Fintan O’Toole: A spiffing tale of how Brexit was ‘spaffed’ away
Chris Cook’s book paints UK swing to political and administrative incompetence
The word of the moment in England seems to be “spaff” or its variants, “spaffed” and “spaffing”. The Oxford English Dictionary, even in its regularly updated online version, has not caught up with it yet, but it is nonetheless fashionable in political and media discourse.
When words bubble up from obscurity like this, they often tell us something about the Zeitgeist, and spaffing is very Brexity.
It is a public schoolboy term for male ejaculation. One of the earliest examples I can find in print is from an account in the Telegraph of a visit to a sperm bank: “I decided to spaff into a cup back in 2014.” It has since come to mean any form of careless waste.
Cook’s book is the first coherent account we have of the Brexit negotiations as seen by the politicians and civil servants involved on the British side
Old Etonian Boris Johnson speaks, with exquisite bad taste, of money spent on police probes into historical child abuse allegations being “spaffed up the wall”. It seems apt, both that English public discourse would need a word to describe the pleasures of pointless self-abuse and that it would find it in the puerile vocabulary of its male elite.
I find a particularly interesting example, though, in Chris Cook’s riveting new account of how the British screwed up their negotiations with the EU, Defeated by Brexit. It is January 2017 and it is finally dawning on Theresa May and those around her that the Irish/UK Border really is a problem.
May’s joint chief of staff Fiona Hill instructs Britain’s most senior civil servant, the cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, to commission experts to come up with technological solutions. Her actual instruction is: “spaff some money on some geeks”. Eloquent in so many ways.
