Don’t quote me on that, please

9:38am Thursday 3rd April 2008

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THE things people say, an occasional series.

Let's start by hopping over the Atlantic to witness Hillary Clinton getting in a tangle during her protracted campaign to stand for the presidency. Caught telling a bit of a whopper, the New York senator said that she "misspoke".

What a splendid expression this is, so handy for those moments when you have pushed exaggeration to the point where the envelope rips and a big lie flops out.

Mrs Clinton told supporters she vividly remembered landing in Bosnia when she was First Lady 12 years ago, with the bullets whizzing about from snipers' rifles. Stirring stuff, worthy of an airport thriller, until archive footage emerged which showed Hillary arriving in a less stressful, less heroic manner, strolling, smiling and embracing a conveniently provided small child. And without a single pinging bullet in sight.

"Misspeaking" is a new one on me, but a quick internet search suggests that it means "to mispronounce", which isn't the same as accidentally telling a fizzing fib to look good in the bloodshot, weary eyes of voters, but never mind.

This compulsion to embroider the facts is common in politics. It's called spinning these days, but stitching embraces it too.

Moving on, a cover story in the new edition of the American magazine Time has caused a stir in this country. It shows a hooded youth scowling through the Union Flag, and beneath are the words: "Uphappy, Unloved and Out of Control".

The article in question claims that "Britons are frightened of their own young". I know lots of young people and I'm not frightened of them. All right, there are a few hanging around the streets I don't like the look of, with their pale faces, pulled-down caps and stolen bicycles. But let's not damn all our mostly marvellous young people because of the highly publicised antics of the unruly few.

David Davies, the Shadow Home Secretary, used this article as an excuse to unfurl the usual Tory line about "Britain's broken society". It's not broken, David. A bit battered maybe, in need of a plaster or two - but hardly broken. Only a politician going over the top for ideological reasons would say such a silly, overstated thing.

Let's leave politics for the airport and the fiasco that landed at Terminal 5. Britain seems to do a good fiasco nowadays, and this one has been a classic. Thousands of British Airways passengers stranded and separated from their baggage in a £4.3 billion building boasting "state-of-the-art" luggage systems (that ridiculous, quote-marked expression is only included here for purposes of irony; other than that, I hate it).

One quote rose to the top of this swirling mess of humiliation. Let's have a big hand for Julia Simpson, head of corporate communications at British Airways. And here she comes: "Early on it was a success story."

By strange coincidence, I have it on good authority that the PR man for the Titanic said exactly the same thing just before that unfortunate interface with the iceberg.

Then again, Julia Simpson used to be an advisor to Tony Blair, so perhaps she just borrowed the line from her previous job.

And finally, The Apprentice is back on TV. And what a modest, unassuming bunch of mumblers this lot are. Or perhaps not. In truth, they are the usual screaming, scheming, nonsense-spouting egotists gagging on their own pompous sound-bites and inflated with a laughable sense of their own brilliance. Which, I guess, is why people like watching. There is nothing putting your feet up as a pumped-up twit heads for a fall.

Do such people really exist? I suppose they must, but fortunately I haven't met many.

The first of this year's batch to be dismissed by Sir Alan Sugar's agitating finger was Nicholas de Lacey-Brown, so posh he made David Cameron look like a chav. Interviewed after being fired, he told the BBC website: "I am not a toff. I'm just a regular guy with a high expectation of quality".

Well, how glad I am to have cleared that one up.