The Middlesex Connection

The Information Minister says he cannot name the place where Mr Khan’s children lived

Time to come clean. I was born in Middlesex, the suburb of Kenton which itself was on the fringes of Harrow. It gets complicated. But all of them, including Shaftsbury Avenue and the rather imposing detached house where I came into the world — are in Middlesex. It was the house of my maternal grandfather and grandmother, and the very epitome of modest, discreet and quietly very very conservative with a large and small ‘C’.

Scroll forward 69 years and my home county is in the headlines in Pakistan and it all got a bit silly. The day-to-day politics of Pakistan has a robust streak of the barking mad running through it. Politicians as they do everywhere run off at the mouth having failed to engage their brains, occasionally with interesting results. The current dust-up about the Panama Papers has got the pols foaming at the mouth and none more so than the Information Minister (IM) who in an attempt to take a rise out of the leader of the Pakistan-Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) Imran Khan, made what he later — and unconvincingly — described as a joke.



It was a play on words. The Information Minister said he could not name the place where Mr Khan’s children lived because if he did he would be obliged to perform ablutions, as would anybody else who was a Muslim who said ‘Middlesex’. Quite what the 12.5 per cent of the population of Harrow that is Muslim; some of whom will be of Pakistani origin and following events back in the homeland made of all this — is unclear. The social media promptly lit up like Times Square on a Saturday night.

The Googlers were to the fore. My friend AT was quick to get into the fray with her breakdown of Middlesex, Essex, Sussex and the long-gone but fondly remembered Wessex home of Alfred the Great (849-899) all of which got an airing. The etymology of ‘Middlesex’ was popping up all over the place; as were dozens of other words that the IM would have trouble uttering, some of them not for the pages of a family newspaper. The history of place names in the British Isles was unpacked in forensic detail and waved before the IM who probably had little or no idea of quite how daft he looked and sounded. Almost within minutes he had been made a fool of. Hoist with his own petard and the busy fingers of the ever-alert digerati.

The retraction came 24 hours later but nobody was fooled, this was a foot-in-mouth moment to be relished. One for the history books, and we may be assured that it will be trotted out for years to come as yet another example of just how dumb the average pol is. It will also serve as a salutary reminder to those on seats of power that bullet-proof screens do not protect them from both the critical gaze and cynical response of a public which is able to lob lexical grenades over their palisades. Quite possibly one of the reasons why the government of the day views the internet in all its iterations with a somewhat gelid eye.



Amusing as the incident was there was a darker side to it as the IM came within a whisker of casting aspersions on the sincerity of Mr Khan regarding his faith, and that is dangerous territory indeed and never a space to enter without careful pre-consideration. That the IM was willing, wittingly or otherwise, to go where all of us fear to tread brings a chill to the spine, a hesitation to the pen and the tongue.

Within a couple of days the story had dropped off the front pages and us Middlesexians breathed a sigh of relief. We Voldermorts can put our feet up and go back to doing the crossword. The political circus moved on, banning films right and left, announcing development projects as casually as sweets are tossed to the bussed-in sycophants. As bloopers go the Middlesex affair was up there with the best of ‘em. Sadly, it is also emblematic of the bottom-feeders that sit to the political fore with little more than a well-stuffed cushion holding their ears apart.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 5^th, 2016.

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