How would one respond to the news, let’s say, that Sadiq Khan has launched an investigation into the possible criminal prosecution of Rishi Sunak over the Prime Minister’s connections to some close relative accused of some unproven behaviour around tax, peddling influence, or merely something inappropriate on a personal level?
Now ask yourself another question. On how many levels would this fiction define dumbness?
The point I’m crudely trying to make is that sometimes headlines make less sense the more you understand the context of a story and are familiar with the actors. The potential of a prosecution means a lot less once you understand that it’s predicated on nonsense, as does knowing that a person declaring the investigation lacks the authority to affect a prosecution. Had an American newspaper (The New York Times, typically) written the above story, a British reader would understand it differently, knowing that the Mayor of London has no such authority and that he would be merely attempting to distract, perhaps, from the disaster of ULEZ.
