Meyer's unfeasible cojones claim

Attentive readers will recollect my doubts about Sir Christopher Meyer's claim that in 2002 he was "...the only member of the waiting British team who understood this [cojones] meant balls." (extracts from his book are no longer on the Guradina site - I wonder whether perhaps this is for commercial reasons not entirely unconnected with Meyer's trousers - so I'm afraid some of the links in my previous blog entries are broken: this introductory piece mentions the incident, though).

Now, I don't know whether any of you saw the film Primary Colours, shown I think on Sunday evening. I managed to watch 10 minutes or so, before I could stomach John Travolta's Clinton impression no longer (the handshake parody was particularly vomit-inducing). I was also unsure whether I'd seen it before or not: from similar past experiences, this probably means I had, but found it totally unmemorable. The point, though, is that just before I switched off on Sunday, "cojones" were mentioned several times...

Primary Colours was released in 1998. I think we can reasonably suppose it has since been watched avidly by those moving in political circles: Clinton himself loved it, apparently. It therefore seems likely to me that many members of the British team are likely to have heard Travolta discussing "cojones". So is it really likely that Meyer was the only one who knew what the word meant? And, if he put this assertion in simply for effect, what else did he distort in his book?

Incidentally, reading my same blog entry (someone's got to) again, I notice the last paragraph where I spout on about the delectable Peter Oborne's seemingly unsubstantiated dissing of our esteemed PM, based on his no doubt uniquely insightful reading of Meyer's memoirs. You'll remember that Oborne made the astonishing claim that: "Our Prime Minister would go into a meeting with the President armed by his advisers with a list of concessions that needed to be won and never even raise one of them." I am yet to work out where in Meyer's memoirs he read this...

I now recollect my eye being caught recently by a book gathering dust on the Right-wing Propaganda shelf in my local store. Could the same Peter Oborne possibly be the proud author of The Rise of Political Lying? As I have no intention of buying it, even reduced by Amazon to £6.39, thanks to one of Amazon's reviewers, Simon Cawkwell from London (that's London in London, United Kingdom, in case you're confused), for letting us know that it's about consistent deception of the British electorate on a deliberate basis. Hmm.