The Lep'rous distilment

The papers in Britain were much occupied in the early months of the year by two strange cases of disappearance. The first concerned the records of all those who received a government allowance, which included their bank details, addresses and national insurance numbers – in short all the things you need for a spot of identity theft and the swift and silent voiding of bank accounts.

It turns out that two disks containing all this information were thrust into an envelope and stuffed in an out-tray with nary a thought for their secure delivery. They disappeared and have not been seen since despite everywhere being searched including all the dustbins.

A senior civil servant resigned. Things looked grim for the government. At this precise moment, a quite different case of disappearance eclipsed this story in the headlines.

A man who disappeared five years ago, presumed dead when his empty canoe washed ashore, nipped into a police station and said, ‘It’s me. You know. The bloke you haven’t been looking for, for the last five years. The canoe bloke. I’m not dead, I’ve just been hiding in the house next door. Sorry about that.’

His wife, the press suggested, had connived at this and spent her holidays with her husband in Panama, enjoying the life insurance. The kids were excluded from the deal.

This is a clear case of Atalanta’s golden apples. The Panama story is a distraction, a diversionary tactic. The searchlight of embarrassing enquiry was beginning to focus on a shortcoming in Government circles, so a story is dreamed up of such bizarrerie that the tabloids cannot resist it and go off yapping in that direction. Sherlock Holmes, I recall, used a steak to toss to slavering guard dogs, while he nipped across a lawn to retrieve the Ruritanian Emerald, or was it the Balkan Treaty, from the small casket secreted within the chinoiserie cabinet. Anyway, it’s largely the same idea. For Panama read steak. For steak read misdirection.

It is clear that a whole department in Whitehall is devoted to fabricating unlikely stories and giving them semblance and verisimilitude with the aim of distracting the press from the government’s woes. These stories are called Downing Street press releases. They are fed through to Fleet Street whose ears are ever open. Shakespeare was for a time a parliamentary reporter on the old News Chronicle (which replaced the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which some of my older readers will remember with fondness), and in his memoirs he recalls how he was tipped the wink by the Prime Minister’s spokesman:

“Brief let me be. Sleeping within my orchard, my custom always of the afternoon, upon my secure hour thy tipster stole, with juice of cursed hebenon in a vial, and in the porches of my ears did pour the lep’rous distilment; whose effect holds such an enmity with blood of man that swift as quicksilver it courses through the natural gates and alleys of the body, and with a sudden vigour doth posset and curd, like eager droppings into milk, the thin and wholesome blood: so did it mine; and a most instant tetter bark'd about, most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust, all my smooth body.”

Ah. The old News Chronicle.

However…. little has changed it seems in the corridors of power. You mark my words. The next time there’s a bit of a problem for the government, just watch the unlikely story that removes it from the front pages. But what I was getting at was that I think I would be rather good at coming up with unlikely stories for these Government Johnnies, and so I would like to apply for a post in Downing Street doing just that. But here’s the problem: search though I might, I have never seen a job advertised in this department.

So I am casting the net wide. If you have seen such a job advertised, please get in touch. I would be happy to pay for the information. Perhaps by swapping it for a couple of disks I have recently come across.

© Roger Murphy 2008