Reset, NOT Relaunch

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Hello, and welcome to Strong Message here on BBC Radio 4, a journalist and a comedy writer's guide to the use and abuse of political language.

It's Armandi Rucci here.

And it's Helen Lewis there, I suppose.

And this week, we're asking when is something not a relaunch, it's a reset.

We'll go into that in a moment.

But how are you feeling, Anne?

Because you were a bit under the woos last week.

Yes, I've had one of those kind of winter colds that just seems to drag on for, you know, you sort of budget a certain amount of time to be ill, and then you think, oh, come on, stop being unreasonable.

I can't still be ill.

So apologies to listeners who think I'm doing a sort of Marlene Dietrich impression.

I'm not.

This is what my voice sounds like now.

I'm just beginning to get it.

My head feels like fudge, and something goes on with your throat as well.

It feels like you've got a tortoise jammed halfway down your throat.

Yes, I think we both got podcaster's disease, I'm afraid.

That's what it's officially going to be called.

I'm assuming it's a virus, and you know, Putin hasn't gotten to us.

Which takes me on to, you've been, you've been traveling.

Yes, I went to Latvia, which was somewhere we'd planned to go in the summer.

And let me tell you, let me see if you can work out why this holiday didn't work out.

We booked it for the first week of July.

And it turned out that Rishi Sinek had other ideas about what I would be doing in the first week of July, and it was watching him lose the election.

So because we couldn't get a refund on the flights, we went and said, no, no, I'm not going to have a word said against Riga, but I did make a terrible mistake, which is after we discussed the Museum of the Deep State, I sort of essentially ended up going to one of them, which is that we went to a former KGB

police station and interrogation headquarters.

And it might be the single most depressing thing that I'd ever done.

My poor husband, who thought we were going away for like a nice mini break and eat some nice food, as we're schlepping around the prison cells, I think we really began to reconsider his life choices.

So, how graphic was it?

I mean, were there were there demonstrations?

Were there

hands-on, were there hands-on exhibitions?

You got to see inside what all the little prison cells looked like in a little tiny exercise yard in which people had kind of carved their names.

It was one of those things that I guess it wasn't, I wouldn't say it was classic holiday fair, but it is one of those things that is quite useful to remember for all that we complain about British politics.

Really, lots of countries, even within living memory, have suffered through politics that was much, much, much worse than anything that any of us in Britain have ever experienced in our lifetimes.

So I wrote it in my gratitude journal that night, even if it wasn't for necessarily the most festive thing to have done.

No, it is a reminder.

When you

you travel around, I've suddenly remember lots of family holidays in Italy where lots of Italian towns have the torture museum in them where all sorts of of medieval things can be not recreated

for your pleasure, but you're reminded by lots of nasty, spiky-looking bits of equipment.

But your experience reminds me of when I went on a walking tour of the Soviet past in Tbilisi in Georgia last year.

And they took us to what was a house still in use, but it was riddled.

The hallway was riddled with bullets, bullet holes, and saying this is the grimmest property in Georgia.

This is where lots of interrogations and executions happened.

As somebody, you know, who lived there walked past with their shopping.

So it's still a lived-in functional building.

But you do realize how kind of privileged we are being on an island and being, you know, we haven't been invaded properly since, and

I'm not giving it the thumbs up, but since the Normans.

Whereas people of a certain generation in Europe, you know, can tell you about a time when things were very, very different.

Yeah, and I think there's a lot of resentment, too, about the fact that the Russians, when they invaded lots of places in the Baltic area, committed some pretty horrific atrocities.

But because they then switched sides and came out on the winning side of World War II, there was never really the same level of justice for them as there was in the, you know, thanks to the Nuremberg trials of German atrocities.

I mean, it's such a cliche to kind of say you should kind of go traveling because you need to remember that Not Everywhere is like the place where you grew up.

But

I felt the same about going to Albania, that somebody the same age as me would have been there, you know, they would have just caught the tail end of Enver Hodger, who was both an insane totalitarian in the sense he wouldn't even let men grow beards, but also somebody who constructed this incredible state apparatus of control.

And that's within our lifetimes.

