The Hidden Politics of Spin – Dead Cats, Moving Windows and a Nation Running Out of Patience

Let’s start with an uncomfortable truth. I was not just somewhere near the machinery of political messaging. I helped run it. I wrote the lines meant to distract you, calm you down, nudge you in the “right” direction. I watched weak ideas polished into saleable products and bad ideas buried under something louder. If anyone ought to be numb to political spin, it should be me. I know the tricks because I used them.

Which is why the current moment should worry you. If someone who once believed in the dark arts looks at Westminster and thinks, this has gone feral, then something important has snapped. This is not just politics being a bit grubby. It feels unmoored.

There was a time when politics at least pretended to have guardrails. Take the 1947 Budget. Hugh Dalton, the Labour Chancellor, muttered a hint about his statement to a journalist on his way into the Commons. By nightfall he was out of a job. One offhand remark, one breach of confidence, and the Chancellor walked. Standards had teeth. You knew what the line was because you had just watched someone lose their job for crossing it.

Today, ministers can trail half a Budget on WhatsApp and keep their jobs. The package is pre‑cooked in friendly columns and planted “exclusives”, and the Government behaves as if nothing were amiss. Andrew Neil – nobody’s idea of a hysteric – now says ministers appear to be lying in a way he has never seen in British public life. When someone with his record says the floor has gone, you should probably stop checking the wallpaper and look at the foundations.

Once, across parties, there was at least a shared sense that truth mattered. You did not need a rulebook to stop you crossing certain lines; you simply knew where they were. Those lines are now a dot on the horizon. Messaging used to sit on top of governing. Now messaging is governing – and it shows.

The problem is not simply that politics has become more brazen. It is that the tools of messaging – the devices that once sat around decisions – have been promoted into a substitute for decisions. When leaders have no idea what to do, they do not go away and think. They talk louder.

Spin as life‑support, not polish

If you want to understand politics now, ignore the airy talk about “missions” and “narratives” and watch the comms tricks. That is where the real operating system sits. They are not gloss; they are the life‑support keeping a weak political class on the ventilator.

We have a Government that announces policy before it has done the work. The headline comes first; the homework, if it happens at all, comes later. Officials are left to manufacture a kind of plan around a line that played well in a room. Anyone who has ever sat through one of those rooms will recognise the sequence: applause first, spreadsheets later.

That is how you end up with a Chancellor floating an income tax rise in the run‑up to the Budget and then watching markets and voters react badly to an idea that should never have been half‑announced. Rachel Reeves’s flirtation with breaking a manifesto promise on tax did not look “strategic”. It looked clumsy and evasive. For the sake of a test line, the Government managed to look shifty and unsure of itself, and to reinforce the suspicion that the Treasury does not know what it is doing.

The same pattern is obvious on migration and border control. Shabana Mahmood can talk tough about removals and enforcement. The language is firm. The reality is flimsy. Anyone who can count Labour MPs knows the parliamentary party will not wear a genuinely hard line. The moment anything serious appears, backbenchers peel away and the detail is quietly watered down. Tough talk is cheap. Tough action costs political capital. This Government can only afford the first.

So it spins. But this is not spin as a polite finishing coat. It is spin as helicopter. The rotors are never allowed to stop. Each day demands a new announcement, a new row, a new “initiative” – not to move the country forward, but simply to stop the machine dropping out of the sky. When you do not have the votes, the ideas or the authority, you govern by press release and hope the public will not read the small print. When you have no idea what to do, you just make more noise.

The toolbox of tricks

None of this language is unfamiliar to anyone who follows politics. The “dead cat” has entered the folklore: the outrageous story dumped on the table to distract from the one that is actually doing damage. The details change. The job does not. Each of these devices exists to create the illusion of motion in a system that has seized up.

You can see it in something as petty, and as revealing, as the sudden obsession with portraits. The Foreign Office quietly removes a picture of the late Queen. Margaret Thatcher disappears from a staircase in No. 10. The Treasury rotates the faces on its walls. None of it fixes a single real‑world problem. No bill is passed. No service improves. But it guarantees a row about patriotism, legacy and “erasing history”. For a day or two, the national conversation is about the decor of Whitehall rather than the condition of the country. The dead cat is hanging on the wall.

Then there are the manufactured controversies, the outrage on demand. Kevin Hollinrake’s foolish decision to liken Reform UK’s badge to a Nazi‑era pin was a gift to Reform’s strategists. Instead of testing the party’s economic plans or its polling ceiling, we spent days arguing about insults and respect for millions of voters. The policy vacuum stayed intact. Reform’s base got something emotional to cling to; the Government got a brief reprieve from questions about why nothing works. Nobody got better government out of it.

Worse still is the way the supposed outsiders walk into the trap. When Nigel Farage declares war on the BBC over the way historic racism allegations are framed, his core supporters think he is “owning” a hostile broadcaster. You can almost storyboard the clips. But the average swing voter sees something else: a politician with long‑standing baggage on race, once again defending himself and shouting at the BBC. Their view of him has not changed much since the Ukip years. His unfavourables remain higher than the institution he is attacking: he wins the clip, but he loses the middle.

Identity has become another shield. “Identity shielding” is now so common we barely register it. Weak border reforms are challenged and critics are accused of racism. Chaotic Budgets are picked apart and detailed questions are waved away as “mansplaining”. The message is not “you are wrong on the policy” but “you are the wrong type of person to criticise the policy”. It is a human shield for bad decisions, and a very convenient one if you have run out of serious answers.

