Kemi-Kaze and political nicknames

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Hello everyone, welcome to Strong Message Here, a journalist and a comedy writer's guide to the use and abuse of political language.

It's Helen Lewis in Savannah, Georgia.

And it's Armando Unucci in a small room in London.

Every week we will be taking tough decisions to turbocharge our levelling up and make the series a must-listen for hard-working families.

But to start off, we're going to talk about political nicknames.

Before we do so, let's just explain the provenance of our title Strong Message here, which was

it wasn't an autocue mishap in that the auto queue performed wonderfully, but it was a mishap in the politician reading from it.

Yes, it's from Jeremy Corbyn's 2015 Labour Conference speech, which you might remember for the one about kinder politics.

And he was talking, I think, about university tuition fees.

And then he fatally read out the instruction on the auto-cue, strong message here.

And I've always liked that moment because it's a reflection of the fact that in politics, you have to look authentic, but you also have to carefully choreograph how much you look authentic.

And the moments when that goes wrong or when you kind of see behind the scenes and the way that language is being used becomes quite obvious, I think.

Yes.

And the reason we wanted to do this particular podcast program was we've noticed more recently politicians' careful use of phrasing and catchphrases and buzzwords.

And I want to investigate just how much they're used to deceive us or to pull an illusion or to overly simplify.

I think this is a useful tool, rather like a language app.

This, hopefully, week by week will build up into a useful tool in which a listener, I'm making them singular at the moment, can learn how to spot the tricks of the verbal trade, I suppose.

Right.

The duolingo of deception.

That's what we aim to be on this podcast.

There's an alternative title.

That's it.

When we expand, when we go into the Strong Message Here universe, we can roll that one out.

Rollout is another one that is used in the form.

Rolling out, rolling the pitch.

Yeah.

That's that happens.

It's when you want to persuade your audience that you've got more than two ideas.

You say we're rolling out.

And I think you roll out a raft of policies.

Not that rafts, are rafts rolled out?

Who knows?

If anyone's seen a raft be rolled out, please do send us your explanation.

May I start by bidding for this week's special word, which is Kemikaze.

Kemikaze.

Which is, I think, is actually very, I would say, very up-market as a kind of both a nickname for Kemi Badnock bestowed on her by her rival for the Tory leadership, Robert Jenrick.

And coming from kamikaze, as in the Japanese pilots during the Second World War, who deliberately crashed their planes.

And

I think that's quite a classy political nickname.

Do you think she wears that one as a badge of honor?

I think if you're a politician that's a i mean that's that's at the top end of what you're going to get called i would say as an expression it's actually been recycled because it was used uh was it last year the year before when uh kwasi katang the chancellor brought out what became the suicidal budget it was labeled the kami quasi budget

so this this this um

This phrase has seen better days.

This is a recycled idea, I think.

Oh, okay.

Within the Tory Party.

Point stop for that.

But I guess the point of it was to conjure up this idea that

Kemi Badnock, I think someone once said she could start a fight in an empty room.

And that's either rendered as a kind of Margaret Thatcher-esque level of conviction in their opinions or as a kind of unnecessary aggression that everything is sort of treated as a cultural war.

So I'm, you know, it could be one of those nicknames that somebody adopts with a certain level of pride, I suppose, which is not true of all of them.

But it's become a much more familiar characteristic of politicians trying to label basically their opponents with a very catchy nickname.

I think the best thing that Boris Johnson ever did, and it's a very short list as far as I'm concerned, others may disagree, was call Sakir Starmer at the height of his Did He Have a Beer Breaking the Lockdown rules, Sabir Corma.

Which, you know, part of me thought, Part of me, I split.

My reaction was, oh, come on, we're grown up, we're better than this.

And another part thought, well, actually, that's quite good.

Another part of you thought, I'm not better than this.

That was well done.

I had to chapeau to you on that one, Boris Johnson.

But then a third part of me corrected the second part of me and said, but politicians shouldn't be spending their time by trying to come up with catchy-sounding nicknames for their opponent.

