Saturday, September 20, 2008

Mangled rhetoric

Let’s bolt those clichés together, shall we?

So instead of repeating the solutions of yesterday we must embrace the new policies of tomorrow and restate the case for our party and our values. Meeting this challenge will not be easy and it will not happen overnight.

Just a couple of semantic points. If you’re intent on not “repeating the solutions of yesterday” then you’re not going to be “restating” a previously existing case but stating a whole new one. And if the new policies you want to embrace are those of “tomorrow”, then I rather fancy it’s going to have to “happen overnight”, or at the very latest by the following nightfall. Otherwise the new policies of tomorrow will have become the old solutions of yesterday and then you’ll have to find another new case to state for the first time. But I do agree that, given such a tight schedule, “meeting this challenge” will indeed “not be easy”.

(Do you really need to be told who writes like this? Although, to be fair, he has a nice line here about the Tory instinct against government interventionism: “You cannot ‘nudge’ your way through a financial crisis.” Perhaps he’s been getting help from a more successful writer.)

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