Will Michael Fallon’s dead cat strategy work on Sadiq Khan?
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Version 0 of 1. Name: Michael Fallon. Age: 63. Appearance: Silvery City gent. Occupation: Defence secretary. Cool. So can he do kung fu and stuff? I don’t believe so. Being defence secretary is more about equipping the armed forces to be good at war. Although Fallon is kind of the Tories’ hitman, with a special move of his own. And that is? The dead cat manoeuvre. Scary. What is it? It’s a political tactic often associated with the election strategist Lynton Crosby. Surely killing cats is unlikely to win votes? No actual cats are harmed during the manoeuvre. It gets its name from the idea that if you walk into a dinner party and fling a dead cat on the table, people probably won’t be pleased, but they’ll stop whatever they were talking about and talk about the cat instead. And that’s good, is it? Certainly, if things weren’t going your way before. Fallon is credited with a lethal dead cat move during last year’s election campaign, when he accused Ed Miliband of preparing to ditch Trident in a deal with the SNP. Until that moment, Labour had been gaining popularity, at least according to those polls. Afterwards, they weren’t. I see. And now he’s done it again at a party meeting in Bromley. Labour’s Sadiq Khan is favourite to be elected mayor of London, but Fallon has called him a “Labour lackey who speaks alongside extremists” and “a man who has said Britain’s foreign policy is to blame for the terrorist threat”. Is that fair? Possibly not. The speaks-alongside-extremists thing seems like either a reference to the unsavoury people, such as Louis Farrakhan, whom Khan sometimes represented as a human-rights lawyer, or to his former brother-in-law, who once had links to the extremist group Al-Muhajiroun. Khan himself has often condemned extremism. He voted for gay marriage. How about the blaming-Britain thing? That’s probably about an open letter Khan signed in 2006, calling for a change to foreign policy, which, the letter claimed, was “ammunition to extremists who threaten us all”. It never blamed Britain for terrorism, though. It just said that British policy was helping the terrorists’ propaganda. And look at us now! Can’t you see what’s happened? What? We’re talking about the dead cat! Curses! Do say: “He’s more of an attack secretary.” Don’t say: “I reckon even dead cats stop being interesting after the first few.” |