Yeah, I mean, the film I did, The Death of Stalin, is very much about Simon Russell Beale plays Lavrenti Berrier, who has been airbrushed out of history, but he was the, you know, Stalin's right-hand person and who was responsible for a lot of the punishments and the gulags and so on, and was eventually shot by Khrushchev and Co.

at the the end.

But when I was in Georgia, somebody pointed out, a journalist not far from me, her mother was raised by the Berriers

in that her parents were good friends with the Berriers, but Beria had her father shot and her mother deported.

And Beria's wife took pity on her and took her in.

So she was raised by the Berriers.

So you're that close to history that you think of as being archived and in black and white and then and gone.

And you realise actually how close

there is still that human connection to it as a reminder.

Yeah, it was very sobering.

But let me quickly now reset the podcast so that we talk about what we're going to talk about this week.

Draw a line under our conversation.

Is there a difference between a reset and a relaunch, do you think?

Or are they just words that fit in headlines?

I think governments like there to be a difference.

Would argue there is a difference because relaunch sounds like it hasn't worked.

And so we've got to go back to the drawing board and come up with another, I think this is the sort of conversation that's going on in Jaguar's headquarters as we speak, where

There's a lot of, it hasn't gone down as well as we hoped.

I mean, it's causing a lot of conversation and talk.

I mean, it's certainly spiked people's interest.

Relaunch sounds like, you know, the previous one crashed and we've had to kind of come up with something new.

Whereas a reset

is something, it's something that's gone a bit cold and now we have to heat it up again rather than...

it's smashed to bits.

It's now fallen apart.

We have to start again.

So I think governments like to think that reset is a kind of grown-up thing to do, whereas relaunch smacks of panic.

Yes, I think you're right.

You've just made, I'm sorry, you've derailed me by making me think about the Jaguar advert.

The funniest thing I thought about that was that I wondered who it was for.

Because to me, the greatest thing has always been, like, for all that, we've had some criticisms on this show of Elon Musk, but his idea of kind of making electric cars something that would cool and you'd actually want, right, rather than something that you were sentenced to have, because otherwise the baby seals will die, is a quite a useful way of making people on the right who are more sceptical about climate change, you know, feel feel okay about the energy transition.

Whereas the Jaguar advert was basically like, if you've got very left-wing values, you'll love our new electric car.

That's very expensive.

And my sort of whole perception of what the Jaguar brand was was that it was for kind of golf club adulterers.

And I can see why that they wanted to reset it from that, but it just seemed such an odd, an odd pivot, shall we say.

And also the advert that didn't have the car in it, because you'd think that, you know, their only job, as you say, is to appeal to car lovers.

Yes.

But with ad that doesn't have the car.

I mean, it's an interesting one.

It's like

when a manager who's under a lot of criticism makes a weird decision 10 minutes before the end of the game by taking off all the good players and putting on a dog and a donkey.

And people go, Well, this is crazy, but it might be so mad, it might just work.

And then at the end, they go, No, clearly, it didn't work.

It was a dog and a donkey.

He's got to go.

But maybe there's something of that in it.

It's like, you know, how do we not look like we're woke eco-warriors and more we are for the rich and the glitzy?

We'll come up with an expensive-looking car that needs batteries.

But that's, I mean, maybe this has some relevance to politics because that is also the case with almost all fashion advertising, right?

Which is that fashion is advertised on the bodies of very, very thin 19-year-olds, clothes that almost nobody can afford and nobody can actually wear

who's eaten a sandwich at any point.

But that's all done in the service of actually what you sell is perfumes and handbags.

And maybe that's the thing, maybe that's what politicians need to do.

When they're advertising something, when they're resetting, it's actually about resetting your vibe, right?

And just saying, here's what we're doing, here's the story that we're telling.

And the policies are kind of secondary to that.

Because I'd honestly defy you.

So Kier Starmer has now got five missions, having had six first steps.

Which is a nursery period, isn't it?

Right, exactly.

Which you put up on the wall and you tick them off.

And I would defy any single person in Britain to name any of those six first steps, or indeed any of his five missions, in anything but the kind of most general terms, in that you presume he'll do something about the economy,

something about crime.

I'm against it.

Probably he is.

