Thursday, February the 26th, 2004
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One's thoughts turn, as they so often do, to Richard Milhous Nixon. One thinks of a certain jowliness, of the sweat and five o' clock shadow which, it is said, lost him the televised 1960 election debate with Kennedy. One thinks of a little dog called Checkers. One recalls—with a jolt—that he was raised as a Quaker. One thinks of cold rage, bitterness, and “expletives deleted”. Inevitably, one thinks of Watergate, and one considers that, thirty years after Nixon's resignation, -gate is the suffix-of-choice for lazy journalists writing about any and every political scandal. And one is thankful for that laziness, because it is so amusing to see how short a time it takes from the first stirrings of a scandal to the first appearance in print of the -gate word. Last year, for example, when the ex-Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith (“the Quiet Man”) stood accused of misusing public funds to pay his wife, it took only about forty eight hours for the episode to be dubbed Betsygate. All of which brings us to the series of events which, had they occurred after 1972, would no doubt have been called Van Dongelbrackegate. See below.