“One ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.” So wrote George Orwell in 1946. Almost eight decades later, the verbal end is exactly where journalist Helen Lewis and comedy writer Armando Iannucci have turned their sharp-eyed and sharper-tongued attention.
Strong Message Here launched last October “to investigate which political buzzwords are strong and stable and which are a crock of covfefe”. (If you don’t remember “covfefe”, count yourself fortunate.) It took a break over the summer but the new series, hosted by Iannucci with a string of special guests, starts on 18 September – which is just as well, as a government reeling from the resignation of Angela Rayner and struggling to get its narrative across seems to need all the communications help it can get.
To understand the vibe of Strong Message Here, the best place to start is with the final episode of the last series, on a year of Labour government messaging. If you puzzled over what Keir Starmer meant by “the tepid bath of managed decline” or scratched your head trying to work out what the “national health recovery mission champion” really does, you’re not alone. “I’m sure they’re doing a great job missioning the recovery,” Iannucci reassures listeners. (The actual job title appears to be “national health mission delivery champion”, which makes everything so much clearer.) There are forays into other intriguing terms that have crept into politics from the right-wing Twittersphere over the past year, such as “Boriswave” and “Yookay”, as well as a whole episode on “the Manacled Gimp of Brussels” – which, let’s be honest, speaks for itself.
There is a serious reason for all this. As Lewis says, “empty rhetoric is probably a sign of deeper structural malaise”. Sometimes the issue with a flailing government is lacklustre comms. More often, it’s not sure what it wants to say in the first place. Orwell had a point.
Strong Message Here
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[See also: My night dancing with Nigel Farage]
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This article appears in the 10 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Fight Back
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