I think we're going to enter a golden age of political nicknames because there is something about Sir Kier Starmer that is just very easy as a kind of, you know, you know when you write a poetry or you know the structure actually almost helps you.

Like limericks have got a very tight structure so you instantly know where you are.

And there's something about that sir, one-syllable, two-syllable.

Yeah.

So, Sabir Kalma, but the left have already given him some, you know, who probably hate him more than the Tories, have already given him some pretty brutal nicknames.

So, they, when they're talking about whether or not they would continue conservative austerity, they called him Saqid Stava.

Yeah.

You know, in the accusations of him being anti-LGBT, they've called him Saqueer Harmer, right?

And I just think we're probably going to get to this, you know, we've got maybe got another four years of him.

It's a very easy one to riff on.

I think we, I think there could be some gold ahead.

Talking about portrait, I mean, I did a poem about the pandemic a couple of years ago in which various of our well-known faces were given titles like Richard Suna and so on.

And I didn't use Keostano.

It was too early for him.

But I had, in my back pocket, I had Sir Keep Karma, which when he was leader of the opposition, was, I know it's going to be tough.

I know it's going to be hard.

But if we just all settle down, it'll be fine.

You know, that was his kind of modus operandi.

But you're right.

And I think it's something to do with the rhythm, something that rhymes.

That's a good one.

If you've got a politician whose first name rhymes with something else, this goes right back to Margaret Thatcher when she was Education Minister and cancelled free milk in schools.

And she was known as Margaret Thatcher Milk Snatcher.

Right.

And I met Erin Pizzy, the women's rights activist who founded the First Women's Refuge in Britain.

And she confidently asserted to me that she had coined this nickname.

Right.

And I spent...

I spent weeks trying to find out if it's true.

And eventually I just couldn't run it down one way or the other.

And that's one of the strange things about these nicknames is that they sort of emerge into the ether, right?

You can't coin a nickname on your own.

Every so often, there's a quite a sad thing when a politician tries to coin a nickname either for themselves or others.

And everyone just goes, no, I don't think so.

But so you have to have a sort of level of support for them.

Yeah, yeah.

You can depend rick on Robert Jenrick, something like that.

Well, that doesn't, that doesn't.

I think that breaks all the rules.

Yes, I think you're right, but they can be quite devastating if they stick.

Which brings me to Donald Trump, because I think trump has got away with boiling politics down to

just spreading and spraying out nicknames derogatory nicknames for his opponents i took a look at the list of them and they're not actually on paper they're not very good so it's like crooked hillary uh lying ted cruise

um

sleepy joe sleepy joe laughing camela laughing

little little marco for marco rubio So they're not witty.

And yet somehow they've worked.

Now, why is that?

What does that say about political discourse now that you can come up with, maybe because he has a big audience, like you were saying, they need to catch and therefore they need to be told in an environment where a lot of people will hear it and pick up on them.

I suppose Trump being a showman, when he turns up for his Barnum and Bailey

an hour and a half in Pittsburgh or whatever, saying these phrases gives him an opportunity to land a kind of a label with his audience.

Yeah, I can say that now as somebody who's now finally been to a Donald Trump rally in person, but he is a politician constructed by language, which I think a lot of people will find very odd because they say, well, he rambles, he's very incoherent, and both of which are completely true.

You know, he will segue from a sort of section about fracking into suddenly now he's talking about China into now he's talking about something, you know, some long-forgotten 90s showbiz beef.

beef.

It's a kind of chaotic thing to try and keep up with.

But you're right, he does this thing that stand-ups do, which is that he uses the audience as an editor.

So he tests out a nickname and he sees, oh, does that one work?

And then not a great reaction there.

So I'll try something else.

So they are often very simple.

The one I think that is probably did the most damage was he called the Democratic now senator Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas, which was about her claim for a financial assistance at university because she claimed to have Native American heritage.

And then a DNA test revealed that she kind of really didn't.

But he managed to sum up in one tiny sentence this idea that she was a phony.

