The most surprising thing about Gillian Keegan’s exasperated gush of self-pity – “Does anyone ever say, ‘You know what, you’ve done a fucking good job, because everyone else has sat on their arse and done nothing’?” – wasn’t the swearing. Most people, including politicians, swear casually all the time. Although rarely at the end of a TV interview while the camera is still on, or while they’re still wearing a live microphone, like some gormless pillock.
What was interesting was the “should we, shouldn’t we” deployment of asterisks. Some news outlets (including ITV, the primary source) used decorous bleeping for the clip itself and deployed quaint asterisks in print – demure little clutches of pearls in the f***ing and the a***. Keen Wordlers might have instinctively skewed American and guessed “ass”. That is, after all, how everyone under 40 spells it.
But Keegan lists her primary biographical achievement as “proud scouser”. She certainly said arse. We can all be proud that the great British arse survives, in politics at least. It is the native red squirrel of mild swearing, driven to the edge of extinction by the ravaging, globalist grey-ass version. That it is being conserved by no less a figure than the education secretary is commendable.
Of course, not everyone censored Keegan’s f-word. Progressive publications including, obviously, the one you’re reading now, love to spell it out these days. It quite often appears apropos of nothing, towards the end of a feature on, I don’t know, why plants make better pets than animals or how someone found spiritual joy in making their own curtains. The penultimate paragraph often contains a tossed-in swear – “And then I thought if I put David the geranium in a papoose I could take him for a walk, why the fuck not?” – just to demonstrate that the author, the subject and the reader are all totally cool with strong language.
Once it was unforgivable to swear in public, then just rude. We’re now in a sort of twilight zone. Bad language is still proscribed by social contract in some spaces we share with others – a GP’s waiting room, say, or some of the higher Anglican churches – but positively encouraged in, for example, football crowds and infant school playgrounds. Net-twitchers such as the Mail on Sunday may spare us the full, glistening, obscene starkness of reported profanity but let’s face it, TV’s saturated with it.
Every bold new historical drama is basically people in period costume saying “fuck” a lot. Elsewhere, it’s now so common to see and hear swearing that you start to wonder if the asterisks of the prim-minded are starting to tilt things the other way. “F*** you, you c***ing c***” looks somehow even worse than what it obscures, a shroud thrown over the knowable. Perhaps the new puritanism of online social etiquette will encourage the young to self-censor with asterisks, making swearing all cloaked and dangerous and sexy again. Asterisqué.
Just a few days after Arsegate, Keegan was fronting it at a drinks do co-hosted by “Conservatives in Communications” (sic). Apparently she joked that she might need media training but, ha ha, “I don’t want to learn how to stop swearing!” Yeah, I bet her colleague, Tory deputy chair and chief shit-stirrer Lee Anderson feels the same. Keegan’s f-bomb was adjectival and relatively mild; it wasn’t aimed at anyone.
And it was uttered, she thought, off the record. Anderson was very much on the record to a national newspaper when he said people seeking asylum who complained about being banged up on a barge should “fuck off back to France”. Anderson, the thick bully to Rishi Sunak’s posh boy with his head down a toilet, got exactly what he wanted – outrage from anti-racists and, by the end of the day, official backing from No 10. But then, he’s a bloke.
Within an hour of Keegan’s indignant demand for praise, the meme-boats had set sail across social media. She was, people said, just like Nicola Murray from The Thick of It. I mean, the hapless fictional secretary of state did swear a lot... Come to think of it, didn’t Murray’s fictional husband work for a PFI developer which, problematically, had secured government contracts and – wait a minute – isn’t Michael Keegan the non-fictional, non-executive director of a company that won a £1m schools IT contract from the department his wife now heads? Life imitating fiction. It’s part of our great British political-comedy heritage.
Politics has moved into a postmodern, post-Brexit era – shameless, amoral, venal – and maybe profanity should adapt. All the horrible extremes of swearing have been explored and recycled for our jaded, streamer-numbed consumption.
Maybe it’s time to follow Keegan’s patriotic lead and celebrate our proud, mad, self-isolating little island’s rich swearing heritage. There’s something deeply satisfying about keeping the traditional Anglo-Saxon intensifier, then landing on a 20th-century insult. “You fucking clot” has a weirdly satisfying cadence. I’m on a mission to bring them all back: berk, git, nitwit, pillock, prat, twit, chump, tit, knob, plonker, prick. Let’s get off our arses, Britain – but let us also swear allegiance to them.
• Ian Martin is a comedy writer. His credits include The Thick of It, Veep and The Death of Stalin
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