Spads

Of course I live in the past — where better? But I found out this week exactly how many years in the past. The answer is six, which seems to me indecently like futurism. The occasion for my discovery was hearing in a politics programme that there were a harmful number of spads in government.

Ah, I thought semi-consciously, Cameron’s people aren’t seeing the danger signals. I had taken it, you see, that the commentator was using an unhackneyed metaphor taken from railways. There, as anyone knows who has seen David Hare’s play The Permanent Way, a spad is a signal passed at danger. Thus, in the Ladbroke Grove rail crash of 1999, one signal, SN109, had been passed at danger eight times in the six years before the fatal day. The acronym spad has been in use since 1988, and was noticed by the OED in 2002.

The politics commentator hadn’t been referring to railway signalling at all. He was talking about special advisers. Spad in that sense, which the OED hasn’t caught up with yet, is a miniature sort of portmanteau word. It refers to people paid by the government (i.e. the taxpayer) but not civil servants. There are an awful number of them. In 2000 the Neill Committee on Standards in Public Life said that there should be a legal cap on the numbers. Good idea, the government responded in the same year. By 2003, its response had spongified into a mess of modern-day politico-speak: ‘The government does not believe that the issue of special advisers can be considered as a numerical issue. The issue is about being transparent about accountability.’

The spelling of adviser, by the way, is usually adviser in Britain, but in America advisor.