Waving. And drowning.

Have you noticed that thing more and more politicians are given to doing now – bouncing on stage and not just waving, but pointing at someone they ‘recognise’ in the audience, smiling even more broadly and waving even more strenuously at them in particular, before returning to the general business of waving in a general way at everybody else in general.

When you stop to think about it, the waving is quite weird in itself. When you’re a lone individual on a speaking engagement in front of, say 2000 people, there really isn’t much need to wave at them as you get up on stage – you already have their attention, they can see you and you can’t hope to see them with the spotlight on you. There’s something bizarrely infantilising about it – they used to get Miss World contestants to line up and wave at us. As if what? As if they knew us? Or were they signalling distress?

But the pointing thing is weirder still. Because that person they’re pointing and grinning and waving at isn’t actually there. It’s an imaginary friend. And pointing, grinning and waving at them like that is intended to suggest familiarity, legitimacy and possibly even intimacy – if you’re taken in by it, that is. It’s fake; they’ve been trained to do it by media coaches. It’s a visual form of rhetoric that’s as empty as the vast quantity of bloated, vacuous hot air that is about to issue forth from their mouths.

Rhetoric used to mean eloquence. Now it means something to hide. Roll over Aristotle.

Toffy, Perky and Bunkum

Toffy

There’s a distinct whiff of the St Custard’s Senior Prefeks’ Common Room about the trio of Jacob “Toffy” Rees-Mogg, Michael ”Perky” Gove and Ian “Bunkum” Duncan-Smith.

In spite of the fact that one of them has already reached the dizzy heights of Head of House, only to be found wanting (his lack of charisma wasn’t in fact an engaging trait, but was found to be an actual absence of character), the three of them are now clammily united in trying to resolve one urgent question: how to be Topp.

Perky

Our job is to ensure, to borrow Perky’s favourite word, that they don’t succeed, a task made rather more difficult in Toffy’s case due to his positively papist enthusiasm for procreation (his most recent oeuvres being Wulfric Leyson Pius and Sixtus Dominic Boniface – knock one down and there’s another immediately behind to take his place. In Latin.).

Bunkum

There must be some sanction they can be threatened with. All three would consider spanking a reward rather than a deterrent; shedloads of Latin prep might silence brainless Bunkum, but the other two would no doubt rejoice exsultate in it; and being shackled to Brexit Bulldog David Davis – which most of us would consider too ghastly a prospect to contemplate – is what they’ve already signed up for. Until the idiot is no longer useful, of course.

So we’ll have to resort to desperate measures. Let’s arrange to send them off to live in a bungalow near Stoke Mandeville. Locked and sealed. With Nigel Farage. Cui bono? Omnes nos.

Cake. Having it and eating it.

Isn’t language marvellous? We use it every day but it never seems to run out – in fact, it’s constantly being re-charged – and, even allowing for those who habitually abuse it, it never lets us down.

As long as you keep going, that is. The moment you stop and take a look at a word, or say it in isolation, it becomes a freak. I offer the word “goat”. Nothing wrong with it as long as it’s describing a Billy or a Nanny or, in the possessive, its cheese. I have a friend who used to refer to Leonard Cohen as “the old goat” – and he was. But “goat” on its own? Goat. Goat, goat, goat. Getting odder by the minute. Goat. And pretty soon, it’s done for, no use to anyone. Goat?

So you can imagine how spectacularly a whole phrase can come to grief. In recent times, much mention has been made in reference to Brexit about we British wanting to have our cake and eat it. And I’ve come aground on it. Its usage is clear: it’s a bad thing to want both to have your cake and to eat it. It’s greedy, selfish, unbecoming, disloyal, cheating – caddish, somehow.

I find it a rather strange concept to be in possession of a cake without intending to eat at least some of it – unless you’re a baker and you’ve baked a cake for someone else: but let’s not get into semantics. Surely the very business of having your cake is synonymous with eating it? (Are we having cake? Would you like to have some cake? Don’t ask her, she’s had cake.)

I suppose you could accept the offer of a slice of cake, watch as it is cut and then put on a plate – with or without a doiley – and placed in front of you. That would be the moment of having your cake – an act solely of possession that takes place in the few seconds that are required by good manners to elapse before you shove it in your cakehole. That might be a technicality you could argue in your defence, but it is somewhat disingenuous.

Is there something I’ve missed here? Is there some activity I’m not familiar with that consists of just having a cake as a possession or a condition – like I have a pencil or I have a headache – which is wholly different from the activity of eating a cake (the same cake, presumably, although there may be unforeseeable circumstances in which one might actually have one cake in the possessive sense and eat a different one in the consuming sense, either simultaneously or subsequently)?

I’m not very clear on what would be the point. What exactly does the activity of merely having a cake bestow upon the person doing the having, other than good old catholic self-denial? What’s more, if I have a cake without the slightest intention of eating it, what is my status? In the cake world, the cake-archy, it might be an all-important distinction to make between the haves and the have-nots, but then you might have to extend the field to include scones, biscuits and petits-fours. To say nothing of cucumber sandwiches, crumpets and Danish pastries.

It must come down to the difference between wanting to have your cake and eat it and actually having your cake and eating it, the former being more sinful than the latter and the greater guilt being borne by those who own up to their desire – the others merely get on and do it anyway.

It’s that simple. Piece of cake, you might say.

Retching out

Elizabeth Campbell takes over leadership of Kensington and Chelsea council. Her first statement? "...to reach out to the community so that wounds begin to heal".

That presumably means handing out Red Cross parcels of emergency clichés for the lucky residents of Grenfell Tower.

Reach out? What the fuck does that mean? Actually what does it mean, ever? All it says is "I'm just going to stand here and extend my arms towards you - it's up to you whether you grab hold or not. It's as useful - and empty and insincere and unsympathetic - as saying "I feel your pain".

I have a nagging suspicion that reaching out comes from the same book of deathly PR vocabulary as putting so at the beginning of a reply in a radio interview: it's not to be trusted.

Theresa May, negotiator par excellence

Let me try to get this right. One billion of your earth pounds (that's so many noughts, you'll need to buy new batteries for your Casio) buys you the support of a right wing party in Ulster... erm... whose support you would probably have had anyway, for free, without charge.

That's called a negotiated settlement. Arlene Foster and her Orange chums must be giggling all the way to the Ulster Bank, owned by the Royal Bank of - you've guessed it - Scotland. Owned, in turn, by us.

So now, I'm beginning to feel dizzy. But I tell you what - I'll just add one billion to the cost of an election that stupid woman didn't need to call that delivered a result that put her in a worse position than the one she was in before the election @ around £150,000,000.

Let's not even think about what Brexit is going to cost us.