The worst political word of our time is ‘delivery’. Starmer and Sunak talked about what they would “deliver” in 2024. Johnson talked about what he would “deliver” in 2020. May talked about what she would deliver in 2017. I have made critical noises about this before: my standard line being that postmen deliver things (‘deliver’ is a transitive verb: it requires an object) while politicians do something else: in fact they don’t deliver things and don’t just deliver, period, either. The word ‘delivery’ is curiously insubstantial. Then we have the fact that delivery, in relation to speech, is not what one says, but how one says it. “He has good delivery” means he speaks well, not that the words are good, or that he composed them, or that they serve any serious purpose. You know, Jeremy Irons, Richard Burton: they had good delivery. They were voice men. All this makes the current political use of the word very odd. Especially when the new Prime Minister has such poor delivery.
Isn’t ‘delivery’ part of the smoke and mirrors of modern political language? It is as if by the word ‘delivery’ politicians are trying to substitute doing something intermediary (delivering an envelope while know nothing about the contents) for doing something original (like writing a letter).
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