Mea Culpa: Not guilty of aiding and abetting the prime minister’s publicity stunt

Questions of style and language in last week’s Independent, reviewed by John Rentoul

Mighty win: Joe Root celebrates England’s Test victory over New Zealand (Getty)

In a report from Ukraine, we said that “the maximum range of fire of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is 15.5 miles”. As Roger Thetford pointed out, this looked like “slavish conversion” from the original metric distance, which can be guessed at 25km by doing the reverse calculation.

He accused us of doing Boris Johnson’s work for him by converting the figure to miles, and also pointed out that we had retained metric units in the next sentence: “This is the range at which 152/155mm calibre artillery and the Grad MLRS units remaining in service can fire.”

We plead not guilty to aiding and abetting the prime minister’s public relations stunt regarding the bringing back of imperial weights and measures, and point out that our style has always been to use miles for distances. Our aim is to use the units with which our readers are most familiar. Given that most of our readers have some idea of how far a mile is, but know little about the internal diameters of gun barrels and rocket launchers, there is nothing wrong with using metric and non-metric in the same article – as long as they’re not being compared to each other.