I've never forgiven David Blunkett for his blatant linguistic truth evasion (= lying) about selection in schools. In case you've forgotten, at a Labour conference while they were still trying to get back into power, he boldly proclaimed, in classic political tub-thumping style: "Read my lips! No selection under a Labour government!" When they got in and confirmed that there would be selection under a Labour government, he spent a day trying out different ways of wriggling off the hook, and finally settled on "obviously, I was joking!" His tone, as it always is, was outraged and angry. There is no rocket science involved in looking at the video and determining that the idea that he was joking is nonsense.

His latest piece of applied linguistics follows his use of the word "swamping" when explaining that the government planned to segregate kids into special schools for asylum-seekers, to avoid "swamping" local schools. On the Today programme on the radio this week, he declared no regrets for having used the word, saying that any dictionary will tell you that "swamp" means "overwhelm" etc., i.e. he ignored the obvious negative connotations and denied the relevance of the allusion to Margaret Thatcher (she used to be Prime Minister, you know) who used the word in a much more inflammatory way referring to immigration in general.

Ignoring the appeal to naive assumptions about dictionaries and authority, which needs a whole seminar of its own, an interesting linguistic point in the interview was when Blunkett claimed that everybody recognised there was no question of anything negative about his use of words. The only people who'd kick up a fuss were people who "like to chat". I'm afraid I haven't checked the exact form of words yet, but the word "chat" was there. This is clearly another allusion to M. Thatcher who loved to go on about the "chattering classes", the idea being that these poncey, middle-class, guardian reading, radio 4 listening, folk should be ignored while we concentrate on the sensible folk who just get on with things without all this bloody talk. Ring any bells? Think of that guy across the channel who claims to represent "the real people" ...?

Last night on telly, Sandi Toksvig expressed surprise at recent news, saying "there seems to have been some terrible mistake, and the Labour government have appointed a Conservative as Home Secretary!" As Lloyd Grossman would say, "the clues are there"