The Sketch: Anything interesting you say may be twisted and used against you

"They never answer the question, do they?" A lady was walking through Westminster Hall after PMQs and making this observation. No, they don't. Even when they do they don't. Genuflecting to the gods of Diversity, the Tories have an American MP in the House. He is an amiable, bankerly sort of fellow called Brooks Newmark. He put to the PM his killer question. It was suicidal. "Only three countries have a larger budget deficit than Britain," he said. "Can the Prime Minister name even one?" He's an East Side smoothie is Brownstone Brooks, so Gordon's response was brutal: "America," he said, and sat down.

It was a great triumph for a New Brown (the confident, conversational model). How Labour cheered and waved their papers. Brooks sat with a determined little smile, hunched forward slightly, as if his head was headed towards an obscene obscurity. He hadn't framed the question properly. The US probably does have the largest budget deficit in the world because everything is bigger there. (Why do American women drink more beer than English women? Because there are more American women.)

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Brooks' question had left out the phrase "as a proportion of GDP". But it was quite clear what he was driving at. He had been deliberately misinterpreted! Not cricket! But with an American playing a Scotsman you don't expect cricket.

Cameron et alia had tried to get Brown to agree that the national debt is going to double in five years. But the PM – sly for such a big man – simply won't say the words. "The figures have all been published," is the closest he'll come to it.The reason is that if he does utter the words, the Tories will spend the next 18 months yelling that the national debt is going to double, "as even the Prime Minister himself admits!"

Somehow that carries more of a sting than quoting the figures from the government accounts.

It's the modern trick, to get the other side to say something that can be used against them. Anything interesting can be used thus. Brown takes opposition remarks, Photoshops them into a different background, recolours them and presents them as a free confession of turpitude. So, "The recession must run its course!" That quasi-philosophical remark from John Maples is now an admission that the Tories are "a do-nothing party". Andrew Lansley has attributed to him the idea that the recession might produce some good as well as hardship. That is the only interesting thing Andrew Lansley has said in 40 years and he was made to apologise for it.

You can see why they play this game but it does have a morbid effect on the national conversation, not being allowed to say anything interesting. Thus, I suppose, Boris.

simoncarr@sketch.sc

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