Deliver

Towards the end of her short-lived premiership, Liz Truss did a sixteen-minute television interview in the course of which she said ‘deliver’ thirty-three times.¹ It was as if she believed that she could dispel the evidence of failure, and reassert a lost sense of business as usual, by merely uttering the word. It didn't work; the iterations became more frequent and desperate as the conversation went on. But it gave an otherwise bland performance a weird Gothic undertone; this was the part of the story when the elixir is losing its efficacy, and the luckless magician resorts to more and more swigs just to keep going. What is it about this rather colourless verb that suggests such a promise of power?

As well as the repeated incantation, this passage performs an interesting slippage. At first ‘deliver’ is, as in ordinary language, a solidly transitive verb: ‘I will deliver a plan’. Almost at once, however, this gives way to a more elusive construction: not to deliver something but to deliver on something. This is still a predicate of sorts, but its relationship with the verb is vague: the proposed delivery is in the general area indicated by the noun, but there is no way of telling what it contains. This attenuated transitivity is a halfway house; in the third stage the object vanishes altogether, so that we no longer deliver anything, or even deliver on anything, but simply deliver. Finally, in a twist which is as close as the speech comes to wit, the evaporated direct object suddenly returns: we will deliver victory in the 2024 general election. So it was a transitive verb, all along! The surprise gives the last sentence the character of pulling a semantic rabbit out of an increasingly empty-looking syntactic hat, and it got the round of applause the trick was evidently seeking.

Of course these transitions are not an original invention on the part of Truss's speechwriters. Rather, the speech is sleepwalking through some passages in the word's modern history. Its use in contemporary politics is essentially as a metaphor drawn from the sphere of business. A prospective government undertakes to deliver the policy you voted for in the same way that Amazon delivers the article you ordered. This basis in commercial practice is what then licenses the emergent preposition: through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as markets became more complex, and transactions more standardised, delivery became less commonly a simple face-to-face conveyance, and more often the execution of a contract – that is, the vendor was delivering ‘on’ a pre-existing agreement.

What might be called the moral dimension of this commercial usage is that it turned the handover of the physical item into the fulfilment of a promise. This principle then informed the colloquial metaphor ‘to deliver the goods’. OED traces this in US political discourse as far back as the 1870s, usually in a negative sense (that is, a public figure has undertaken to do something, but not delivered the goods). Passing into the language, this expression formed, I think, the royal road to the quasi-absolute construction: over time ‘the goods’ became implicit, and people spoke of ‘delivering’ tout court. The dictionary's earliest instance of intransitive use is illuminating. In Fred Astaire's memoirs, published in 1959, he wrote, ‘I have a horror of not delivering – making good, so to speak’. Chronologically this is an outlier, and the writer's hesitation between expressions suggests that at this point the complete formula was almost still needed. Here, then, we can see Truss's ready-made – ‘we will deliver’ – just emerging from its American carapace – ‘he didn't deliver the goods’.

This pedigree goes some way to explain the word's talismanic resonance. Because of its business background, it suggests a speaker who, precisely, means business: this is how most politicians, and indeed most CEOs, want to sound. The tone is already audible in the quotation from Astaire: although he is a great artist, he nonetheless speaks as an unpretentious hoofer making sure that the public get what they've paid for. At the same time, the option to leave the object of the verb partly or wholly unstated releases the speaker from the need to specify what goods they are promising to deliver (or claiming to have delivered already). Rhetorically, then, the word makes it possible to strike a robustly practical note without committing to any definite action – a handy combination of boldness and self-protection.

That is enough to make the word politically useful; what then makes it politically magical is, paradoxically, its power to depoliticise. The commercial trope has the effect of portraying the state as a service provider which simply succeeds or fails in its efforts to give the citizen-consumers what they want. So when, for example, Truss says she will deliver on the NHS, she hopes to be understood as saying simply that the service is going to work – that there will be enough doctors and nurses, that you will be treated promptly and so on. Political issues around the NHS – privatisation, pay, competing priorities – are all elided by the suggestion of an ideologically innocent transaction: delivering the goods. It is appropriate, then, that the word should loom so large in the vocabulary of a politician who seems to have an unusually naive faith in market forces. There is no need to be clear about what is going to be delivered if all that is really required is to remove obstacles so that the market can deliver whatever its impersonal workings find to be optimal. In this sense ‘deliver’ is a device for taking the political out of politics.