Because Rishi Sunak did it as well about six months into his premiership, which is like, okay, here are going to be the five, was it the five targets?

You know, the to-do list that you can hold against me.

And it sounds like there's a purpose there that you're getting a grip.

But all it is, it just reminds me of when, you know, I was very bad at revising.

I could only revise when it was the day before, but I'd spend the four weeks previous to it just drawing up and redrawing up revision timetables as if somehow that was me getting on with it.

But it's not.

It's just me drawing up revision timetables.

You know, I haven't actually done anything that's on those timetables other than, you know, should I factor in next Wednesday, draw up a new revision timetable.

But it sounds like,

it sounds like they're getting on with it.

But I wonder if we're convinced by that or does the electorate think, no, hang on, you told us all this in the election, this is what you were going to do.

Why are you spending more time now booking a room to tell us again?

Why aren't you just getting on with it?

I think probably in the case of the Starmer government, it's down to a sense that things aren't working, that they're kind of stuck in a rut.

So they had the budget, which, you know,

they picked a fight essentially with pensioners by means testing the winter fuel allowance.

And, you know, in politics, you have to make decisions that sometimes have losers and winners.

And you have to be clear about why you think that you think some people deserve more attention than others.

And there was a perfectly reasonable narrative to say, well, actually, things have been very tough for working people, but thanks to the triple OC on pensions, we've protected pensioner incomes throughout this really tough period we've had in the last 10 years.

And now we think that maybe actually the balance has gone a bit too far.

But there's not, there's a kind of a desire not to sort of say that.

So I think the problem, the feeling was that the budget was, you know, it was not particularly well received by other pensioners or by farmers.

Even though those inheritance tax changes will affect relatively few people, they were quite noisy and angry about it.

And so then this is a kind of restatement of where the kind of long-term trajectory is.

It's giving some detail in that they do announce the old target here and there, although they'll say it's not targets, it's an aspiration or it's uh pat mcfadden who's very close to uh kiostama who's officially the chancellor of the duchy of lancaster but i think his brief extends beyond lancaster i think that's one of those titles that basically says you can walk into my room at any time he was trying to explain what this speech outlining his his bishops he tried to explain what it was saying

quote at the heart of the plan for change are the milestones for change on each of the missions over the course of the parliament I do not know what that means.

Does it just mean I'm going to give you my to-do list again, but louder?

Is that it?

Plan for change is the most exquisitely boring phrase, isn't it?

It's just almost like your eyes sort of just slide off it, your ears simply refuse to hear it.

It just has absolutely no content whatsoever.

I'm sort of almost impressed with that.

It reminds me of, I think it was Labour's 2005 manifesto, which went on the slogan forward, not back.

And you thought, well, yeah, I mean, I think most people would

agree with that.

We plan to reverse linear time.

Okay, big if true.

I think it's been poisoned, though, because there is this feeling in late, well, not even just in Labour, actually, in politics generally, that Labour's 1997 pledge card, which had some very concrete promises on it, like it was going to cut class sizes below 30, has achieved this kind of totemic status.

And this is kind of, I think, what happens is that successful campaigns, people tend to not think, well, it was a mess of factors and people were disillusioned with the past government and the economy wasn't going well.

They want to latch onto something that sort of like, you know, like those adverts you see on the internet that are like one weird trick to cut belly fat.

And you think it's probably just going to turn out to be eating less, isn't it?

And I don't want to hear that.

I want to hear that it's, you know, some kind of special drink that I could buy.

Yes, but meantime, I've given you 0.1 pence by clicking on this link.

Right.

But that's, I think, the way that people regard that Labour pledge card is that they sort of think, well, Labour got elected with a huge majority in 1997 and they had a pledge card.

Therefore, you know, coincidence, I think not.

And was it not also that those pledge card promises were things that actually appealed?

You know, the reduced class sizes,

stress on education, and so on.

They were things that appeal.

And it may have been the actual policies which got them elected rather than the pledge card.

The pledge card was a neat way of summarising it.

