A dagger. A bullet. A mistress. A cover-up. A cough. Thus are promising political careers curtailed. If Theresa May should lose her job as a result of her repeated and annoying hacking this week, she will take her place by the most unlikely of back doors in the pantheon of politicians snatched away from power before their time. Caesar. Lincoln. Kennedy. Gandhi. Profumo. Nixon. May…
What a piece of work is a cough. A Piers Morgan of an affliction, the more you wish it would go away, the more it keeps coming back. Why is it that you can cough once in a crowded football stadium and that’s it, job done, but cough once in a library and you open the floodgates to a seemingly endless stream of coughs? And not proper coughs but silly little ‘ahem’ dry, tickly coughs that do nothing but trigger the next cough.
Philosophical question: if you cough in the middle of a forest and no-one hears it, will your wife still thump you?
It’s not just libraries, of course. Coughs love to operate in any public place where they’re not wanted: theatres, cinemas, churches, especially during funerals…also when your intercostals are tender… and during political speeches broadcast to millions.
You can just imagine Theresa’s panic, can’t you? “Oh no! It’s one of those coughs that won’t go away. Ahem. And now I can’t put it out of my mind. Ahem. A-HEM. Hem. And the more I think about it, hem, HEM, the more I want to cough. HEM. This isn’t going well. Hem Hem. This really isn’t, hem, going, hem, hem, well. Hem. Hem hem. AHEM. Oh god help me! This is, hem, HEM, HEM, the biggest speech of my, hem, political career and, hem HEM, HEM – excuse me, sip of water, no that’s, hem, hem hem, no better – hem, when they play it back, hem, all you’ll hear will be ahem, hem, HEM, HEM. AHEM.”
Of course, once you become fixated with something, your mind starts to play with it. The image of Brian Clough will have entered her mind. “Why wasn’t he called Brian Cloff?” she would have thought. And then she would have begun to muse on the strange pronunciation of the word.
“Why is it pronounced ‘coff’ anyway? Hem hem. Why not ‘cow’ as in plough, hem, or ‘cuff’ as in rough? In fact, ahem hem, now you come to mention it, HEM hem, hem, it could be pronounced ‘coo’, as in through, HEM, or ‘cor’, as in thought or bought or fought or, ahem, nought, or even ‘cock’, ahem hem, as in Lough Neary.”
All this while trying to convince the country that she’s the right person to lead us through whatever tedious hell they’ve got in mind for the next few years. Talk about multi-tasking!
So what exactly was going on? Why should a person who didn’t have a cough 30 seconds before she stood up to speak suddenly become Coughy McCough, the most prolific cougher in the history of British politics?
For answers to this and other questions, we have to ask the simple question: why do we cough?
To attract a waiter? To draw attention to someone who’s smoking in a no smoking area? To alert somebody that their flies are undone? To hide your embarrassment? Yes, but surely there must be a biological explanation for why we cough involuntarily. It turns out there is.
“Coughing is your body’s way of preventing harmful stuff from reaching the lungs,” explains Professor Ron Eccles, director of the Common Cold Centre at Cardiff University, in an article in The Mirror. And that’s about it. There’s no explanation of why we can’t stop coughing in theatres even though we haven’t got a cold, or why drinking water made no difference for Theresa. So, as usual when it comes to science, we have to draw our own conclusions.
Something in Theresa’s throat was causing a constant and immoveable irritation. The words that were coming out of it perhaps. Can anyone remember any of them? Or maybe it was what she was breathing in. Can the air at a Tory Party Conference really be so toxic, so fetid with the excoriating stench of hair oil and treachery that a person can’t stand up and give a speech on… no, I really can’t remember any of it… without dissolving into a coughing frenzy and forming a sword of their own Prime Ministerial mucus on which to fall?
Perhaps it can.
