‘It sounds like Polari to me,’ said my husband, who can remember Julian and Sandy (Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams) on Round the Horne, 1965 to 1968. They used Polari, an assorted camp slang popular in the years when homosexual acts were still illegal.
It was the phrase Genny Lex that my husband had heard, popping up as a jocular name for the general election. This annoys people. On that old-fashioned social medium, X, someone with the handle bewilderedyorks posted: ‘*Opens Twitter* *Reads post about “the genny lex”* *Burns iPhone*.’
‘Right, if you’re gonna call it the gennylex, I’m calling the protagonists Richie Soons and The Starmeister General,’ wrote GlennyRodge, who has a reputation on X for humour.
Genny Lex, with its air of a personal name, has been floating about since 2022. On 20 October, Liz Truss resigned. Someone on Twitter mounted an opinion poll: ‘Genny lex?’ The answers were: Yes, 92.3 per cent; No, 7.7 per cent. There were 39 respondents.
But they were discussing an election, not its name. An attempt earlier that year had been to call the Platinum Jubilee the Platty Jubes. An even less successful attempt was to call the Queen’s funeral the statey funes. From the same stable came cozzie livs for cost of living.
Historically that stable must have been shared by Muriel Belcher, who ran the Colony Room Club. Her monstrous successor, Ian Board, would refer to the police as Lily Law, and even went so far as to give a name to his early morning hangover vomiting reflex as a Vera Vomit.
This was echoed in camp redoubts such as St Stephen’s House (Staggers) in Oxford, in the early 1970s, during A.N. Wilson’s
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