Alongside this sits a softer, more respectable form of evasion: the tyranny of the vague. Soft words such as “fair”, “balanced” and “reasonable”, and phrases like “right to a family life”, are deployed precisely because they sound unarguable while committing the speaker to almost nothing. A “fair share” of refugees could mean ten thousand or a hundred thousand; a “fair share” of tax could be a modest tweak or a raid on middle incomes. “Right to a family life” is used as a kind of magic spell in immigration and deportation cases, stretched far beyond what most people thought Parliament had signed off. The language is soothing because it is empty. The trouble starts when you ask for numbers.

Even the jargon of political science has been dragged into the performance. The Overton window – the range of ideas considered acceptable in public debate – is now treated as a dare rather than a tool. On migration, some on the Right talk breezily about “shifting the window” as if crashing through every constraint were a mark of courage. Reform UK’s move on tightening leave‑to‑remain rules looked bold on paper and cooled their support in practice. You are supposed to look through the window, not hurl yourself out of it.

Underneath all of this, the strategic leak has become so routine that it now feels insulting. Whole Budgets are briefed out in advance. Angela Rayner’s alternative manifesto appeared in a friendly inbox just as she was at war with the Treasury over spending and looming austerity. The supposedly “casual” file left lying around is no longer a clever trick; it is the most basic tool of the trade. Voters are not fools. They know when the news has been pre‑cooked.

The Morgan McSweeney school of smoke‑screen briefing tipped it into farce. Downing Street tried to manufacture a leadership “crisis” to distract from Budget chaos, forgot to tell Wes Streeting he was meant to be the rebel, and the fake plot turned into a real one. A stunt meant to cover economic incompetence ended up advertising political incompetence as well. You could not write a better parable of a government that confuses noise with strategy.

These are not the calling cards of a clever, professional political class. They are the tells of a system that no longer knows how to govern, only how to generate noise.

From spin to “my truth”

All of these devices – dead cats, decoys, identity shields, strategic leaks, vague language – could, at a stretch, be written off as the grubby mechanics of politics as usual. But something deeper has shifted.

We are no longer simply in the age of spin. We are drifting into the age of “my truth”. It is no longer enough to manage the headlines. The very idea of an objective, checkable reality is being treated as optional.

You see it most starkly in the big moral arguments. Over Israel and Gaza, genuine horror on both sides is reduced to whataboutery. Any acknowledgement of Israeli victims is met with “yes, but genocide”; any focus on dead Palestinians is answered with “yes, but Hamas” or “yes, but the hostages”. Atrocities become tokens in a permanent blame game. Nobody has to hold their own side to a standard. They only have to prove the other lot are worse. Whataboutery is not an argument. It is an escape route from responsibility.

The same reflex is visible at home. Every Government arrives in office with some version of Liam Byrne’s “I am afraid there is no money” note pinned to the wall. “The mess we inherited” is a fair point in year one. By year four it is a crutch. If you have been running the country for a full Parliament, the state of the country is no longer an inheritance. It is your record. Yet the temptation to point backwards persists because it is easier than saying, “This one is on us.”

This is what makes the present moment dangerous. When dead cats and trial balloons sit on top of a system that still believes in facts and consequences, they are irritating but survivable. When they sit on top of a system that no longer really believes in truth, accountability or standards, you are playing a different game entirely – one in which nobody is really driving, but everyone is gripping the steering wheel for the camera.

The vacuum: apathy and bad actors

Two things grow in that vacuum: apathy and extremism.

First, apathy. When voters see obvious failures go unpunished, when ministers can be manifestly bad at their jobs and still leave office with a handshake and a book deal, they stop believing the system can correct itself. If every scandal is met with a non‑denial denial, a smoke‑screen briefing or a carefully worded “lessons will be learned”, why would you assume your vote changes anything? Large numbers already do not. They look at Westminster and see one blob of low integrity, high self‑regard and zero consequences. “They are all the same” is not, in that light, a lazy slogan. It is a rational conclusion from observed behaviour.

Second, bad actors. The more we degrade truth and hollow out institutional trust, the more space we create for people who know exactly what they want to do with power – and whose plans are more ideological and far less benign than the hapless crowd currently spinning in circles. While we casually label everyone we dislike a fascist or a communist, there are actual extremists, with serious money and serious organisation, waiting to take advantage of the chaos. A politics that treats truth as optional is an advert for people who do not. They read our mess as an invitation, not a warning.

At the moment much of our problem is ineptitude: leaders who are out of their depth and a political class that is incapable of governing in any serious sense. My fear is that what comes next is not more incompetence, but its opposite: the ideologically certain. The people who are not guessing but convinced. They will inherit a system in which facts are negotiable, conventions are dead and millions have checked out in disgust. That is a more dangerous prospect than one more shambolic Budget.

Messaging is not optional. Truth is not either.

None of this is an argument for a politics without messaging. In a mass democracy, how you explain yourself matters. Good politics requires clear communication. But somewhere along the way we started treating truth as the optional extra, the bolt‑on you can discard for one more clever line or one more 24‑hour reprieve.

We now have senior journalists saying openly that they believe the Government is lying in a way they have never seen before. We have Budgets hollowed out by pre‑briefs, human rights reduced to slogans, identity used as armour and a daily arms race to see who can generate the loudest outrage for the least substance.

The tricks of the trade are not the mark of a clever, professionalised political class. They are the evidence file for the prosecution. They tell us we are being governed by people who do not know what they are doing, who have no idea how to fix what is broken, and who are using messaging devices to paper over the gap.

The first step towards something better is admitting that the system has not simply “lost its way” or “gone through a rough patch”. It has collapsed, in the sense that the old guardrails and the old standards no longer hold. Until we stop indulging that – until we stop laughing off the lies because they are “funny” or shrugging at the leaks because “everyone does it now” – nothing will improve.

The line between spin and truth has gone. Our job, as voters and citizens, is to redraw it and to make sure that, once again, crossing it costs you your job, not just your mentions.