The Path to the Perfect Political Metaphor
by Paul Richards
When Boris Johnson spoke from Downing Street after his recovery from Covid-19, he warned of the dangers of lifting lock-down too soon. Unlike Angela Merkel who explained the science, or Jacinda Arden who deployed her vast emotional intelligence, Johnson used one of his favourite rhetorical devices — a metaphor. The virus is a mugger that we’ve tackled to the ground, he said, and it would be foolish to let the mugger back on their feet.
Johnson, like Oscar Wilde, studied Literae Humaniores (that’s ancient Greeks and Romans to you and me) at Oxford University. His classical education serves him well when it comes to political communication, and his love of metaphor is a product of those far-off days amongst the spires, dreaming of being World King.
The trick to using a metaphor in your speeches or writing is to choose very carefully the thing you’re going to use to illustrate the other thing you’re describing. In The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1937), I.A. Richards calls the first thing the vehicle, and the second thing the tenor. The vehicle carries the meaning you want to express. Johnson’s use of ‘mugger’ conveys the idea of threat, but with the sinister dog-whistle connotations to trigger Daily Telegraph readers.
A bear of a man works because we can imagine a big, hairy bear, and that a man might share those characteristics; a hadron collider of a woman doesn’t work, because we don’t have a scooby what a hadron collider looks like. That’s why effective metaphors are usually simple, everyday, visual concepts. Martin Luther King talked about a table of brotherhood and a stone of hope from the mountain of despair. Churchill coined iron curtain. Obama talked about a rocky road ahead. Your choice of vehicle speaks volumes about who you are, and the message you want to convey.
George Orwell in Politics and the English Language (1946) points to the dangers of metaphors-gone-wrong. A ‘dead’ metaphor is one where the words have reverted to being ordinary, and have therefore lost all vividness and impact, for example kick the bucket. Worn-out metaphors that Orwell lists include ring the changes on, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, Achilles’ heel, and hotbed. These, he says, are merely used to save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.
Modern politics is littered with examples of metaphors which have become so commonplace they fall into cliché. Browse a copy of Hansard or read a political blog and you are likely to rub up against blank cheque, can of worms, political football, bloodstream, sunset clause, landslide victory, paper candidate, grassroots, sacred cow, straw man, lame duck, witch-hunt, stalking horse, or reverse ferret. They are lazy and lack impact because they are unoriginal.
Some theorists, for example George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their Conceptual Metaphor (1980) disagree — they argue there is no such thing as a dead metaphor because the phrase has become part of our shared language and culture and takes on meaning of its own, regardless of whether we appreciate its origins.
For example, in British English in particular, there are dozens of phrases which belie our history as a naval power, which we use without necessarily knowing their meaning: show a leg, let the cat out of the bag, pipe down, pull your finger out, over a barrel, long shot, at loggerheads, true colours, above board, piping hot, square meal, feeling groggy, batten down the hatches and freeze the balls off a brass monkey. Each of these might be used in a speech or article in the right context, without the audience needing to understand their nautical roots.
Worse, perhaps, than a dead or dying metaphor is a mangled or mixed metaphor. For example Ernie Bevin’s view on the idea of a Council of Europe in 1948: I don’t like it. When you open that Pandora’s box, you will find it full of Trojan horses.
Or this exchange in Yes Minister:
Sir Desmond: If you spill the beans, you open up a whole can of worms. How can you let sleeping dogs lie, if you let the cat out of the bag? Bring in a new broom, and if you’re not careful, you’ll find you’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water. If you change horses in the middle of the stream, next thing you know you’re up the creek without a paddle.
Jim Hacker: And then the balloon goes up.
Sir Desmond: Obviously.
Johnson chose his mugger metaphor with the same care that he concocted his visual metaphor of a bulldozer crashing through the wall of Brexit during the 2019 election campaign. In this case the vehicle was an actual vehicle — a bulldozer breaking through a wall, and of course Johnson wanted us to think he had the attributes of a bulldozer: tough, determined, and unstoppable.
Similarly, Donald Trump’s election success was built on a series of simple metaphors — drain the swamp, build the wall, lock her up — which are highly visual and understandable to his semi-literate target voters. Build the wall is a work of evil genius because it speaks directly to Americans’ fear and anxiety about change. And some of his supporters thought he was going to build an actual wall along the 2000-mile-long Mexican border.
Aristotle in Poetics said the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances. He’s not wrong. Metaphors bring clarity to complexity; they imprint a memory in the brain; they can shape a political moment, like JFK’s the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans or Macmillan’s winds of change, or Tony Blair’s a new dawn has broken, has it not.
Most of all, a fresh, vivid and memorable metaphor shows an audience that you care about them, you really, really want them to understand what you’re trying to tell them, and you’ve spent more than five minutes writing the words. Audiences, in my experience, like this.
So backs to the wheel, folks, and nose to the grindstone. I’ve shone a light on metaphor. Its time to take up the cudgels, gird your loins, and strike out on the path to the perfect political metaphor. After all, all the world’s a stage.
Paul Richards is a writer-for-hire, specialising in speech-writing.
