The very model of a (post) modern Prime Minister

Today every week, John Clarke and Bryan Dawe show us how arbitrary is the connection - or otherwise - not just between what our politicians say and do, but indeed between what they say and what they say. Words can mean anything the speaker wants them to mean. The statement “X” might mean “Y”, “X” or “not-X”.

And the audience - dubbed inevitably the “bullshittee” in literature following Frankfurter - is complicit in the code.

As Kevin Drum puts it, it’s “a shared secret that brings them closer together. Thus the piquancy of bullshit, as well as its popularity.”

When John Howard was rearranging his position on when he would retire, he said this to Kerry O’Brien.

I would expect well into my term, … I would probably, certainly form the view well into my term, that it makes sense for me to retire, and in those circumstances, I would expect, although it would be a matter for the Party to determine if Peter would take over.

Remarkably, perhaps out of politeness, or the propriety of easing the Prime Minister through his squirming, Kerry didn’t press him on this new, still inchoate, “form of words”, so different from his earlier “as long as my party wants me” and so similar to previous statements about his expectation of what his expectations might be in the future - subject of course to the wishes of his party.

John Howard, whose detractors like to lampoon him as a man of the 1950s, might be particularly well practiced in such postmodern arts. But he’s never been on his own, either among his peers in politics or among those in the audience - whether they’re in the front stalls as producers, or among the millions down the back as consumers of the medium through which political messages are broadcast.