The Right Dishonourable

This week’s duel between the prime minister and the leader of the opposition saw the shadow foreign secretary caught by a stray if inaccurate shot. Defending the government’s new integrated foreign policy review, Boris Johnson tried to paint Lisa Nandy as some kind of peacenik.

“It is frankly satirical to be lectured about the size of the army when the shadow foreign secretary herself wrote only recently that the entire British Army should be turned into a kind of peace corps,” Johnson told the House of Commons during Prime Minister’s Questions. But this is untrue.

A launch event for Robert Tombs’ latest book This Sovereign Isle led to a cheeky allegation about the parentage of Brexit. Outlining the reasons for us having exited the European Union, the author flagged Britain’s retention of the pound as a “decisive difference” between us and other member states.

“If there is a reason that explains Brexit it is surely that,” he told the event hosted by the think tank Policy Exchange. “Every other issue is secondary, simply because once one is in the euro leaving it becomes extremely risky, not only to national finances and to a national economy, but to everyone’s savings in the bank. And for that reason I think one can regard Gordon Brown as the father of Brexit.”

It is often so easy to mock ‘inclusive’ word guidelines that it can feel unsporting. Lately the BBC reported the release of such rules for the University of Manchester, highlighting the instruction against the use of ‘mother’ and ‘father’

Poe’s law has clearly broken out of the internet, and one sometimes wonders if these guidelines are the work of Ron Swanson fans trying to destroy redundant HR departments from within. Another plausible explanation is that there is a long campaign to send copy editors insane, which would only take a push.