Why shooting should stay in the shadows

There is a concept very much in fashion in Westminster, where I occasionally work as a journalist, known as the “dead cat strategy”.

It works something like this: let’s suppose you’re at a dinner party, debating a topic in which the facts are almost entirely against you. Logic dictates that the longer this conversation continues, the more certain you are to lose the argument. So instead of continuing to talk, you decide to suddenly plonk a dead cat on to the dining table.

Now all anyone is saying is: “Crikey, that’s a dead cat!”

In other words, people have stopped thinking about the subject that was giving you so much grief and are instead obsessed with something new: a dead cat. They might very well be alarmed, disgusted and even traumatised at this development, but you have successfully ended a debate that you were otherwise bound to lose.

Dead cat strategies are simple, but can be highly effective. Perhaps the most famous, in recent