The Tribune

THE former British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson – whose fall from grace was swift, it must be noted – once penned an article in which he described a strategy to use when the argument is being lost.

In 2013, he wrote “let us suppose you are losing an argument” in a situation when “the facts are overwhelmingly against you”. In such circumstances, he described what he said was an Australian strategy of metaphorically throwing a dead cat on the table.

He said that the key point was that everyone would shout “Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table” and that everyone would be talking about the dead cat rather than the issue causing you so many problems.

If Prime Minister Philip “Brave” Davis was endeavouring to distract from some of the other issues of last week – be it the many questions over the situation at immigration or the shoddily handled consultation with women over the gender violence bill – when he decided to claim that the Wartsila engines at BPL never worked properly, then it appears not to have succeeded. But we shall gamely entertain him in this column for a moment.

The problem is that Mr Davis appears to have been undermined by both the opinions of others – the CEO of BPL suggesting some problems with the installation of the engines causing issues with their optimal running, some way short of never working properly – and possibly the facts too. FNM leader Michael Pintard says the log files show all seven engines have been running when the load demand requires, and challenged the Prime Minister to bring those logs to Parliament.

Now the tricky part of this is that Mr Davis made his claim in the House of Assembly, and if it turns out not to have been accurate, then Mr Pintard wants him to come back to the House to clear up the record.

Rather than distract, however, this has just become another item on the list in what was a challenging week for the government.

As our columnist Malcolm Strachan notes in his Insight column today, the handling of the violence bill’s passage despite opposition from women’s groups was particularly poor.

When contrasted with what sometimes seems to be excessive consultation with church leaders over the marital rape bill – when there has been ample opportunity for people to express their views – it appears there was an almost dismissive approach and cursory consultation with women on the changes made to the violence bill, cutting the size of the final bill drastically.

There did not seem to be an adequate explanation from the government for the reasons for this – and almost an assumption that everyone would be on board with the bill without actually checking if that would be the case.

That’s the kind of treatment that people will remember when it comes to time for a trip to the ballot box once more.

Meanwhile, Immigration Minister Keith Bell has seemingly taken PLP chairman Fred Mitchell’s advice and no longer seems to be talking about the issues in his department.

How long it can be sustainable for a senior minister in a department at the centre of many allegations to remain invisible, we shall see.

But the government will need more than a dead cat to move the conversation along.