But I think people have taken from that, well, we just have to do a pledge card or equivalent of, and then people will understand what we're up to, rather than let's explain our policies and the effects they will have so it's the idea of a a neat visual aid i mean i keep i keep thinking of ed miliband and his pledges literally carved in stone if you were going to mention the edstone because it is one of my favorite things that ever happened in politics where were you when you first heard about the edstone i i think i was throwing up um

i don't know if you can answer this was it actually stone yes yeah yeah it was some i believe it was like a limestone or something sourced from portugal it turned out So for listeners who are perhaps young enough, there will now be people who are young enough not to have experienced the wonder of this as it happened.

In the 2015 election, Ed Miliband had six promises.

And for some reason, he thought it was a good idea to literally carve them in stone in order to say, I'm not going back on them.

I've taken them so seriously that I've rendered them into physical form.

And if I'm elected, they'll go in the Downing Street garden, the sort of obelisk garden.

Like some, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly, with the kind of little chimpanzees we'll be going around it, kind of attaining consciousness by looking at Miliban's pledge card.

It's up tomb to the unknown policy advisor.

Exactly.

And he was going to put it in the Rose Garden.

But the thing is that almost from the start, everyone just found it hilarious.

And there was a description of Michael Foote's 1983 labor manifesto, which was notoriously about 1,500 pages long.

And someone called that the longest suicide note in history because obviously he lost incredibly badly.

And then I think it was the journalist Chris Deerin took one, look at the Edstone and said, it's the heaviest suicide note in political history.

It just sort of encapsulated everything that everybody felt about Ed Miliband being overly tough in this way that just didn't at all land, as we've talked about previously.

I express my policies in granite form.

The sad thing is that no one knows what happened to it.

I was about to ask you, was somebody charged, some poor researcher was charged with hauling it away and trying to

smash it to bits somewhere.

Yes, you know,

all of the unemployed people who thought they were going to be special advisors instead were handed a hammer and told to get busy.

No, the assumption is that at some point it was ground down.

And it's a real shame because they could have auctioned it off for a lot of money

or raffled it or something.

Yeah, or just set up at Stonehenge as a sort of missing bit.

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My other thought about these pledges and so on is I think lots of politicians do them.

And I said Rishi Sinook did exactly the same.

There was the same Boris Johnson at the Brexit campaign and also his own election campaigns, you know, to come out with simple words, phrases, you know, let's get Brexit done, stop the boats.

They think they will get kudos for saying this is going to happen, for actually, you know, I'm brave enough to come out here and tell you that if I don't get this done in three or four years, you can sack me.

And that's meant to get them popularity.

But what they haven't calculated in that move is that the likelihood is they won't get them done.

And they've now said we can sack them.

They do these things confident that because they've said them, they must happen.

I mean, I'm the Prime Minister, for goodness sake.

It's that sense of they haven't factored in fallibility and impossibility.

And similarly, I'm reading maybe that, you know, the targets have been downgraded to milestones and achievements in Kiostarma's speech because there's a recognition that these are hoped for rather than guaranteed.

Well, I think you're right.

When you look back at the history of political targets in the last sort of 10, 15 years, they have actually not, oh, you're going to like this.

They have not been so much a milestone as a millstone.

But it's true, right?

So David Cameron said he was going to get immigration down to the quote tens of thousands, which everybody took to say net migration, this is sub 100,000 a year.

And not only did that not happen, the most recent immigration figures that we've had have been extraordinarily high, higher than they were pre-Brexit.

So what he'd done is essentially put a number on what he thought low immigration looked like or sustainable immigration looked like, which the government then failed to meet over and over and over and over again.

And it's one of those things where putting a precise figure on something.

I felt exactly the same when I saw Rishi Sunak stand in front of a lectern that said, stop the boats.

And I thought, well, you won't.

You might be able to cut the numbers of cross-channel boats bringing people over.

But the idea that there will be no boat ever seen again in the channel is like very hopeful.

So why have you set yourself this target, which you can only ever fail?

Exactly.

And yet the appeal to them is if we can condense it into a neat phrase, then that's half the work done.

It would be more honest if they had come up with the fourth word at the front saying somehow, somehow stop the boat.

Somehow get Brexit done.

Stop some boat.

Partially stop the boat.

Yes.

