So, after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus, I’m at an in-person meeting that occurred quite regularly before the pandemic, sharing a theory about a cabinet minister whom I won’t name except she goes by the nickname “leaky”. I got this notion off Twitter, by the way, and it involved a lot of premeditated twists and turns, acts dressed as accidents that were actually carefully plotted, all part of a complex and gestalt long game. I made no attempt to verify this theory. As far as I was concerned, this was the “shooting the breeze” phase of the meeting, where you just say whatever pops into your head, like the first 20 minutes in a pub, before you have settled on who you want to bitch about.
There is no such phase, reader: as I was swiftly reminded, a meeting is not the same as a pub. “It is pretty well sourced that it was all an accident,” someone pointed out politely. “This sounds a little bit like a conspiracy theory,” said someone else. Well, sure. Things that are fun often do sound like conspiracy theories. The first forgotten rule of the meeting: they’re not supposed to be fun.
