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The Table

Richard Spencer

Wednesday, 30th April 2008

Knife cuts

This week’s column should be guest-written by Hillary Clinton, who has shown herself a master at sinking the knife into Barack Obama’s all-too-yielding flesh. But at home we can learn valuable lessons in wielding the knife from our own politicians.

The knife itself is not, sadly, a glorious child of Britishness. The first knives made of metal appear to have been fashioned by brutes living in Mesopotamia and Egypt, though both regions of course would eventually fly the imperial Union Jack. Before the Industrial Revolution, high-quality knives were made of carbon steel, easy to sharpen but prone to rust and to discolour in contact with acidic food. The Industrial Revolution begat the stainless-steel knife, a stronger, more resistant tool, but hard to get sharp. Good knives today combine the two sorts of metal as high-carbon stainless steel; the best have forged rather than stamped blades, and the best makers of these heavy yet well-balanced instruments have been, happily, located in Sheffield, though, unhappily, their craft is falling victim to the general disaster of British manufacturing.

The right way to wield a knife is to imagine it as an extension of your entire arm; that is, you use the weight of the arm to slice rather than applying pressure from the wrist. Your thumb and index finger should embrace opposite sides of the blade just where the blade joins the handle; gripping the handle alone means you will lose both force and control of the knife. Politics enters the picture at the moment when you then set to work.

What could be called the Alastair Darling cut, or the self-inflicted wound, occurs in the kitchen as at the Treasury from a failure of co-ordination. The hand holding food (the data hand, as it were) does not grip it as securely as the hand wielding the knife (the policy hand), causing the knife to slip. In the kitchen, the best way to avoid a Darling cut is to position both hands before you draw the knife, making sure your grip on the data hand is independent of policy-hand pressure. It’s tricky to get this right, so you might do well to buy an excellent guide to kitchen co-ordination, Peter Hertzmann’s Knife Skills Illustrated (Norton, 2007). In cooking, trial and error is too dangerous.

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