As usual, however, the claim to have left ideology behind is highly ideological. Truss personally was not so much being cunning as talking in clichés: in recent times the idea of ‘delivery’ has spread across political and corporate discourse so relentlessly that its metaphoric character is almost worn away. Footballers deliver, or don't; national governments undertake to deliver net zero; managers set targets for delivering growth, or quality, or equality; universities produce documents detailing how they will deliver on their vision; restaurants deliver an exceptional dining experience. I have heard the ANC described as the party that delivered a post-apartheid era in South Africa. A few years ago a wave of spam e-mails promised that Viagra would enable men to deliver more orgasms. It is not necessary to be an unreconstructed Marxist to see that what is in question here is capitalist ideology: that is, the viral spread of the locution makes acquiring a commodity the universal prototype for every kind of successful interaction.

It is therefore worth taking a step back from usage in order to be surprised afresh by the grotesque inappropriateness of these habitual applications. Sexual pleasure, higher education and postcolonial revolution are fundamentally different kinds of thing, yet in this desolately abstract verbal world they are all dropped off at our doors in identical packaging. What they really have in common, despite their differences, is that they all involve interpersonal actions and energies which mean that the participants don't just take delivery of new stuff, but feel and act in new ways, and so transform their own lives and the lives of people around them. Knowledge of that human potential for change is presumably what the magic word, as pronounced by more powerful wizards than Liz Truss, is designed to suppress.

In the last issue of CQ, I argued that the word ‘challenging’ serves to reconcile actual difficulty with a regime of positive thinking, and quoted the spokesman of the Learjet company announcing that their flagship aircraft was to be discontinued: ‘given the increasingly challenging market dynamics, we have made this difficult decision to end Learjet production’. Struck by one irony (market conditions are described as ‘challenging’ in the act of declining the challenge), I failed to note another: that the speaker immediately goes on to use the very word that he was apparently avoiding. It is all right, then, to say ‘difficult’, even in registers and contexts where ‘challenging’ is routinely used to mean the same thing. So is this really a case of euphemism at all?

That question was prompted, practically on the eve of publication of CQ 64.3, by the verbiage surrounding the restoration of financial orthodoxy in UK politics. Jeremy Hunt, parachuted in to calm the bond markets, toured the politics shows on the morning of 15 October, saying ‘difficult’ almost as single-mindedly as Liz Truss had been saying ‘deliver’ a few days earlier. According to my argument, he should have been talking about ‘challenges’ – and when Rishi Sunak became first front runner and then Prime Minister a week or so later, that is indeed what he did. But it is interesting that Hunt's vocabulary was out of line.

What counts here is not the word but the phrase – ‘difficult decisions’ – which also demonstrates its stability by its possessing phrasal synonyms: ‘tough decisions’ and ‘difficult choices’ are easy to find around the same crisis. And as the immediate context makes all too clear, these difficult decisions are in fact government spending cuts. In other words, this formula is a euphemism too. The way it works, I think, is that since the cuts will cause suffering and be unpopular, they are applied with ostentatious reluctance. The ‘difficulty’ is not financial or intellectual so much as psychological: preparing to do something nasty, the speaker struggles against his own niceness. The expression is that of the old-school headmaster who prefaces your punishment by saying that it will hurt him as much as it hurts you. It is also, at the same time, a claim to leadership quality: this is someone who has the strength of character to do what is necessary where weaker souls would opt for an easy life.

So this is not an exception to the prevalence of ‘challenging’; rather, it is part of its functionality. By performing many of the former semantic tasks of ‘difficult’, it frees up the latter for its new, moralised and mendacious role.