101 YEARS OLD AND STILL LOGICALLY ELEPHANTINE...

FOLLOWING my revelations yesterday concerning the huge rise in the number of elephants in the room mentioned in the national press since the year 2000, I have been deluged with information and suggestions on the topic.

The idea of an unnoticed elephant in a room seems to date back to a story called The Inquisitive Man written in 1814 by the Russian writer Ivan Krylov about a man visiting a museum who sees many small things but overlooks an elephant. The earliest known use of the exact phrase “elephant in the room”, however, was in a philosophical treatise of 1935 by HT Costello which argued the difficulty of asserting that there is not an elephant in the room “for I cannot observe what is not”.

The recent inability of politicians to come up with a way of dealing with the rapid increase of elephants in rooms is amply shown by the occurrence of the phrase in the last dozen or so years in debates in Parliament. A search through Hansard reveals 326 mentions of an elephant in the room since 2005, of which 209 were in the House of Commons and 117 in the Lords (these figures, I should clarify, are the numbers of mentions, not necessarily the number of elephants).

Curiously, the only mention before 2005 was by George Osborne in 2004 who said in a debate: “The elephant in the room was the 60,000 pensioners who had lost all or part of their pension.” But he did not explain how these 60,000 people managed to cram into a room already overcrowded with an elephant or why they hoped to find their lost pensions there.

Even more curiously, Hansard reveals that 761 white elephants were mentioned in debates before 2005 yet none of those, apparently, were in rooms, nor were any of the 114 white elephants referred to since 2005.

It could be argued that since it is in the nature of elephants in the room not to be noticed, MPs and Lords cannot be expected to detect whether they are white or not, yet if they are going to the trouble of identifying them as elephants, it should surely be little trouble to detect their colour.

Several readers have pointed out the potential conservation value of keeping elephants in rooms rather than letting them rampage through jungles. Some have suggested that if we restricted the use of elephant in the room metaphors to Indian elephants, we could get more than one of them into a room, as they are considerably smaller than African elephants. They are also an endangered species, so preserving them in rooms may be beneficial.

Finally, I must mention a comment by Lord McCluskey in a House of Lords debate on Scotland’s fiscal framework in February in 2016: “At the risk of mixing my metaphors…have we not… been burying our heads, ostrich-like, in the sand while turning a blind eye to the elephant in the room?”

How right he is! We cannot continue to be ostriches on the matter of elephants but must introduce without delay reliable methods of estimating the number of elephants currently being overlooked in rooms and how many of those elephants are white.