Theresa Meerkat

  
UK Prime Minister Theresa May recently shocked MPs and the media when she quoted animated meerkat Aleksandr Orlov from the Compare the Market TV adverts while speaking in parliament. Yes, you read that right. In an exchange with the Scottish National Party’s Ian Blackford over Brexit, Mrs May said: 

“If he wants to end the uncertainty and deal with the issues he raised in his response to my statement, then he should vote for a deal… simples!”   

Yes, she said “simples”, the catchphrase of the CGI meerkat which everybody seemed to be saying… nine years ago. This cringe-inducing utterance was met with surprise, swiftly followed by ridicule from media outlets on all points of the political spectrum, from the left-leaning BBC to bastion of Conservativism The Telegraph (subscription needed to read the article). The utterance was embarrassing because it appeared to be an attempt by Mrs May to sound cool and contemporary. The problem is the advert that first featured this catchphrase debuted in 2010 and regular people stopped saying simples years ago. This led to the utterance backfiring by making Mrs May sound horribly out of touch. 

The following weekend, the Mail on Sunday (MoS) published a piece which claimed that Mrs May had been encouraged to say simples by her closest aide, Seema Kennedy MP, in order for Ms Kennedy to win a bet she’d made with Simon Hoare MP. Apparently Ms Kennedy made a wager that she could get the PM to say the catchphrase and if she won, Mr Hoare had to buy her tea at the Ritz, which starts at £58. A couple of things struck me as odd about this story. First of all, the MoS doesn’t mention who its source was for the article; was it Ms Kennedy? Mr Hoare? Someone else? It doesn’t even say “an anonymous source told us…” The article simply states that there was a wager between the two. Secondly, if Ms Kennedy did indeed make this bet and the outcome was that it caused her boss to suffer ridicule and embarrassment, I would expect Ms Kennedy to be in trouble. However, there was no report in the papers of Ms Kennedy being reprimanded. In fact, the opposite happened because just two weeks ago Ms Kennedy was promoted to minister after Mrs May appointed her Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Health.

I don’t buy the story about the wager. What I think really happened was that Mrs May was embarrassed by her silly use of the catchphrase so she cooked up the story about the wager with Ms Kennedy in order to offer an alternative, less embarrassing explanation for why she said it, which didn’t make her sound so out of touch. Mrs May then asked / ordered Ms Kennedy to take responsibility for it. I was a bit disappointed that Compare the Market didn’t capitalise on this bit of unexpected free advertising they received because they could have had some fun with it.