By John Pickard
A ‘dead cat’ story is one thrown into the political mix to distract attention from the more important issues of the moment. Rishi Sunak is so desperately trying to mitigate what is shaping up to be the worst Tory general election defeat for a century that he has launched a ‘cat’ missile of his own – compulsory National Service for all 18-year olds.
No-one seriously believes for one moment that the Tories have a cat in Hell’s chance of winning the election, but this idiotic story has pushed everything else off the headlines for the moment – living standards, prices, housing, the NHS, the state of public services, sewage in rivers, the genocide in Gaza, etc, etc.
So, let debate commence. It’s all in the press today…
Will a twelve month military ‘placement’ involve six-month basic military training? Will service in the army mean a likelihood of a better job? Will universities and colleges have to go without an entire cohort of 18-year olds? Will the rich (as usual) get exemptions? What if a non-military person dodged one of their allocated ‘weekend’ duties of service? Will recalcitrant youths face jail? Or a cat-o-nine-tails? Etc, etc.
There are some newspapers that have considered Sunak’s cunning plan more soberly, and where it is analysed in that way, it is universally derided. Only last week, a junior defence minister, Andrew Murrison, had rejected the idea. Having “unwilling” national service recruits, he said, “could damage morale, recruitment and retention and would consume professional military and naval resources”.
Far from getting universal approval in Tory ranks, the dead moggie has gone down badly among a lot of his fellow MPs. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” a former Tory Party chair told the Financial Times. Another ex-chair simply commented, “Words fail me.”
But a further comment by the FT journalist covering this story let the cat out of the bag, so to speak. “The prime minister’s allies believe the plan has achieved something that has eluded him for months: a hearing”
So dead cat it is. There have been others in the past. Who remembers one of Boris Johnson’s ‘famous dead cats’? – when he was faced with universal outrage over his partying during Covid, he announced that the UK was going to abandon the metric system and go back to imperial measures. So for days the press was full of stories about pounds, ounces, grains, scruples, pints, fluid ounces, and then…nothing.
Then there was the famous dead cat of the then Tory Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, who announced “experimental” new semi-military prisons for young offenders. A recording of Whitelaw’s voice is heard in the song Garden of England, by the late Gerry Rafferty.
“These will be no holiday camps” [Whitelaw says]
“We will introduce, on a regular basis,
Drill, parades, and inspections
From 6:45am ’til lights out at 9:30pm
Life will be conducted at a brisk tempo…” etc, etc.
So National Service for all 18-year-olds is all over the newspapers today, but unfortunately for Sunak, this dead cat will be gone long before July 4. Millions of people will be voting on issues that matter to them…which means they won’t be voting Tory.
