Does Keir Starmer know what a ‘drag anchor’ does?

The language of sailing ships is as treacherous as a lee shore. Words seldom mean what they suggest or are pronounced phonetically. So if you climb the ratlines, you may reach the top by means of the futtock shrouds, unless you can use a lubber’s hole.

When Sir Keir Starmer insisted last week that the NHS waiting-list is ‘a drag anchor on our economy and our country’, his metaphor was obscure to his listeners and unhelpful to his argument. A drag anchor is a useful thing: a device towed underwater by a sailing ship in order to keep it pointing into the waves and to lessen leeway. In other words, it prevents the ship going sideways or being capsized by wind and waves from one side. In the current high seas and unintended drift, Sir Keir should have said: ‘We need a drag anchor to prevent the NHS from foundering.’

The drag anchor is not the fluked iron thing tattooed on a sailor’s arm. It is a conical canvas object, like a giant cake piping-bag. It is not to be confused with a drag embedment anchor – pulled across the sea floor only until it becomes embedded. And when we hear of a ship dragging its anchor, it means that the anchor has become loose, allowing the ship to drift.

None of this is straightforwardly connected with the kind of drag that RuPaul is familiar with, named I think after a foot-dragging dance; in that sense, the Sunday Express published a memorable explanation in 1927: ‘A drag is a rowdy party attended by abnormal men dressed in scanty feminine garments, singing jazz songs in high falsetto voices.’ It’s the drag anchor, though, that remains a political favourite. In 2023, Boris Johnson said that the Windsor Framework was a ‘drag anchor on divergence’; back in 2008 David Cameron warned that borrowing put ‘a drag anchor on our recovery’.