Pedant’s revolt

It used to be that the most annoying thing in academic life was political correctness. But a new irritant now threatens to supplant it: the scourge of correct politicalness.

The essence of correct politicalness is to seek to undermine an irrefutable argument by claiming loudly and repetitively to have found an error in it. As with political correctness, which seeks to undermine arguments by declaring the person making them a bigot, correct politicalness originated in the US. But it now has its exponents here, too. Foremost among them is Jonathan Portes.

Portes’s career recalls that of the character Kenneth Widmerpool in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Widmerpool is charmless, pompous and mediocre, yet inexorably ascends the greasy pole by aligning himself with the Labour party.

Portes has no PhD and has published painfully few articles in peer-reviewed journals. Yet his rise through the politicised bureaucracy of the Blair years was Widmerpoolian.