be asked to, had the same rules of engagement as always, in peacetime; they may return fire if fired upon.
Many things turn up in dinghies. Too many people, far too many who are not really refugees, the odd sharp instrument – used in order to guarantee their place on a rubber boat no self-respecting Royal Marine would use in a bath, and mostly dropped in the sea as soon as it gets underway. However we are, as yet, to see an AK-47 as a passenger.
The question of lethality as deterrent is moot. Risk of death has so far not been a deterrent. What will actually work is when those arriving by boat from France are shown to be leaving by plane to their original home within days.
That Farage had to say what Jenrick and Yusuf had meant, was something of an irony since he then had to explain he hadn’t, in fact, told a podcast audience – why is it always podcasts? – that he’d give Donald Trump the Chagos Islands in order to stop him talking about Argentina’s flimsy at best rights to the Falkland Islands.
The online Reform support army swung into action to suggest it was outrageous to suggest that when he said “‘Right, you know what, mate? Chagos, it’s yours. Diego Garcia, in perpetuity…” he did not mean giving the Chagos islands away and letting the US have the Diego Garcia airbase forever.
The Americans helped clarify that Farage had not meant it that way hat either. Which was helpful as the Reform leader explained on his own TV show.
Thing is with all of these things, what would be ideal, for all politicians including Badenoch, is that what they say is what they meant, and in all honesty could be taken as meaning what they said.
Honesty is becoming an increasingly valuable political commodity. Long may it remain so.
And yes, I really mean that.