Oaf?!
Stephen Pollard calls Oliver Kamm an "oaf". The first Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of 'oaf' is "a stupid person" .Not a description, of course, that could apply to Pollard himself.
There was the time when he declared that private pensions operated independently of the generation in work. And of course his breathtaking advocacy of the invasion of Spain by US troops for failing to invite President Bush to a parade. And who can forget that in the wake of the July 2005 atrocity he was invited to write something 'uniting' against terror, but instead wrote "it is imperative that those of us who believe in democracy and liberty stand up and fight. Not just against the obvious enemy, but also against the enemy within - those who claim to be on the Left, but whose views have nothing in common with the decency for which the Left ought proudly to stand"?
And those who have forgotten will remember another infamous outburst, that "The mainstream Left has demonstrated clearly which side of the battle to preserve Western civilisation and freedom it is on. The Left, in any recognisable form, is now the enemy.". That was part of his Maida Vale Manifesto, a competitor to the Euston Manifesto. Now, as everyone knows, I'm no fan of the Euston Manifesto. But it has got over 2000 signatures, whereas the Maida Vale Manifesto has at most about five.
It is also true that sometimes his accuracy, and how he combines that with understatement, lets him down. As the time he gave investment advice - the "dead-cert" that finished 5th.
So at a pinch, Pollard calling someone else, and someone evidently more intelligent than himself, an "oaf", could be seen as rather, well oafish. So could he be using Merriam-Webster's second sense of the term, which is...oh - "a big clumsy slow-witted person".
Update: Oliver writes (in the comments and by email) to say that Stephen Pollard's description of him as an 'oaf' was an in-joke, and that Pollard is 'no oaf'. I feel foolish with respect to the first point - Pollard on his blog describes Oliver as 'the master' and 'unmissable' - and thus I accept the first correction entirely.
I reject the second correction with even more vigour (though with the caveat Oliver is a friend of Stephen's and I've never met him). I don't think anyone who believes that one of the things that 'needs to be said' is "The mainstream Left has demonstrated clearly which side of the battle to preserve Western civilisation and freedom it is on. The Left, in any recognisable form, is now the enemy" can be given the benefit of the doubt. This is no less than a declaration of treason against about half the country, on the basis of a New Statesman cover and the actions of the Mayor of London. The only way I can see of squaring the circle of non-oafery with such a statement would be to claim it was another in-joke, but if we take that view then I fear, as with Melanie Phillips, we would have to declare anything Pollard said to be a joke. I realise there is a bit of a problem here for me, as this site relies on in-jokes to the extent I have very few readers, and even they don't like most of them. But even still.
posted by Matthew @ 8/14/2006 07:40:00 PM
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