Has Boris Johnson’s blunder killed the dead cat diversion tactic?

Instead of saving Johnson’s skin, the whole sorry episode appears to have confirmed the opinions of those who had doubts about his character and hardened critics’ resolve to remove him from office, writes Andrew Woodcock

The Savile smear had been circulating for some time on far-right websites and gained traction among conspiracy theorists (Getty/PA)

Everyone knows the philosophical puzzle of Schrödinger’s cat – if said moggy is sealed inside a soundproof box, how can we truly say whether it is alive or dead?

This week’s debacle over Jimmy Savile has created a new conundrum, which we could call “Johnson’s Dead Cat”. If a politician tries to distract attention from his shortcomings by using a tactic that highlights those shortcomings, can he truly be said to know what he’s doing?

The “dead cat” diversion is the principal political insight of Sir Lynton Crosby, the Australian polling guru who masterminded Mr Johnson’s London mayoral campaigns and has reportedly been summoned back into No 10 to get him out of his current Partygate scrape.

The idea is that if everybody is talking about something you’d rather wasn’t discussed, you slap a dead cat on the table, in the form of a remarkable and outrageous comment that cannot be ignored. In an instant, as the theory goes, everyone stops talking about whatever it was that interested them a second ago and instead exclaims: “That’s a dead cat!” They may be annoyed or disgusted, but at least they are no longer discussing the subject of embarrassment to the cat-wielder.

What the theory doesn’t seem to resolve is the question of whether the people around the table might instead respond with: “Why has this person slapped a dead cat on the table?” Or even – once you are known for using this trick: “Ah, he’s put a dead cat on the table like he always does, he must want to distract us.”

And Johnson, of course, is well known for deploying a dead cat, to the point that Westminster gossip during the Partygate scandal has frequently turned to the question of when he would pull out his deceased moggy and what kind of feline it would be.

As it turned out, the cat in question was a thoroughly unjustified allegation that Sir Keir Starmer had in some way helped a serial child sex offender avoid justice while director of public prosecutions.

The smear had been circulating for some time on far-right websites and gained some traction among conspiracy theorists in the wilder corners of the internet. But – as Johnson and those around him were clearly aware – it had been discredited almost a decade in advance by a QC-led official inquiry which found the Labour leader had no role in decisions relating to Savile.

So instead of looking at the cat, MPs, the media and the public looked at Johnson and asked themselves the very question he was trying to avoid in the Partygate scandal – what does this say about his character?

You’d expect Labour to go on the attack. But it’s not often that a Conservative PM hands the opposition so blatant an opportunity to accuse him of “parroting fascists” and to compare him unfavourably with Churchill.

The extent of the misstep became all too apparent when well-regarded and sober-minded Tory MPs like Julian Smith, Tobias Ellwood and Sir Bob Neill expressed their horror and urged Johnson to withdraw his allegation. And when former home secretary Amber Rudd branded the remark “disgraceful” and “Trumpian”. There were reports that advisers had urged Johnson not to deploy the cat. And the resignation of Munira Mirza – a member of his closest inner circle – makes clear that he was begged to apologise almost as soon as he had issued the slur.

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Instead of saving Johnson’s skin, the whole sorry episode appears to have confirmed the opinions of those who had doubts about his character and hardened critics’ resolve to remove him from office.

After the tactic has backfired so dramatically, could this be the end of the dead cat? And could Boris Johnson – the first to discuss the tactic in public – be said to be, as it were, its executioner?

Personally, I doubt that politicians under pressure are ever likely to be able to resist the temptation to fling a bit of dirt at their opponents in the hope of a moment’s respite. However, if they try to use this particular tactic as ineptly as Johnson has, they risk being accused of flogging a dead cat.

Yours,

Andrew Woodcock

Political editor