Long life | 2 June 2016

It was a famous American editor and columnist Michael Kinsley who once defined the political ‘gaffe’ as something that occurs when a politician tells the truth; and he was right, for it is usually the case that a person gets into most trouble when he publicly says what he actually believes. There were a couple of examples just the other day — one when the Queen said that Chinese officials had been ‘very rude’ to a British ambassador during a visit to London, and the other, even more embarrassing, when David Cameron described Nigeria and Afghanistan as ‘fantastically corrupt countries’. They had both been overheard while chatting with guests at a Buckingham Palace garden party and were the most recent victims of a now frequent danger facing public figures — the forgotten camera or mistakenly left-on microphone. It was one such that so damaged Gordon Brown during the 2010 general election when it picked him up describing an amiable elderly voter in Rochdale as a ‘bigoted woman’.