Potty-mouthed politicians turn the air blue in 2023

MPs swear an oath when they enter the House of Commons, but now it seems they are just swearing all over the place.

In November, Home Secretary James Cleverly got in hot water when he used an expletive - some say he was insulting the town of Stockton; Mr Cleverly claims he was insulting the local MP.

In September, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan was caught on camera complaining that she was not being thanked for doing - to paraphrase - an extremely good job.

And No 10 text messages, revealed during the Covid inquiry, contained language that made The Thick Of It look like an episode of the Archers.

But does it matter? After all, politicians are often told they need to be more like the rest of us...

Labour MP Jess Philips is unapologetic describing swearing as "one of the greatest gift I have".

Speaking to Samira Ahmed's How I Found My Voice podcast, she said: "I swear all the time, I don't even know I'm doing it."

She said it makes people "feel comfortable" with her and helps constituents feel she is "on their side".

Research suggests that swearing can make a message more persuasive, and one study found that a sweary blog by a fictitious politician improved people's impression of them.

In 2017, then-Labour MP Michael Dugher was named as the second sweariest MP on Twitter, now known as X, beaten to the top spot by his party colleague Jamie Reed.

Five years on from leaving Parliament, he is still miffed about coming second - "maybe that is why I stepped down", he says.

He says his constituents weren't fussed. "They knew it was authentic... that's not necessarily a bad thing."

And has political swearing got worse over the years? He says it is hard to tell - after all Winston Churchill didn't have WhatsApp.

"Thatcher could have been absolutely foul-mouthed on Facebook, Clement Attlee looked like butter wouldn't melt, but give him an iPhone..."

The Covid inquiry revealed a blizzard of bad language in the corridors of power - something Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings apologised for. But as he told the inquiry, he was pretty rude about nearly everyone - and that, in the grand scheme of things, it didn't really matter.

Ian Leslie, author of Conflicted, a book which explores communication and confrontation, says there are reasons why the language raised eyebrows.

"When situations are high pressure, when choices have to be made very quickly, when the decisions are high stakes, we shouldn't worry too much about etiquette and politeness.

"However, I did think there was so much swearing among some of the participants it was a little disturbing - it seemed to be symptomatic of a chaotic decision-making process."

Some of the conversations, he says, were "indicative of a group of people who were behaving like headless chickens".

But, he argues, in some circumstances swearing in the workplace can be effective - for example, the language used by Helen MacNamara, a senior civil servant.

The Covid inquiry heard that on 13 March 2020, she used a strong swear word in a Downing Street meeting to express her concerns that the government was not prepared for Covid. She added: "I think this country is heading for a disaster. I think we are going to kill thousands of people."

Ian Leslie says this is "a great example of somebody choosing to swear rather than doing it impulsively - that's the difference, she was deploying a heightened register strategically in order to break through a decision-making impasse."

To make a point she moved "outside the usual decorous modes of conversation that civil servants use", he says.

Unlike government WhatsApp groups, there is still some decorum in the House of Commons. The current rules say MPs should not use abusive language in the chamber - and the Speaker can demand that an MP withdraw words deemed to be "unparliamentary".

In the past, words or phrases deemed to have stepped over the line include "impertinent dog", "cad", "blethering", "guttersnipe" and "git".

Sometimes persuading an MP to take something back can be an uphill struggle. In 1970, it took a fair bit of cajoling from the Speaker, before MP James Wellbeloved retracted his accusation that the House of Commons was "a place of drunkenness".

Swearing in anger directly at other MPs would almost certainly break the rules, but occasionally an MP can get away with a rude word.

In recent weeks, Labour shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper has managed, several times, to use a term referring to bat excrement because she was quoting James Cleverly, who was himself reportedly talking about the government's Rwanda plan.

She wasn't the first politician to use the word in Parliament. Earlier this year the Earl of Leicester used it, but only to describe the character of his spaniel, rather than the government's key immigration policy.

The truncated version of that particular word has also been said in Parliament over the years.

Use of other particularly strong swear words has risen very slightly over the years - that has been driven by discussions about abuse of politicians on social media.

The difficulty of working out if politics is getting ruder is that what we find rude changes over time.

Melissa Mohr is an expert in swearing and wrote a book on the history of the subject, in which she documented a shift in the words we consider offensive.

These days swear words tend to have a sexual or scatological element, whereas in Medieval England the most objectionable words were religious in nature.

For example, her book records a 1606 law Parliament passed making it illegal for actors to use certain words on stage including "by God, God's blood" and "zounds" [a shortening of the phrase "God's wounds"].

"God's bones" or "Christ's nails" were once among the most derogatory phrases.

The change, Melissa Mohr says, is partly explained by the decline in religion and the transition from a feudalist to a capitalist society, during which oaths to God expressing loyalty were replaced with commercial contracts.

However, the shift is also down to a growth in personal wealth. As we have grown richer, we have gained more privacy and certain activities or bodily functions have become taboo, paving the way for certain words to become more offensive.

But, whether it's Labour's Tony Banks in 1989, saying "he is to the arts what Vlad the Impaler was to origami", or Labour's Denis Healey describing being attacked by his opposite number Geoffrey Howe in 1978: "It's like being savaged by a dead sheep", the one comforting constant in British politics is that politicians have always been able to find ways of being rude to each other - with or without swearing.