The politics of inversion

Human rights campaigners are claiming that keeping men out of women’s sports is an attack on women’s rights.

Most successful politicians are adept at linguistic sleight-of-hand. I am not talking here about outright lies, but rather the twisting of the truth through wordplay. One of the most striking examples was the US military spokesman during the Vietnam War who described a bombing raid as having ‘obtained a 100 per cent mortality response’. This verbal form…