I think you're right though, but I think there's a feeling that because get Brexit done was such a powerful slogan in 2019, or you know, and the Brexit campaign itself had such success with the kind of encapsulating what it was to kind of be free, that actually the smaller you can boil those things down, the better.

Yeah, yeah, it's that kind of admission though that these things work in campaign mode but not in governing mode because when you're in government you realize how complicated these things are and it's hostage to fortune to commit to certain targets by certain time periods but also it's a bit like being a goalkeeper which i always think is the saddest position in football because you know you really mostly come to people's notice when you let a goal in right rather than all the great goalkeeping you did for the other 89 minutes and and of those five rishi sinek pledges he actually achieved two out of them right he did halve inflation or inflation was halved under his watch, however you want to phrase that.

And, you know, he avoided a recession.

But no one is ever going to remember the ones that you

got some right.

Yes.

It's like well done, good effort, rather than you're through to the next round.

So what is the next stage then?

If you've set up your targets at the start of your administration to show that you're tough and you mean it and you're across it and whatever, when you start realizing two or three years later, it's not really going to happen.

Is there a pattern of behavior that can allow us to predict what happens next?

Do you start blaming others?

Is it outside forces?

I think there are two things that happen, which is one, you start fiddling the figures.

And this often happens with like we're going to build new hospitals.

And then it turns out you've actually gone retrospectively back and decided that any hospitals that are, you know, people started thinking about,

yeah, exactly, that you are now going to claim credit for every hospital that is now going to be built.

And you know, you're sort of backdating that.

And a lot of that stuff happens, I think.

And the second thing that happens is there's a great phrase, which ever since I heard about it, I I love, which is the tyranny of metrics, which is essentially that by measuring things, you distort them.

And the second thing that sometimes happens is you meet the target in a very technical way, but at the cost of kind of ruining everything.

There's a great kind of thought experiment that a philosopher called Nick Bostrom came up with, which is about the idea about the trouble with very powerful AI.

And it's called the paperclip experiment.

And essentially, if you ask an AI to make paperclips, what it might do is make some paperclips, but eventually it will start mining every bit of the earth.

It will start, you know, it will sort of like start mulching down humans to make paperclips.

And that's the thing.

If your target is only to make paperclips, then it's doing a brilliant job.

If your target is to not, you know, wipe out humanity, then it's not a very bad job.

And I think not I'm saying Kierstama's ANE waiting targets will be simply catastrophic, but the thing is that they can kind of come at the expense of something else.

Yes, and it has been said with a lot of these targets, they're expressed in a certain way that don't actually connect with most voters.

Part of the inquest into the failed Kamala Harris campaign was that, yes, she went round saying, you know, our growth is higher than any other major developed country, inflation is coming down, and wherever.

But people didn't point out to her was just how heavily people felt

how much prices had gone up and how much the cost of living had gone up.

And she didn't have an answer to that.

She felt that if you put out these economic figures that are good, but they just measure a certain aspect of the economy that most people aren't affected by.

And similarly, there is the problem, I think, with the more you mush these mission statements down, the more people don't quite know what it is you're setting the target of.

You know, it's something to do with schools, it's something to do with the NHS, it's something to do with law, but we don't quite know how that is going to affect us on a day-by-day basis.

The phrase that's often used now to sum up that whole debate is the political philosophy is called deliverism.

Yes.

And the idea is actually, as a politician, how much credit do you actually get for improving people's lives in very material ways versus how much credit do you get for being in tune with their values.

Yes.

And you know, the Trump presidency is a very interesting example of that because when he left office, actually, his approval ratings were quite poor.

People thought he'd managed the economy quite poorly.

So he wasn't actually seen to have delivered particularly well for the American people.

Whereas, as you say, Biden was the president who ended up with high inflation on his watch, which he managed to bring down by the end of his term.

But people didn't care about that.

What they remembered was he was old and he didn't step down in time, and they didn't think that his successor was particularly inspiring.

And so there is a big and slightly terrifying discussion going on in political theory circles at the moment about basically: do you get any credit for actually doing policies or not?

Should you just tell a story that people like?

Exactly.

Talking about the story, it makes me realize that actually this is coming down more and more to something that I've always kind of railed against, but I think now I can see the need for it, which is, you know, telling the story in that it needs someone to explain why these targets are being set and what the material or societal benefit of them is going to be, how it will impact on your daily lives.

