Mea Culpa: only on a holiday from reality

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

Some Tory members think only they, not MPs, should elect the party leader (AFP/Getty)

In an editorial about the Boris Johnson fan club, we wrote: “They want the grassroots members only to choose the leader – not MPs.” It usually doesn’t matter if we misplace “only” in sentences, and sometimes it sounds more natural to detach the “only” from the thing to which it refers, but as Linda Beeley pointed out, here it changes the meaning, suggesting that Conservative members should have no other role but to choose the leader – and that they shouldn’t choose MPs.

These people may be on a holiday from reality, as Michael Gove put it, but that is not what they propose. What some Boris enthusiasts actually think is that only members, and not MPs, should elect the party leader.

Drugs stash: We misspelt “cachet” in an article about Prince Harry’s youthful drug taking, saying: “Like many of those holding senior political positions who have confessed to past drug use, safe in the knowledge that they won’t be prosecuted, they may, if anything, think it will add something to their public cache.” That would have been the right pronunciation if it had been written “caché”, although the wrong word, as it is a French adjective meaning hidden. As it was, our policy of leaving out accents (I mean, our policy of elegant, clutter-free writing) meant that it looked as if we were talking about adding something to a store. Thanks to Gavin Turner for drawing it to my attention.