The Right Dishonourable

Many writers will have been told to read George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language at some point. This is not so much for the political content, but for the advice on writing clear English.

Some of it is obvious, but most writers I’ve read or worked with would benefit from it. “Never use a long word where a short one will do,” is an instruction many a schoolboy would sympathise with, while “if it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out” would make editors obsolete if followed.

It is funny to think that 10 months ago as we faced the most serious pandemic for decades, the West fell out about what its name should be. Exemplifying our misplaced energies, headlines were briefly dominated by whether terms like ‘Chinese virus’ or ‘Wuhan virus’ were racist.

Almost a year later ‘Covid-19’ or more simply ‘the coronavirus’ are the accepted terms, while the more cumbersome ‘SARS-CoV-2’ for the virus has fallen away. But controversy over how we deal with China looks less likely to disappear, as Nigel Farage has latched onto the country as his next big project.

Amid the fuss over Northern Ireland’s new political position in a halfway house between the United Kingdom and the European Union, less attention has been given to other British territories affected by Brexit. Among them is that peculiar peninsula at the south of Spain: Gibraltar.

As anyone with access to Wikipedia will tell you, Britain nicked the territory off Spain through the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. The British wanted it because of its commanding position at the western entrance to the Mediterranean Sea, which has proved useful in protecting trade and waging war in the centuries since.

It is no secret that the Liberal Democrats have historically benefited as the ‘none of the above’ option, countering the Conservatives in some marginals and Labour in others. Even more than Labour it has been the natural party of opposition in the last century.

In some cases the orange team has even acted against consensus between the two main parties. The classic example was Charles Kennedy’s opposition to the Iraq War, which both the governing Labour party and most Conservative MPs backed.