Because at the moment, again, the figures are being put out and the headlines are being put out, but people can't make the connection.

People don't know, you know, in three or four years' time, what does that mean in terms of, you know, your family life, work life, getting to work, your retirement, you know, Blair will be remembered for all sorts of things, but at least you kind of knew the story he was telling.

Similarly, I suppose with Margaret Thatcher, again, you know, you could disagree with what she did, but you had an idea where she was coming from and you know she compared it to you know shopping or you know housekeeping you know balancing the books in the house and so on but at least you got a sense of what the narrative was she was trying to kind of shape across her government and and then when you don't do that when you just assume people will look up the figures and see how good it's gone then it doesn't work I think if you if you say to people the phrase Thatcher's Britain, they have something in their mind what that means.

And either that means entrepreneurialism and dynamism, or it means the closure closure of the minds um and de-industrialization similarly if you say blair's britain to people they either you know i have negative associations with it or they think cool britannia jerry haliball wearing a union jack dress right all that kind of stuff and i'm not sure we've necessarily i don't think we ever really got to see what liz druss's britain was um

i don't think she ever got a chance to see it either no and i'm not sure whether or not at the moment anybody could tell you what they think kier starmer's britain looks like what is the story that he's telling about what what he thinks britain wants to be i think that's the you know behind the commentary on the the re-lodge, the reset, and so on, I think that's the thing I'm finding the loudest, that sense of what is, what's a story?

And I don't mean story as a fiction, I mean as a way of being able to articulate what is happening, but also what the plans are in a way that we can connect with, really.

Now, tell me, before we go, have you ever heard the phrase the great reset?

Oh, my word.

Now, this is something, this is a conspiracy theory, isn't it?

Well, it was the World Economic Forum put out a document that said that what the world needed essentially post-COVID was a great reset.

And,

you know, for an extremely boring policy document, it has achieved a kind of mythical status as, you know, it's kind of woven into that all-purpose conspiracy theory about the idea that there's some sort of shadowy world government.

And that essentially, so all kinds of things play into the great reset, one of which is the fact that, you know, people want you to eat insects, which to be fair, The Economist magazine is notoriously people laugh at, will reliably run an article every couple of years about how they're actually a very good source of protein.

And in lots of places around the world, people do eat insects.

And then there was also a phrase about, I think it was the philosopher Yuval Noahari said, you know, you will own nothing and you'll be happy.

This idea that there's a sort of stealthy version of kind of communism that's been ushered in by these very progressive policies.

And then the other one that kind of plays into that is the idea that there's something very terrifying about 15-minute cities, which are this idea that you should basically bring back neighborhoods and that everything that you need.

But to, particularly in America, which is a very culture that is car-obsessed to the extent that owning a car is seen as synonymous with freedom, then the 15-minute city is seen as kind of like you know, a kind of joyless leftist is going to kind of take away your car and force you to walk to the mung bean dispensary.

So, yeah, there is a whole panoply of kind of worries about the idea of this.

Who is the one who gets to do the resetting, essentially?

You see, what the proponents of the great reset need to do is book a room and have a press conference, which they outline all their mischievous aims and targets that they hope to hit over the next four or five years.

And it's more than eating insects.

It is true that actually the one thing you don't get in totalitarian governments is you don't get

policy setting, I suppose.

I suppose the Soviets had their five-year plans.

Five-year plans, yes.

But they didn't go into a lot more detail, did they?

No, no, I don't think so.

And the other thing about these pledges and so on is they kind of assume that governments are in control of events.

A lot of the defence against Rushi Sunak missing some of his targets was, well, there was a war in Ukraine, there was a banking crisis, there was climate.

And you think, yes, but you should know that, you know, events do happen.

You cannot control what will happen around the world diplomatically, militarily, and meteorologically.

So you should assume that from the start when you make your predictions.

So I always feel it's a kind of easy way out three years on to say, well, we'd have made all these targets were it it not for the fact that, oh, the pandemic, that's the other one.

Were it not for the fact that just things,

things weren't quite how we thought it would be, you know.

