Mea Culpa: Alastair Campbell is always right

John Rentoul on questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

Tied up in nots: Tony Blair’s former spin doctor knows a thing or two about communication (PA)

The thing about Alastair Campbell, who I am glad has become a frequent contributor to The Independent, is that he can write. It was he who teasingly peered over Donald Macintyre’s shoulder in our old press gallery office and said: “You can’t have ‘not’ in a first paragraph.” Macintyre, who was political editor when I joined the newspaper, took it in good humour, but Campbell was right. You have to be careful with “not” in headlines and first paragraphs, because it’s easy to omit or overlook, and negation is an extra logical step for the reader to process.

Anyway, Campbell wrote scathingly in our pages last week about Boris Johnson’s lack of attention to detail, saying: “You would expect a serious government with a serious leader to spare no effort in crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s.”

You can’t use apostrophes for plurals, I said, metaphorically peering over his shoulder.

But then I tried the alternatives. Simply deleting the apostrophes produced “crossing the ts and dotting the is”, which look like mistakes. You can’t use capitals, because a capital I doesn’t have a dot. You can’t put “t”s and “i”s in quotation marks; and italics don’t help either. So we either have to avoid using the phrase altogether, or admit that it is a good rule of life that Alastair Campbell is always right.

Journo-jargon: In a report of the prime minister’s comment that keeping schools closed a moment longer than necessary was “morally indefensible”, we said: “It comes as sources in No 10 say the PM would sooner close pubs, restaurants and shops than have schools shutter again amid concerns for both the educational future of children and for their safety and wellbeing.”

“It comes as” is a device beloved of reporters who want to say: “And another thing, on a related matter.” Except that here it was the same matter, so we could have just cut it out. Then we have the American “shutter” as a way of avoiding saying “close” again. Most schools don’t even have shutters and there is nothing wrong with repeating a simple word if it is the right one.

Finally, we used “amid” instead of “because of”. Three distinctive bits of journalese in one sentence, all of them making life slightly harder for the reader.

Wind of change: In an analysis of the changes sweeping the Middle East, we wrote: “The super-rich oil producers are feeling the draft, but states like Iraq are close to capsizing because they can no longer pay the bills.” Thanks to Iain Boyd for pointing out that we should have spelt it “draught”, which is the usual British spelling of the word referring to a current of cool air.

Of all the Americanisms that are occasionally encountered on our pages, this is one of the least objectionable, however, not least because we British have also used the phonetic spelling since the 16th century – only we have decided to use “draft” for a rough sketch or preliminary version of a piece of writing. It is the same word, from the Germanic root of draw and drag, but the two spellings have ossified, side by side. We should know the conventions, of course, but that is one of the most arbitrary.