“I think it’s time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history, about our traditions and about our culture, and we stopped this general bout of self-recrimination and wetness,” Boris Johnson said on Tuesday. He added, “I wanted to get that off my chest.”
Ah, the firm smack of leadership at a time of national crisis. The crisis, of course being a global pan… gosh, sorry, that seems to be wrong, it’s actually a row about the fact that the BBC has decided to cancel the performance of a patriotic song. No, hang on, that’s wrong too! It is performing the song. Just without the lyrics. Although the reason for this may simply be restrictions on the number of participants due to the global pan… well, let’s just say none of this is straightforward.
I’m not going to get involved in litigating the latest culture war update (I think we’re on 13.6.12342), though I note my colleague Rafael Behr has pointed out that “without a blank cheque for marginal constituencies, Downing Street will rely on the constant mining of … grievances to persuade people that Johnson is on their side”. I do, however, find the language interesting.
It’s the word “wetness” that jumps out. A strange choice, redolent of playing field taunts, though perhaps not unexpected from the man who seems to view running the country as an only slightly elevated form of class clownery, and who once used an official document to label David Cameron a “girly swot”.
But reflexive silliness aside, Johnson seems to be saying that self-examination, stopping to consider the implications of our symbols or actions, is “wet”. He’s using the sense described in the Oxford English Dictionary as “inept, ineffectual, effete”. As with “girly swot”, there’s a definite current of what you might call “toxic masculinity” here. One of the earliest citations of this usage is from a 1924 novel by Percy Marks, called The Plastic Age: “A man is wet if he isn’t a ‘regular guy’; he is wet if he isn’t ‘smooth’; he is wet if he has intellectual interests; and he is wet if he is utterly stupid.”
The OED says “wet” is also used “quasi-adverbially” (as in “don’t act wet”), “and in the combination wet fish. A wet individual, a ‘drip’. Also specifically in politics.”
That political definition probably has the most resonance for any Conservative, and may be why Johnson instinctively reached for it. The OED expands on it as follows: “A politician with liberal or middle-of-the-road views on controversial issues (often applied to members of the Conservative party opposed to the monetarist policies of Margaret Thatcher).” The implication is that deeming Rule, Britannia! inappropriate in this day and age (which, it bears repeating, isn’t necessarily what happened), is lily-livered, wishy-washy, lacking in backbone.
If those phrases strike you as being straight out of a mid-century Britain of stern morality, spam and conscription, that’s not necessarily a coincidence. Though the political use of “wet” didn’t originate with Thatcher, who was born in 1925, she definitely popularised it, and she was a creature of her times.
As the earliest newspaper references show, she was fond of the phrase even before it caught on as a label to differentiate ministers who balked at her economic “shock therapy” from those who supported it (by analogy, “dries”). A 1979 Associated Press report on Thatcher’s style says: “She reportedly marks civil servants’ work like school essays – with remarks such as ‘wet’ and ‘what are the facts?’ scrawled on memos.” In April 1980, the Times asks: “Who are to be counted among the wets? The answer seems to be anybody who crosses the prime minister in fashioning a particular policy.” Since the main policy splits tended to be about spending, as time wore on the meaning gradually narrowed. Wets were one-nation Tories unafraid of a bit of state intervention in the economy. Dries were proponents of tight fiscal restraint with the aim of controlling inflation.
The irony being, of course, that Johnson now finds himself presiding over the economically wettest Tory administration for decades. But if its meaning has become untethered from the intra-party battles of the 1980s, its symbolism is still potent: to be “wet” in the Tory lexicon is to be snivelling, cowardly, afraid to take tough decisions. In the current climate, this appears to mean seeing nuance, pausing to reflect and considering consequences. Johnson’s penchant for vague but emotionally loaded language may fire up those who respond to this kind of manipulation, but it certainly doesn’t make for good government.