Wherever James Cleverly goes, ‘batshit’ will surely follow

Let me take you back to a once-popular British jeweller who, in 1991, admitted to an audience of industry leaders that two of his company’s biggest-selling items were, in fact, “total crap”.

Within days, some £500m had been wiped from the high-street retailer’s value, its goods had become unsaleable, and its chairman – Gerald Ratner, the one-time “Sultan of Bling” – a byword for why it pays corporations to choose their words carefully.

“Batshit” is not merely the faeces of the Chiroptera family, but also the name given by the newly installed home secretary to the Conservatives’ plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Could this single-word utterance now come to be this government’s “Ratner moment”?

Politicians like to think they can craft their images with carefully prepared speeches, policies and announcements.

But it is often a casual aside, public or private – sometimes profound, often profane – that they are remembered for in the end.

When the political obituaries of James Cleverly are eventually written, many years from now, this one, short, unpleasant though vivid word is likely to be prominent.

Nobody is quite sure of its origin, though it is generally agreed it means “crazy” – more specifically, totally crazy, as in “batshit crazy”.

In the 24 hours since he was accused by shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper of having used the phrase privately to describe the government’s asylum policy, Cleverly has signally failed to deny it.

Challenged about it by the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning, he resorted to the classic politician’s non-denial denial, saying limply he “did not recognise” ever having said it.

His evasiveness was immediately spotted by the BBC’s shrewd political editor Chris Mason, who observed the unconvincing nature of his rebuttal.

Cleverly is not the first politician to suffer this fate.

Margaret Thatcher had to apologise after an unguarded moment on television when she mocked left-wingers who “drooled and drivelled” over the poor.

Former Tory chancellor Norman Lamont’s reputation never recovered from him saying that unemployment was “a price worth paying” for economic recovery. (It didn’t help that he later clarified his comments, adding: “Je ne regrette rien.”)

And John Major’s image came to be defined after he was caught on a hot mic after a TV interview, raging against virulent anti-EU members of his party, referring to his cabinet rebels as “bastards”.

David Cameron, the new foreign secretary, broke protocol – and took the shine off his reputation as a smooth operator – when he was reported to have described the Queen as “purring” down the phone to him following the defeat of the Scottish independence referendum.

Such “Ratner moments” are not restricted to the Conservatives.

Former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown became a laughing stock after a rogue TV microphone caught him ranting about an elderly woman he met on a 2010 election walkabout, calling her a “bigot”.

Another former Labour leader, James Callaghan, is remembered for dismissing the ongoing winter of discontent with a joke: “Crisis? What crisis?” Except, of course, he never said it. The aphorism was a tabloid confection, his actual words – “I don’t think other people in the world would share the view [that] there is mounting chaos” – not pithy enough for a Sun headline.

But, it’s not the explanation nor the extenuating circumstance that get wedged in the collective memory – it’s the gaffe in all its glory.

James Cleverly is going to struggle to ever bat away his “batshit”.