ON MY MIND
With Graham Davies
IF YOU were to throw a dead cat on your friend’s dining room table, it would no doubt be the end of a purrfect friendship. It would certainly dramatically change the conversation from what was being discussed to the deceased felis catus before you. And this is exactly what has happened in the past week.
Called “dead catting”, it is a well-known political strategy for distracting from one thing which is not going too well and shifting the attention to another. Originating, it seems, from his previous campaign manager Australian Lynton Crosby, it has been used by the PM to divert attention from the moral failures of his leadership and get people talking about something silly such as imperial measures.
Yet it seems to have backfired since people are far more intelligent than he thinks and the concept is as daft as a bone picker after a peck of ale.
First, we will soon be able to toast the Royal Family with a pint glass embossed with a patriotic crown symbol while enjoying a hip-hop version of the English national anthem sung by Nicholas Witchell. Putting the clock back to the reign of William III (1650-1702), when the crown symbol was introduced, is one of the major benefits of Brexit and the move was described by Jacob Reesmogg, Minister for the Middle Ages and Trying to Find Any Benefit from Brexit, as freeing us from the “bureaucratic suzerain of Brussels”. Failure to display the crown meant a fine for the innkeeper of 40 shillings, or, if you prefer, 120 groats.
This will be followed by a consultation on the return of imperial measures, the outcome of which could put us proudly alongside Myanmar and Liberia. Yet to suggest that imperial is essentially British is a nonsense, since most of the imperial units derive from Romans, Normans, Anglosaxons and the French. What we have is another Westminster spin, but it could be fun exploring old currencies. For example, paying for some nails three barleycorns in length with an unclipped silver penny sounds interesting. So perhaps the feline spin worked.