I thought this piece was an April Fool’s joke, but it’s dated the third: hyperbole, cliché, metaphors so mixed you can’t tell where the crescendos end and the whirlpools begin. But Stephen Pollard has a point. I couldn’t get into the Tesco carpark today for the customers panic-buying in the wake of the chaotic chaos threatening to overwhelm the chaotic shambles of a government that has plunged our chaos-stricken nation into chaos.
Check out the opening paragraph:
It is almost impossible to overstate the chaos [but you’re going to have a go, aren’t you, Stephen?] which has engulfed the Labour Party in the past week. The Blairites are openly attacking the Chancellor. The Brownites are ranting against the Prime Minister. The Labour Party itself, caught in the middle, is being spun around from pillar to post without an anchor.
Apparently we are all “rubber neckers at the scene of a car crash”, the Blair Brown spat has reached such a “crescendo of intensity”—no: “a level of passion”—that “the Government itself is near to being out of control”. Blair and Brown have “stared at the precipice”, the “glue has finally come unstuck”, they won’t “bite their tongues” any more.
Look at Blair’s “deliberate act of provocation”. Their “courtiers” had been “let off a part of their leashes” [huh?], and then “reigned [sic] in”; now they are “going full pelt at each others’ throats”. A “string of stories” “have [sic] emanated” from the the Blairites. Things are “incendiary”! The atmosphere is “febrile”! (And that same atmosphere is somehow being “played out”.) The speculation is “wild”! “The rumour mill is [wait for it] in full swing”! Apparently the Pension Commission is recommending, er, “a huge increase in public money” [WTF?]
But that’s not all! “A new battlefront has emerged”. “Britain’s future prosperity is at stake.” Never fear! Stephen has the solution:
That is why this festering feud must now be resolved. Mr Blair is a busted flush, unable to pass the legislation he claims he is in office to secure.
The time has come for him to step aside and let Mr Brown get on with things his way – for good or ill.
Christ, Stephen, I wish I could get paid by the Mail for turning in that sort of copy. Maybe it is a parody. Go on, you can tell us. You couldn’t have written this crap with a straight face, could you?
I’m off to buy some gold now before the uncontrollable lack of control of a government utterly out of control finally precipitates an inevitable and uncontrollable run on Sterling.
You’re missing the point here.
Pollard has a history of hiding messages in clever wordplay. If you look closely at that column and take the first letter of every word in the last two paragraphs, you’ll see that it actually spells out the words “WESTMINSTER HACKS ARE ALL A BUNCH OF LAZY ONANISTIC TOSSERS.”
It does sound rather like The Day Today, doesn’t it? I look forward to Brant, the physical cartoonist from the Daily Telegraph, acting out Tony Blair walking a political tightrope.
Yeah but, no but….
As far as I can see SP manages to break all 6 of the sainted George’s rules in Politics and the English Language (http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/site/work/essays/language.html):
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never us a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
However judging by his blog maybe he actually sets himself this as a task with every post.
Presumably when he talks about “reaching a crescendo”, he’s referring to the point just before the volume levels start to rise, even though this interpretation doesn’t make much sense in context.
Alternatively, he could simply be a musical ignoramus who doesn’t know what the word ‘crescendo’ actually means – you choose.
You know, there’s a post in my unpublished pile entitled “Clash Of The Cummerbunds” in which I mocked at length a blog debate between Stephen Pollard and Oliver Kamm about “greatness” in classical music. While composing it I “reached a crescendo” of scatological contempt before I realised its futility and abandoned it—though it did make me wonder if the English language needed a new word to label a refined combination of 1) vast and expensive consumption of an art form, 2) confident pronouncement on its aesthetics, and 3) ignorance of its basic technical elements.
So if I had an email from the deputy-sub-under-editor at the Daily Filth at a quarter to five on a wet Wednesday saying that because Galloway’s lawyers had served an injunction on them they had a bit of hole on page eight, so if I could whistle up 500 words of anti-Nulab polemic by six o’clock there would be a fat cheque in the post, I would have to reply that I could not possibly prostitute my art, that I would need more time to think of something worthy of the Filth’s readership, and in any case I would hardly have time to run the piece through my Amstrad WP, let alone check it against Orwell’s six dictums. Wouldn’t I.
By the way, why is it an uphill struggle, but when it’s finally downhill all the way, that means it’s getting more difficult?
And what is the difference in meaning between, “It’s impossible to underestimate…” and “it’s impossible to overestimate”?
I’ve reached my crescendo, so toodle-pip.
Blimey! I didn’t see the original article, having been away, but thanks to your post I see that I must immediately away to Tesco to lay in supplies of ‘Everyday’ tinned tomatoes and pasta before taking to the Welsh hills to sit the inferno out. Thanks Pooter, you have saved my family’s lives.
By the way, shouldn’t this also have been filed under your ‘Tin Foil Hat Wearers’ category?