A little joke by Paddy, Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, turned upon something to be shunned. Conservative ministers, he said, had ‘indulged in a spasm of knee-jerking which would have made even St Vitus feel concerned’. He has, I think, got his spasms in a twist.
Apart from saying ‘Aaah’, the cartoon task for a patient at the doctor’s is to cross a leg for it to be hit with a little hammer. ‘Striking the tendon below the patella gives rise to a sudden extension of the leg, known as the knee-jerk,’ wrote the physiologist Sir Michael Foster in 1890. He was a busy man, sitting on committees to rid Victorian England of evils linked to malaria, sewage, tuberculosis and the University of London. But he didn’t object to knee-jerks.
When Lord Ashdown spoke out, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, had already remarked, about the murder of James Foley, that it was ‘not a time for a knee-jerk reaction’.
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