And tell me, have you brought a little extra phrase?

Yes.

Well, this goes back to the relaunch, the reset.

Kirstama did a speech last week.

And he used the phrase, you know, that we were going to do graft, not gimmicks.

And that was the sort of takeaway phrase from that speech, graft, not gimmicks.

And, you know, I've alighted on this before, but the power of alliteration, we must do a whole episode on alliteration, that somehow, if you can yank two slightly opposed words together that start with the same letter, that's all you need to explain what you're doing.

But also, graft, not gimmicks, is a gimmick, isn't it?

Somebody's come up with that phrase as a way of simplifying.

what you're doing.

I remember Tony Blair towards the end of the Good Friday Agreement talks saying, well,

today's not the time for sound bites, but I do believe the hand of history is on our shoulders here.

Well, that's...

That's one of my favourites, Tony Blair.

Yeah.

Up there with People's Princess, which was obviously the sort of deranged concept.

It's a non-egalitarian concept, and it just sort of wonderfully worked.

But I think now is not the time for soundbites.

I feel the hand of history on my shoulders.

It's just shadowy.

And there it is again, graph, not gimmick.

So I think we should be looking out for that more and more of politicians saying they're not going to boil down complex ideas into digestible phrases.

They're going to, I need another B word now, they're not going to, we're not going to boil it down, we're going to bugger it up.

No, no, we're not.

We're not going to boil it down.

We're going to bring it on.

Yeah, we're not going to boil it down.

We're going to bring it on.

Well, I've got an email from one of our listeners and an exciting opportunity for our other listeners, which is that in January, we'll be doing a special You Ask Us edition.

And you can send in email suggestions, alliterations to strongmessage here at bbc.co.uk.

And I should say, any sort of strange words or phrases used in politics over the last year?

Yep, nominations are open for that.

And requests, like a wedding DJ, we very much do requests.

This one is from Nick Wookiee, which is an excellent name, spelt sadly not like Chewbacca, but like Wookiee Hole.

And he says, hello, Armando and Helen.

Love the podcast/slash programme, keeping it open.

And then a phrase which I think he's written deliberately to upset me in having to read this out.

So many linguistic incongruities and semantic monstrosities exist in politics.

You shine light on them, there's another, in a really entertaining and appropriately sarcastic way.

I'd love for you to deep dive, another one, on the way the concept of clarity has evolved and the way it features in political rhetoric.

The phrase, let me make it clear, feels like it was commonplace in the 70s and 80s.

Since then, it seems to have transmogrified via the clunky, let me be clear, into the latter-day abomination of, I am clear, as in I am clear that XYZ is the case, used by everyone from Pretty Beatle to Kier Starmer.

I think wasn't let Me Be Clear an alternative rejected title for the podcast, in fact.

It's such a horrific cliché.

It is a horrific, but also I think it's one of those phrases now that people rail against, isn't it?

You know that if somebody says, let me be clear, they're going to either not be

or they're going to say something that requires no further questioning.

So let me be clear, I'm not going to be.

Let me be honest is another one that you should just, I think, avoid.

The preface is something bad.

Let me be clear.

Yes.

I think it's one of those ones where it's sort of, yeah, the kind of jokes do themselves in that it's very rarely followed by anybody being clear, right?

It is the kind of classic thing that will happen in a political interview where they've been asked the same question twice and not really answered it because possibly because the question is unanswerable.

And so the third time round, you get, let me be clear, I'm not going to, you know, the only poll that matters is on election day or whatever it matters.

I think that's one where public shaming has worked.

I feel like that one has died out slightly.

But it's interesting that Nick Wickham moves on to I am clear that, which is a late evolution of it, which is, it implies certainty, whereas in fact, it isn't certain.

It's just an opinion.

You know, I am clear.

This is a great program, perhaps one of the greatest programs that Radio 4 has ever put out.

Well, on that unarguable note, I think it's time to, but I don't know.

How can we top it?

How can one improve on perfection?

Thank you, everybody, for listening to Strong Message here.

We will be back next week.

All our episodes are available in our feed, so make sure sure you subscribe on BBC Sounds.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

The Wreath Lectures 2024, hosted by me, Anita Arnand.

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