From ‘working people’ to ‘back to basics’ – soundbites that dogged the politicians who coined them

Even initiallly successful phrases can come back to haunt the politicians who use them, as Kate Devlin reports

Ahead of this week’s Budget, Labour is struggling to define who is a “working person”. The issue would not matter so much but the government has promised to protect whoever qualifies from a series of key tax rises.

Here we look at some of the other phrases used by politicians which came to haunt them in the end.

‘Back to Basics’

Sir John Major launched his “back to basics” campaign in a fit of optimism that it would resonate with a country that wanted to return to good old-fashioned values.

Sir John himself explicitly stated that the campaign was not “a crusade about personal morality”. But it was widely interpreted as exactly that. Which made a series of sleazy scandals involving his MPs all the more difficult.

‘Spring’

Hard to stumble as you define a season, you might think. But Boris Johnson’s government managed it.

At one point, during successive UK lockdowns because of the Covid epidemic, the government announced that it would lift some of the restrictions it had imposed on millions of people across the country in spring.

Unfortunately, while most people in Britain find it easy to say when spring is, at that point, it turned out, the government did not.

As the questions mounted during one briefing with increasingly exasperated journalists, one hack was heard to mutter: “How long is a piece of spring?” There was no answer to that question, either.

‘Big society’

David Cameron started his premiership in 2010 with a big idea, one that seemed to be central to his mission of what a future Britain could look like. That, of course, was the infamous Big Society.

Again, the idea struggled as it seemed that no one in the government, especially not the prime minister who coined it, could define what exactly a Big Society was. As time went on, it came under suspicion because of a widespread feeling that it meant the scaling back of public services under austerity and was possibly code for a mass increase in volunteering. Pretty soon, even David Cameron himself stopped mentioning the Big Society.

‘Alarm clock Britain’

Poor Nick Clegg, then the deputy prime minister if you remember, could never quite say who counted as a member of “alarm clock Britain”. The phrase was a Lib Dem idea to try to show that they were in touch with the British people. And my, they needed to at that stage.

The party had suffered a slump in popularity after it went against its pledges not to increase tuition fees for students. The move led to accusations of betrayal and began a slump from which the Lib Dems at that stage, it turned out, could never quite recover. But in a bid to boost his popularity, Clegg tried to sympathise with a part of middle Britain he claimed was being squeezed. However, as Lib Dem politicians faced questions in television and radio studios that included how early one had to set the alarm clock to be part of alarm clock Britain, the phrase didn’t last.

‘Who governs Britain?’

In the 1974 general election, the Conservatives’ campaign was encapsulated by the now-famous phrase, “Who governs Britain?” The answer from the voters was, not you. And so Labour’s Harold Wilson became the prime minister.

‘The pound in your pocket’

In November 1967, the government announced it was devaluing the pound. The next day, the then prime minister Harold Wilson gave an infamous address for which he was later mocked, claiming that: “From now on, the pound abroad is worth 14 per cent or so less in terms of other currencies. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank, has been devalued.”