Jeremy Hunt’s workhouse and the art of misusing a quotation

The health secretary this week clumsily invoked Oliver Twist to scold doctors wanting more funds. So we wondered what other great words politicians could mangle?
  
  

Haven’t we fed the NHS enough already? A still from the movie Oliver! (1968).
Haven’t we fed the NHS enough already? A still from the movie Oliver! (1968). Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Allstar Collection/ROMULUS

Health secretary Jeremy Hunt this week quoted Oliver Twist as he argued down pleas for more money for the health service, dismissing a report by the lobby group NHS Providers as amounting to saying: “There isn’t enough money, please sir, can I have some more?”

It was presumably lost on Hunt that the bearer of the begging bowl is the hero of the piece – a small orphan living in that Victorian forerunner of the welfare state, the workhouse. Bearing in mind the political power of selective quotation, we have ransacked the annals of literature to find some more useful quotes, ready for misuse.

For Donald Trump, US president-elect

“Good fences make good neighbours,” from Mending Wall by Robert Frost.

It’s surely only a minor inconvenience that the spouter of this homespun “wisdom” is ignoring the fact that “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall … [nature] sends the frozen groundswell under it.”

For Vladimir Putin, Russian president

“Out of the strong came forth sweetness,” from the Bible, Judges 14:14

The pugnacious leader and ally of the Orthodox church is admittedly unlikely to listen, but generations of golden syrup eaters could tell him that, in the riddle of Samson, it is only after the lion is dead that the bees can get to work making honey in its carcass.

For Boris Johnson, UK foreign secretary

“East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” from Rudyard Kipling’s The Ballad of East and West.

Given previous form, it should be no problem for Boris to forget the lines following, which add: “But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, / When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!”

For Justine Greening in her role as education secretary

“Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. ” From Charles Dickens’s Hard Times

Never mind that the words are spoken by schoolmaster Gradgrind, who has become a watchword for educational bad practice.

For Justine Greening in her other role as minister for women and equalities

“Of course, men know best about everything, except what women know better,” from George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

There’s a small problem with the sentence that precedes this piece of sisterly advice to Dorothea from her sister Celia: ‘“Why can’t you think it your duty to submit a little to what James wishes?” said Celia, with a sense of stringency in her argument. “Because he only wishes what is for your own good.”’

For David Davis, Brexit secretary

“In Europe one gets used to doing nothing. You sit on your ass and whine all day. You get contaminated. You rot.” From Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.

Resounding words of euroscepticism avant la lettre, written long before the first stirrings of the EU. Tempting, but Davis would have to overlook the fact that the character who utters this sentiment is described as “a snob … an aristocratic little prick who lives in a dementia praecox kingdom all his own”.

For Nigel Farage, former Ukip leader and ‘friend’ of Donald Trump

“How puzzling all these changes are! I’m never sure what I’m going to be, from one minute to another!” From Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

Alice was under the influence of magic mushrooms at the time.

• Please feel free to add the quotes of your choice for the politicians who need them in the comments below.

 

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