I caught my husband in the act of throwing into the organic waste recycling bucket a little pile of newspaper cuttings I had collected. Slightly soiled with the wet from potato peelings, they still told a story about a phrase of our day: get a grip. A piece in the Times by Andrew Billen, on anxiety at the workplace, quoted Rhona (not her real name) saying: ‘I was told to pull myself together. Get a grip.’ Very annoying it must have been. Being told to get a grip implies that one has lost it.
Labour’s ploy, before this latest war, had been to portray David Cameron and the Tories as incompetent. ‘They keep banging on about him needing to “get a grip”’, Quentin Letts noted in the Daily Mail. One of the people banging on was Ben Bradshaw, who, commenting on Downing Street’s briefings about the Duke of York earlier this month, said: ‘The Prime Minister should get a grip.’
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