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| Courtesy of Martin Shovel via X |
Certainly familiar with the strategy, and new examples popping up daily in western political scenes, but had had no idea of the origins. Though shouldn’t have been surprised to see this particular Aussie as the source:
The dead cat strategy was invented by the Tories’ election guru Lynton Crosby, but it was explained most clearly by one beneficiary of his dark arts, the then Telegraph columnist Boris Johnson, in one of his typical rants against the EU. The advice from Johnson’s “Australian friend” was that if you’re losing an argument and people are focussing on a reality that is damaging to you, your best bet was to throw “a dead cat on the table,” everyone will shout “‘jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’; In other words they will be talking about the dead cat, the thing you want them to talk about, and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”
Unfortunately, there is an actual dead cat next to our communal rubbish bin. Next door neighbour and I regard it sadly. Not a great deal of language in common but I do know the word for municipality. Will they take it? Of course, she says. How soon may be another matter. And probably best pursued by someone more fluent in Turkish.
And, in the crime department, a man has been arrested and charged with both theft and impersonating a police officer. He apparently went to a bureau de change in Nicosia, announced that he was a policeman, and asked for £1000 in exchange for Turkish lira. Then left with the thousand pounds without providing the lira. The police tracked him and it turns out that he had an astonishing 224 previous convictions. None of them must have been major or he’d still be doing time. May also explain why he compounded the offense by announcing untruthfully and quite unnecessarily that he was a police officer as well as why he didn’t ask for a larger sum than £1000 while he was at it. He’s simply addicted to crime.