And also he went there in a way that other people just wouldn't have been that mean.

And I think in 2016, the play around sort of bully aspect of this, it was the same thing.

He called Ted Cruz's wife ugly, right?

There was just a kind of shock that anybody would go there.

Probably not as a nickname, but just generally he was, yeah.

But all laws break down when you come to Donald Trump, really, don't they?

Because things that would not work coming from another politician when they come from him it seem to be not only do they work but like you say they seem to embody him they seem to define him i mean he is he is a massive word cloud i think that's what he is do you

i think when you go to the way you describe the rally it sounds like you've you've gone to watch a word cloud form in front of you because it has these kind of disconnected uh phrases and i mean billy connolly you mentioned stand-up billy connoisseur does that for his he can go on stage and talk for two hours.

And he has spoken about how he has five or six different subjects in his head.

And he's got a mind map that connects them to each other.

And he can wander from one and go back to them and so on.

But that's because he's very, very good at doing that job.

Whereas Donald Trump just sprays out these arbitrary thoughts and then tries to justify them at the end by saying, but they are all somehow connected.

Right.

But it also reminds me a bit, you know, that bit in Top Gun where they're trying to, you know, they throw out flares from the back of the plane to stop the the heat-seeking missile getting you?

That's the effect that it has, I think, on political journalists, is that there's just, there's a, there's just a lot, there's too much.

And you pick out, do I write the headline that's, you know, Donald Trump says mad thing X, or do I write Mad Thing Y, or do I write about, you know, very exciting policy proposal, if it ever happened?

And it's just, it's just a kind of, as you say, it's a word guide, it's a vibe.

I think you can probably trace the fall of the American Republic.

I was looking up previous presidential nicknames, and George Washington's,

one of George Washington's nicknames was the American Cincinnatus, right?

Which is the idea of the he went back to his plow at the end of the day.

Yeah.

And we've kind of gone from the American Cincinnatus to the guy who will call people Sleepy Joe.

Yeah.

That's the arc of history so far.

Just reminds me when Boris Johnson left Owning Street, he said, he said, like Cincinnatus, I will return to my plow.

People forgetting that Cincinnatus was allowed to become dictator of Rome for a period and then gave up and went to retire and then was brought back sometime later to do it again.

And I very much think that that's what was secretly implied in his farewell message.

And Cincinnati, of course, in the middle of that, wrote an autobiography, went to some Bitcoin conferences for money.

Bought a lovely house in the Cotswolds.

Signed a massive contract for GB News

but has yet to appear on it.

Yeah, that's classic Cincinnatus.

Yeah.

Now Johnson, as I'm going to call him, is an interesting one because he's someone who's gotten away with being called by his first name rather than a nickname.

You know, you say Boris and everyone instantly knows who you mean.

And there are only a few people,

Sting, perhaps, who can do that.

The Edge, although that's technically two.

But Boris...

very much

enemies as well as supporters will call him that.

I've tried rigorously to show my independence by calling him Johnson all the time.

But people, when I say Johnson, people say to me, who?

Which is how I like it.

But somehow, his actual name doesn't cut through.

I think people get very annoyed about the use of Boris because they think that it's over-familiar.

And the same way that there was a backlash to calling Trump the Donald, right?

There was this feeling that it treated him as a kind of cartoon character rather than what they felt, you know, he was a dangerous personality.

But it's also interesting to me that boris is a name that johnson chose for himself right his actual first name is is alex and the family call him alex and he took a conscious decision i think as a teenager that this was more iconic branding to pick a kind of cool russian sounding name that basically other people didn't have and i think that's the other bit to remember about it is that in that case you are going along with what a politician wants you to use and i think there's a bit of me as a journalist maybe a bit of you as a kind of comedy writer throwing bricks from the back that just instincts me as soon as someone wants me to do something i don't i don't want to do it anymore yeah yeah yeah yeah no i think that's right and and i think also what politicians don't want are nicknames thrust upon them or their name used in a phrase that is being used without their permission or control i was thinking for example of the farage riots which was uh you know the the disturbances and the horrible uh attacks on immigration and and asylum seekers across social media that became the Farage riots.

