Mea Culpa: Give Boris Johnson a merit star for self-awareness

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent, by John Rentoul

Whatever you do, do not demote the chancellor, the prime minister seemed to tell himself (AP)

Give the prime minister a merit star for self-awareness, I thought, when I read this headline: “Johnson warned he would be signing political ‘death warrant’ by demoting Sunak.” For a moment I thought we were reporting that Boris was warning courtiers who pressed him to demote his chancellor that this was not a good idea. Then I realised that it was written in Reflexive Headlinese, in which Johnson was being warned by unnamed others – indeed, by anonymous Conservative MPs – who thought it was a bad idea. It would not have done any harm to slip “is” between “Johnson” and “warned”.

Amidships: Another headline on the same story was a victim of a different curse of headline-speak: amiditis. “Boris Johnson told to ‘stop picking fights and get a grip’ amid Rishi Sunak row,” we wrote. There at least it was clear who was doing the telling, but it wasn’t “in the middle of a row about Rishi Sunak”, which is what “amid” suggests, making it sound as if two unrelated things happened at the same time. The telling off of the prime minister was part of the row. “In” would have been fine. Or “after”, in the sense that the unnamed Tory MPs were responding to the initial fuss over reports of the prime minister’s alleged joke about making Sunak health secretary. Anything but “amid”.

That wasn’t the silliest use of “amid” last week, however. That prize was awarded to this headline, reported to the authorities by David Hatcher: “‘No one is above the law’, says Scotland Yard chief amid Prince Andrew lawsuit.”