There is a hidden horror in Sue Gray’s report. It looks fine on the surface, with neatly numbered paragraphs and with findings honoured by Roman numerals. But remember Sherlock Holmes’s remark: “The lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”
The sin of the smiling Gray report is its language. It contains no rude words that might have been uttered on an unbuttoned karaoke night in Downing Street. Instead its bosom harbours the snoozing asp of 21st-century officialese.
Take page 7. Here the Second Permanent Secretary in the Cabinet Office declares that “staff wanted to raise concerns about behaviours they witnessed”. Behaviours? The plural belongs in the lexicon of a social worker who finds “issues around challenging behaviours”. For us human beings, behaviour is singular (sometimes very singular, it is true), like milk. It may be a bit off and it comes in different varieties. Perhaps denizens of Downing Street ate pineapple chunks from the tin, trod on the flower beds or teased the cat. We may never know. But that would be bad behaviour.
“There is significant learning to be drawn from these events,” says the report in its corporate dialect. (It’s not a report, I know, but an “update”. We are lucky it was not labelled a “catch-up”.) By learning, the author does not mean knowledge acquired by systematic study, a little of which, Pope warned, is “a dang’rous Thing”. She means whatever ministers mean at the Dispatch Box when they say: “Lessons have been learnt.” In their case they seldom have been, or are soon forgotten.
It is not that Sue Gray does not know right from wrong. She just prefers to speak of “appropriateness”. “The excessive consumption of alcohol is not appropriate in a professional workplace,” and the use of the garden “without clear authorisation or oversight” (oversight in the sense of “supervision” rather than “inadvertence”) was not “appropriate”. It’s as though civil servants, special advisers and visiting wallpaper experts need an “appropriate adult”, whose role under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 is to “safeguard the interests, rights, entitlements and welfare of children and vulnerable people suspected of a criminal offence”.
Yet individual words are not the only sin here. “Let us have an end of such phrases as these: ‘It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations…’.” So Churchill bade his colleagues, in extirpating “officialese”, no matter how flat its surface. The prime minister, no enemy of what seemed to him perfectly appropriate consumption of alcohol in a professional workplace, went to the trouble of drawing up a memorandum on brevity in August 1940 – not a relaxed moment in the Second World War.
Churchill hoped not just to save time but that “the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clearer thinking.”
Such thinking is occluded in the Gray Update when, for example, the unattached phrase “as such” pops up like a wounded minke whale calf in the Thames. It’s a phrase almost as annoying as at pace, against which Jacob Rees-Mogg inveighed the other day, only for a minister to deploy it the very next morning.
If this Government, headed by a talented writer, is to fall, though, let it not be for its bad language.