I don't know if it was a specifically planned attempt to label Nigel Fry for those or whether it was one of those organically

the way things spread on social media.

But it does show you how the use of names within phrases, political names within phrases, can be quite devastating at times.

Yeah.

Kamala Harris is trying to do a similar thing by talking constantly about the Trump abortion bans.

And I think in both cases, it's an attempt to pin something on a politician, right?

It's an attempt to kind of make them responsible for something to allow them not to escape from it.

So I can imagine in both of those cases that the politicians involved probably feel quite sore about that.

They feel that they're, you know,

what's that phrase from John Proctor in the cruise we know, give me back my name.

The idea that power politics involves you in necessarily having your name taken away from you and your opponents trying to blacken it as much as they possibly can.

So it's about control.

If you can come up with a good, catchy nickname for someone else, that's good as far as you're concerned.

But if one emerges in the electronic ether about you, that's bad because you don't have any control over it.

Yeah, that makes sense to me.

I think that's a fundamental sort of way that power works in language, isn't it?

The people who get the rights to name stuff are the powerful people.

I mean, it's why biology is going through this process of saying, should we rename all of these species that were named after some random white bloke who tipped off and went, that looks like a nice butterfly, when people have been happily identifying that butterfly for centuries beforehand?

The idea that whoever wields the power to name stuff is the dominant force in the society.

I'm rather worried about the increasingly exotic names used for hurricanes because I'm sure next year when they wipe the slate clean and they start with A again, there'll be a devastating hurricane Ormando at some point.

There was Storm Boris a couple of weeks back, but

there was Hurricane LN, but that's the kind of cool continental version of my name.

So I just about sidestep that one.

I have a question for you, which is, can you guess why the symbol of the U.S.

Democrats is a donkey?

It is related to nicknames.

Uh, oh gosh, no, no.

So, Andrew Jackson, early U.S.

president Andrew Jackson, got into a bit of trouble.

And cartoonists, political cartoonists, who are devastating bestowers of nicknames as a tradition, they drew him as a jackass.

You see what they've done there?

Right, okay, very good.

And he tried to lean into it, which is another good thing to do if you possibly can with a nickname.

And so, the donkey became associated with the Democrats.

It then kind of went out of use for a bit and was picked up later.

But it is all down to somebody making a crude pun on Andrew Jackson's name.

Well, that now leads me to ask you a question, which I wasn't expecting to ask you.

But do you know the origins of SARS, which stands for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome?

Severe and acute both mean the same thing, but it was originally going to be called acute respiratory syndrome.

They realized it would be arse.

And, you know, it doesn't...

It doesn't help your message to be prepared for arse when SARS is better.

Which, now you might think this is, we've gone off on a bit of a tangent, but I can bring it back to politics because I know when Tom Tuchenhatt launched his campaign for the leadership of the Conservative Party, he had behind him a series of slogans.

The initial letters were highlighted, and it was, together we can unite the party, rebuild trust, defeat Labour, which spelt turd.

And

it went vertically down to the side of his face when he was standing in front of the poster.

So that had to quickly be changed.

And it does show you how

these attempt to coin your own.

There was a phase in advertising and in television where people always used to go.

And the aim is to make it go viral, forgetting that going viral is something that happens spontaneously.

You don't actually plan something spontaneous.

But the use of the word viral was very much a kind of idea number one.

What we'll do is we'll make something very popular.

I mean, that's going to be our campaign.

Uh, give us £150,000, please.

Thank you.

Yes, I have sat in meetings like that where people hear that, and you go, well, hang on, why don't we just have it?

Hear me out.

Let's just make it good.

Yeah.

And then we'll hope that people like it.

Yeah, but it is out of our control.

Yes, I wonder.

I mean, I went and looked through the list of presidential nicknames because there are some absolute stars in there.

The one who I, Thomas Jefferson, six foot two inches, long Tom.

He's got to be happy with that.

