How Language Works, Part 379: Political Sex ‘Scandals’ in the 21st Century.

In today’s news, married Lib-Dem MP Mark Outen stands down from the party leadership contest and front bench after the News Of The World reveals a rent boy affair. He describes the 6 month tryst as ‘an error of judgement’. His words, his life and career, but not his phrase.

What an incredible modern phrase that is, up there in the Official Statement-Speak chart with the more cowardly ‘inappropriate’. I’ve seen the latter used to describe everything from a leaked email comment to the ejection of an old man from a Labour conference, to the shooting of an innocent man at a tube station. Except with the poor Brazilian gentleman, that really was an error of judgement; he was judged guilty – Dredd-like – by the police and shot dead on the spot. He was innocent. They made an error of judgement, and then an rather more irreversible error of punishment.

Yet it’s the shooting that gets officially filed as ‘inappropriate’. An ‘error of judgement’, on the other hand, is now used when officials get caught doing something they shouldn’t. Painting over The Deliberate with a thin veneer of The Accidental.

Civilians commit ‘crimes’. Politicians, civil servants and police make ‘errors’.

‘Officer, my bag’s been stolen!’
‘I’ll stop you there. You mean, your bag has been the victim of an error of judgement.’

It’s as if Mr Outen accidentally went online to the escort website, ‘accidentally’ visited the trick’s place, accidentally paid him, then accidentally kept repeating it all for months on end.

My own sordid confession is that today I bought the News Of The World in order to read the piece. I feel very disgusted with myself for doing so. To excuse myself, I have to draw upon that third euphemism for getting caught. It was in the spirit of ‘research’.

Such a sense of deja vu with the Oaten story. There’s even a MP character in the third series of Little Britain, forever apologising in unconvincing descriptions to the press about his ‘accidental’ cottaging exploits, wife and family at his side. O, for one politician to break the cycle for once. I wish Mr Oaten could have made his statement along the lines of:

‘Yes, so I spent six months having threesomes with young men dressed in football strips. So what? You’ve got to have a hobby.’

He’d get my vote if he did.

Mr Clinton proved that a private life should really be nothing to do with being fit to govern. If anything, people liked him more for being alive from the waist down.

In fact, even though this story leads the BBC News, it only makes Page Eight of the actual NOTW. Page One features the England football team manager’s corruption allegations. Oh, and a free DVD of ‘Highlander’.

So even the News Of The World readers don’t really care that much about the lives of politicians. At least, not as much as football and free DVDs.

In Britain, the idea that politicians must be dull, frigid husks in order to govern persists. To run the lives of the nation, your own life has to be lifeless. Charles Kennedy’s drinking made him interesting for the first time in his life, yet he had to go.

Seeing George Galloway mewing like a cat (in a rather kinky, sex worker client way) on Big Brother could possibly change things. Mr Galloway, I strongly suspect, won’t describe his BB antics as an ‘error of judgement’, even though his Commons colleagues want him to. On the contrary, I think he’ll cite them as evidence of being alive and trying to enjoy himself.

Mr Oaten, however, is happy to be eclipsed by this story, as just another ‘3 IN A BED SHAME’ scandal, another Little Britain stereotype. I have more sympathy for him than for the rent boy, who clearly sold his story, or for the dreaded News Of The World itself, which exists purely to damage lives and uphold this out-of-date, prurient-yet-prudish, curtain-twitching side of the country’s political and sexual psyche. More interested in DVDs and Football Men than politicians, then chastising an MP for liking Football Men A Little Too Much.

The newspaper is as much a hypocrite as the MP. From the article:

‘The naked MP then got the rent boys to humiliate him with a bizarre sex act too revolting to describe.’

As I read this sentence, I’m instantly separated from the target audience of the newspaper, as is anyone with an IQ over 10.

The News of the World is only the news of A world, not THE world.

The language they use, and the language Mr O uses in return, are the real things to be shameful about.