It's moving to think how happy Van Gogh was in Brixton

When a phrase really takes off in the political sphere, you will recognise it by the frequency with which it crops up on the Today programme. Many years ago, I noticed that politicians had begun using the line ‘it’s not rocket science!’ when attacking the alleged inability of their opponents to get even the basics right. It had a muscular, common-sense ring to it, which they clearly relished, and it spread like norovirus through a cruise ship. How times have changed. Where once we had politicians who never stopped talking about rocket science, the ascent of Elon Musk in the US has brought us a rocket scientist who never stops talking about politics. Painful as it was, I think I liked it better the first way round.

Political language is often a desperate attempt to sound dynamic before the public

Long after rocket science slipped out of rhetorical style, however, we got ‘not fit for purpose’, ‘levelling up’ and any number of modish phrases in between, before ending up at the now ubiquitous ‘hold their feet to the fire’. Whitehall, it seems, has turned into a modern-day version of Tom Brown’s School Days: suddenly everyone is threatening either to roast someone else’s feet, or offering up their own. Last December, Sir Keir Starmer gave a speech introducing his ‘six milestones’, in which he stated the right of the British public to hold the collective feet of the entire Labour government to the fire if the pledges were not fulfilled.

It was George Orwell who – furiously – described political language as ‘designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind’. Yet it is just as often a desperate attempt by politicians to sound dynamic before the public, even as they flail in the sticky webs of bureaucratic complication that attend new policy directions.