William Henry Harrison, nicknamed Old Granny, because, and actually, before this, this was his nickname before it happened, he caught a cold at his inauguration and died of it.

This is about the worst luck you can possibly have.

I know, but first, you're given the maybe the worst, just saddest presidential nickname, and then he only got to be president for basically a couple of weeks.

So, uh, should we give each other nicknames there?

Okay, yeah, I'm ready.

I've done my homework.

I've thought, I've pondered on this.

No, I haven't.

You know, all I can think of, I mean, the best I could come up with is Helen Lewis.

You'll you'll know who is she

um

but you know i think this proves that politicians are actually better comedy writers uh than i am and that i should just spend my time doing their job which is to come up with an integrated transport policy

um i don't know where you can go with your nucci uh well i had a thought about this and i know that your friends call you arm don't they oh yeah yeah and you were once described as the hard man of political satire which is one so i i think we'd like to bring that back so my nickname for you is going to be grievous bodily Arm.

Great.

I'll wear that one with pride.

Good.

I'm Andrew Ducci.

He's not Stanley Tucci is the only thing I could.

Again, doesn't get you any votes.

As well as looking at one main phrase from the last few weeks, I just wondered if you've found any other odd words that are in currency at the moment that throw up odd words.

I was going to say I'm I'm still living in the afterglow of dealing with the Trump rally, but the thing that he talks about is the weave.

And I think in what we talked about today, I'm going to leave you with the weave, which is the idea that somehow it all actually makes sense.

So if you were ever accused of not making sense, go, I'm sorry, I was simply doing the weave.

Right.

I think we must explore that at greater length in another program, actually, because I think that's he has used that word recently to explain the word cloud phenomenon that he projects at his rallies against accusations of him being incoherent, mentally unstable, all the things that were leveled at Joe, he leveled at Joe Biden.

He's trying to maintain that he's not a dodgery old man, but in fact, he's,

as we all know, quite a genius.

A titan.

A verbal titan.

Okay, well, yes, that's the good that we.

What about you?

Well, you mentioned right at the top, well, I was going to talk about Arnold Palmer only because

only.

I only found out who Arnold Palmer was and what an Arnold Palmer was in a number of different ways.

So I actually, because I'm in Georgia at the moment, I had an Arnold Palmer this week, which is half iced tea, half lemonade.

It was delightful, but you're not going to talk about that.

Part of Trump's weave at the moment is to do like a 10-minute riff on Arnold Palmer and how much of a man he was in the locker room.

I won't go any further than that.

Just look it up, Google it.

Or some other website, some other research websites are available.

But this is what I mean about each way that Trump kind of signal jams political journalism, because American political journalism is very stately.

You You know, it's very gallant.

We'll always say he used a slur about him and never actually tell you what it was.

So you can't really grade it on an offensiveness scale.

So the thought of American political journalists having to grope with, you grope with, sorry, that's not the happiest phrase in the second

American journalists having to deal with the idea that Trump is now just rambling about

locker room bragging.

It was quite funny to watch in real time because they were obviously accused of kind of covering up what he was saying.

And I don't think it was that.

I think it was just a sort of blushing southern bell kind of, Lord, I do declare.

You know, can't possibly put this word in headlines.

Do you think he has a team of rapid responders who go out on the media the next day says, No, the plan always was to talk about Arnold Palmer?

Yeah, so we think that actually, whether or not Arnold Palmer was hung, was actually one of the big issues at stake in the situation.

That's what we're hearing on the doorstep.

Hard-working families, the first question they ask of us is

it relates to Arnold Palmer.

And Trump kind of answered that question head-on.

Other politicians refuse to, they waver, they give a very nondescript answer.

They try and avoid the question.

But the thing about Donald, Donald the Weaver,

is the way, yeah, and they go out and just say, no, that's part of it.

It's on our grid.

Well, there we go.

I think we'll end on a controversial note, which is that actually Donald Trump, perhaps the greatest rhetorical genius of our time.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you for listening to Strong Message here.

We'll be back next week.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

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