The dead cat. Once, a sadness only for its owner and the various female cats it had impregnated and then left to deal with its offspring while it slunk off to do it again. But now, “dead cat” is the go-to political buzzphrase of every armchair campaign strategist who can’t wait to tell anyone paying attention to almost any part of this election that they should in fact be paying attention to something completely different. They’ve missed the 4D chess. They’ve fallen for a classic piece of misdirection. Remember: it’s never a cock-up, it’s always a conspiracy. Previously a fairly precise term of political arcana – it was a Lynton Crosby fave – the dead cat’s most enthusiastic adopters have now decided it can mean anything that distracts from bad news.
And this is the great felinicide election, where everything is judged by some keyboard Metternich to be a deliberate and masterful distraction from something else. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s repulsive Grenfell comments were a dead cat, apparently. They’re trying to divert you from the fact they haven’t released the Russia report! They’re trying to hoodwink you into stopping watching Corbyn’s Andrew Neil interview! They’re trying to draw your eye away from them doing a black Friday deal on the NHS! And, a personal highlight, from shadow cabinetry’s Richard Burgon: “Boris Johnson is a Tory. He wants us to forget this. But that’s what he is.” Yup, you have to get up pretty early in the morning to catch Burgon out. (He should definitely stop doing the breakfast shows.)
And so to the morning after the YouGov MRP poll of the night before, which forecast a net gain of a single seat for “Britain’s next prime minister”, Jo Swinson. The chief takeout after Swinson’s ominously named “The Problem With Boris Johnson” speech is that the Lib Dems can’t kill a cat. For ethical reasons, I think, but the details aren’t important.
“Boris Johnson only cares about Boris Johnson,” the Lib Dem leader sensationally revealed. Thereafter Swinson went through the charge sheet we’re sadly familiar with as far as the prime minster is concerned: Johnson’s slapdash approach to his Foreign Office brief, which led to his own words being used against Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in her trial; his entirely unapologetic racism, in particular his multiple Islamophobic statements and their real-world effects; his “Etonian entitlement” where his non-existent commitment to public service should be; his winning of the coveted Tommy Robinson endorsement; his status as “Britain’s Trump”. There was quite a bit about children. He wasn’t someone our children could look up to, said Swinson, pausing for dramatic effect.
Well now. Was she going to Go There? One notable detail of this campaign so far is that no one has Gone There and asked the down-and-dirty but important question of Johnson that may never be asked if he doesn’t front up to the BBC’s Andrew Neil. Namely: how many children do you have, and how many of those do you take full and proper parental responsibility for? All deadbeat dads matter for the human duties and responsibilities they shirk – is the prime minister one?
This, you might have suspected, was where Jo Swinson was going with her speech. But we didn’t get there. Perhaps a little prompting was in order. Asked by my Guardian colleague about the prime minister’s Wikipedia entry listing his number of children as “five or six”, Swinson began with a joke. “I have two children, by the way. And I REALLY did notice both times.” This deserved the laugh it got from her audience.
But at that point, arguably, you do have to kill the cat. Put it in the sack and chuck it in the river. Or – if you truly believe you’re the people decent Tories urgently need to switch to – make like Itchy out of Itchy and Scratchy and commit to a cartoonishly grotesque political attack line. Instead, what Swinson went for was: “What was really troubling for me was that he didn’t know the words to The Wheels on the Bus.”
Ah. So instead of saying “There it is!”, you were left going “There it isn’t!” I’m trying to picture the episode. “Itchy and Scratchy in ‘Doesn’t know the nursery song’.” Nope, unless the cat gets run over by one of the bus wheels and then the little pieces of him are scraped out of the treads and moulded into a bomb, into which a fuse is inserted and then lit … well, it’s back to the drawing board, guys. You can’t come here to play.
Maybe Swinson was thinking of the specific children affected by the apparently untouchable issue of the prime minister’s terrible carelessness; maybe she’s squeamish; maybe she hopes other people will push the point home for her. But someone’s got to start asking these questions, given that “The Problem With Boris Johnson” is that an awful lot of people say they’re going to vote for him in two weeks’ time.