Labour Lexicon
To add to his many talents as politician and prime minister, Gordon Brown has now started a nice line in neologisms. Speaking yesterday about the antics of Peter ‘Mr Orange’ Hain, Brown referred to his colleague as having committed ‘an incompetence’.
This delightful new word has a distinctly Victorian flavour – sounding rather like a euphemism for some embarrassing error such as urinating in one’s trousers (“What is the matter Nurse?” “I’m afraid, Ma’am, that little Peter has done an incompetence again.” ) However it seems more likely that this is a straightforward Freudian slip.
Having decided that Hain was a bloody fool, Brown promised himself that he would not call Hain incompetent as such – or else why is he in the Cabinet? But as he searched in that allegedly mighty brain for a synonym for ‘mistake’, he dropped his mental guard and out popped the brand new word.
Handily, we now know exactly what the PM’s estimation of his work and pensions secretary is. But then Brown has always been the quintessential team player, hasn’t he?