What’s your New Year’s resolution? Eat less, move more? Or perhaps you’re a contrary cuss aiming to eat more and move less? Ever perverse, I plan a little exercise which will leave me both more streamlined yet more replete; by culling what I can only call ‘swivel-eyed Remainers’ from my friendship group, both online and IRL.
‘Swivel-eyed’ is thought to have originated in the early 1990s of a certain type of Conservative politician; Simon Hoggart wrote of those who had a ‘swivel-eyed belief in privatisation’. When John Redwood was first appointed to the Cabinet in the 1993 reshuffle, some clubbable Tory sneered ‘We want fewer swivel-eyed ideologues, not more’. The Conservative MP Tim Collins described the Tories who backed Redwood’s 1995 campaign for leadership as the ‘swivel-eyed barmy army from Ward Eight at Broadmoor’. It was reportedly the journalist Euan Ferguson who first used the complete phrase in a 1997 Observer column to describe the Conservative Christian Fellowship, who he pondered could run a candidate who might well be ‘a swivel-eyed loon who glories in pious deceit.’
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