By now you might have heard that Mitt Romney’s trip to the United Kingdom is not going very well. The Guardian is keeping a running count of his various missteps—from demeaning the London Olympics to accidentally revealing classified information—and it’s not pretty.
In fact, it’s gotten so bad that tweeters on both sides of the Atlantic are mocking the Republican presidential candidate’s repeated stumbles with the hashtag “#romneyshambles.” The intent behind the hashtag is easy enough to figure out: “Romney” because of Mitt Romney, and “shambles” because his journey across the pond has become an unmitigated disaster. But figuring out exactly where the hashtag came from, and why it’s so funny, requires a little background knowledge of British pop culture.
“Romneyshambles” is a bastardization of the word “omnishambles,” which itself comes from a popular BBC sitcom called The Thick Of It. The show, which will air its fourth season this fall, is a black-hearted, profanity-laden satire of UK politics, set in the government’s fictional Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship (DOSAC). A typical episode begins when the department’s minister or staff makes a huge political blunder, which the Prime Minister’s PR enforcer (an acid-tongued Scot named Malcolm Tucker) has to then fix.
In the first episode of the third season, after learning that the new minister of DOSAC is a public relations nightmare, Tucker dubs her “the [expletive deleted] omnishambles.” Here’s some video of the now-famous scene. Warning: like pretty much every scene in the show, it contains a lot of swearing. Since then, the word has formally entered the British political lexicon. Scottish journalist Alex Massie even wrote an article for the American magazine Foreign Policy with a title that labels Cameron, “Mr. Omnishambles.” Now, with #romneyshambles penetrating American political consciousness, our own political vocabulary just got a little more colorful.
Ned Resnikoff is an urban policy analyst, researcher, writer, and editor. His byline has appeared in a variety of publications, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Dissent, and The Nation. He writes the newsletter Public Comment, which can be found at publiccomment.blog. Recommended
