Why I’m sick of politics being described as a circus

Jon Sopel has a new book out this month – A Year at the Circus. But the BBC’s North America editor hasn’t spent the last 12 months taming roaring lions in a sawdust ring or swinging on a trapeze wearing a skin-tight sparkly leotard. He’s been covering Trump’s presidency. And the ‘circus’ he refers to is the chaos and infighting inside the Oval Office. The book’s jacket shows a picture of the White House with a red and white striped circus tent perched over the stucco roof railings. ‘At the heart of Washington, there is a circus. It’s raucous, noisy and full of clowns,’ Sopel declares.

This distinguished member of the White House Press Corp is not alone as a political commentator in using circus to describe incompetence. During the Conservative party leadership contest, Rory Stewart called his rival a ‘clown’ who couldn’t be trusted with the nuclear button, and the CBI’s Carolyn Fairburn called on politicians to stop the ‘circus’ when parliament rejected Theresa May’s Brexit deal earlier this year.