Mea Culpa: What’s $400bn between friends?

The sum total of our efforts this week was inaccurate, Liam James finds

You can bet Donald Trump won’t be pulling out this move in his fight for Greenland (WireImage/Getty)

A headline gave readers the impression Sir Keir Starmer was out for the heads of his own ministers. “Will Tulip Siddiq be the next ministerial scalp for Starmer?” we asked, using a metaphor that refers to the grisly practice of warriors claiming an enemy’s skull cap as a trophy. The scalp of Ms Siddiq, the Treasury secretary caught in a corruption scandal, might be a prize for Labour’s opponents but the prime minister would be unlikely to cherish such a memento mori. This headline could have been fixed by bringing his enemies in.

Elsewhere in our coverage of the government’s woes, an editorial on Starmer’s response to the wild attacks on him by Elon Musk appears to have grossly undersold the wealth of the world’s richest person. We said: “The centibillionaire and the X gang have, as the prime minister says, ‘crossed a line’.” Roger Thetford advises that the prefix “centi-” means one-hundredth.

Dictionaries differ on the application of “centi”. Some support our use, which refers to Musk as having $100bn or more, while others look to its well-established use in metric measurements to indicate a division of 100 (centimetre, centilitre). In this sense, we would have been suggesting Musk had a measly $10m rather than his recently estimated $415bn – off by a factor of 40,000.

Such a miscalculation would suggest Musk had a much smaller pile than his billionaire friend Donald Trump (who was on $5bn). Given the trouble the X owner has been causing lately, we ought to be more careful not to tread on his ego. Roger says we ought to have used “hecto-”, meaning 100 times and known from “hectares”. “Multibillionaire”, another choice, would no doubt be accurate but lacks the grace of “multimillionaire”. I think we would be safest dropping the prefix altogether.

Finishing move: Talking of the incoming president’s pile, he this week continued to threaten to claim Panama and Greenland for the Trumpian empire. We said he had not ruled out invasion or economic coercion to “wrestle Greenland away from Denmark”. Trump may have history with World Wrestling Entertainment but, as Linda Beeley points out, he would be more likely to wrest Greenland from Denmark. The Oxford English Dictionary traces “wrest” back to an Old English word for twist or tighten, a meaning that links to today’s: “to pull, twist, or force something away with great effort or difficulty”.

Weather or not: The weather sat high on the news agenda for a second week running. It was certainly difficult to keep our coverage engaging but that is no excuse for sloppiness. A headline leading our website on Tuesday told readers more snow was expected as the UK braced “for temperatures to fall to -20C amid health alerts”.

The interesting new line was the extraordinarily low temperature forecast. We had by this time made much of the government’s health alerts in our reporting and were not offering any new information on them: the UKHSA had not updated its cold health warnings for more than 24 hours. This headline wasn’t helped by the context tacked onto the end and was rather improved when we removed it. A victory in the campaign against “amid”.

Roll up: Mark Carney was identified as a frontrunner to replace Justin Trudeau as leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, prompting our profile, which recalled the former Bank of England governor’s role in the Scottish independence referendum. We said he was “rolled out as part of the so-called Project Fear”.

This was an unusual use of “rolled out”, a phrase commonly used to describe the introduction of policies or mass inoculations. We should have said Carney was deployed.

All fall down: The Raac scandal returned to our pages again this week but not without some confusion over how far Britain had to go in fixing its crumbling schools. The article’s top line established that “nearly 90 per cent of schools receiving government support to remove dangerous concrete have not had work carried out”.

But on attempting to repeat this fact further down the page, we dropped the caveat and said that “nearly nine in ten schools are waiting to have Raac removed”. Thanks to Roger Thetford for drawing our attention to another miscalculation.