Weasel words keep flowing out of Johnson’s inept Government as it presides over an absolute disaster

WORDS: we are assailed by them yet are none the wiser. The Tory Government is awash with words, from the daily coronavirus briefing to Boris Johnson’s florid, mostly meaningless, evasions at PMQS.

Words are trotted out to camouflage the latest dereliction of duty, with hackneyed cliches churned out ad nauseam, enunciated in an unctuous, distant, disengaged manner — a formula that is expected, but with no real empathy or sense of genuine feeling.

Poured like a sauce over an otherwise unappetising dish, this Government uses words, gallons of them, as its stockin-trade to deflect, detract, avoid, evade and disengage from any of its responsibilities, seeking always to offload them elsewhere (the scientific community, for example).

In a disreputable effort to wriggle his way out of his breaking of the lockdown rules the Government’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings spouted a plethora of words to a small group of increasingly incredulous professional journalists and to an equally questioning public. That, in this case, the power of words failed Mr Cummings was subsequently brought out in a survey in which 81% of the public believe he broke the rules.

Herein lies the rub. While words have power, it behoves their authors to back them up with actions, as in Matthew 7:16 (“By their fruits you shall know them.”) and by Benjamin Franklin (“Words may show a man’s wit, but actions his meaning.”).

In both Cummings’s and Johnson’s actions, unlike their words, we are subjected to a paucity of results; an abyss of inaction that will doubtless be proven to be the prime cause why the UK death rate in this pandemic is the highest in Europe and, proportionally, probably the world. What weasel words will Johnson, Cummings et al conjure up to wash their hands of any responsibility for this debacle? No doubt, like Pilate, it will be everyone else’s fault but theirs.

OBSERVER Bangor, Co Down