Labour is full of mugwumps – but Corbyn is not one of them

Trust Boris to dominate the headlines by reopening that most famous of books, Johnson’s Dictionary. Writing in the Sun, our effortlessly provocative Foreign Secretary swiped at Jeremy Corbyn with this colourful barb: ‘He may be a mutton-headed old mugwump, but he is probably harmless.’ Couched rather incongruously as the reflections of ‘the people’, this comment has left many laughing, but more still scratching their heads. In fact, there’s more to being a ‘mugwump’ than a throw-away jibe.

The word comes from the original New Englanders, the Algonquians, for whom mugquomp meant ‘great chief’. It was a term of respect laden with connotations of nobility. But that presumably wasn’t what Boris had in mind. Instead, ‘mugwump’ properly earned its stripes in English at the American Election of 1884. The Republican James Blaine was up against the Democrat Grover Cleveland. Blaine’s candidacy had annoyed many Republicans, who saw him as an unethical careerist mired in scandal: worst of all, he was cynically operating the so-called ‘spoils system’, whereby political patronage would be rewarded with subsequent office.