Wherever James Cleverly goes, ‘batshit’ will surely follow

The new home secretary certainly isn’t the first politician to regret an off-the-cuff remark – but he’d better get used to what is his (and his government’s) Ratner moment, writes Paul Clements

Could this single-word utterance now come to be this government’s ‘Ratner moment’? (EPA)

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.