oday’s publication of the long-delayed Russia report reveals grotesque incuriosity. “The outrage isn’t that there was interference,” explained intelligence and security committee member Kevan Jones of suggestions the Brexit vote may have been compromised. “The outrage is that no one [in government] would want to know if there was interference.” Far from providing answers, the report’s main revelation is that the successive Conservative governments and the intelligence agencies seem to have regarded the most serious matters as analogous to the deaths of Spinal Tap drummers: best left unsolved. So on the one hand the Russia report has spoiled the haute remainer prom by failing to contain all the knockout blows some of the movement’s leading lights have long been implying it contains. On the other hand: it’s a rollover! In fact, some people who have spent nine months describing a number of things as a “dead cat” for the ongoing non-release of the Russia report are already claiming the Russia report itself is a dead cat for the government defeating an amendment that would have protected the NHS in post-Brexit trade deals. As always, buy your tickets for the bigger jackpot, the next missing piece of the jigsaw, the just-around-the-corner key to all mythologies. Facetiousness aside, it’s not hard to feel deep sympathy for the general position. There’s a bit in one of the Austin Powers movies where Dr Evil is in a family therapy session with his son, who has just made an emotional outburst claiming his dad wants to kill him, only to be gently disabused of this idea by the well-meaning counsellor. “No, actually the boy is quite astute,” muses Dr Evil. “I really am trying to kill him, but so far unsuccessfully.” I’m a big believer in Joseph Heller’s perfect adage that just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. With the exception of those with something to hide – or to lose – most would surely agree it’s quite clear that Russia has sought to influence the results of elections, both here and in other nation states. At one level it’s already such an axiomatic part of modern life that it feels like attempting to establish the pope’s religion, or whether the bears’ claim to journey into town to use the public conveniences really stands up to much scrutiny. Russia brings down passenger planes and lies about it; it uses nerve agent to poison UK citizens in our historic market towns, then sends the would-be assassins on TV to give deadpan interviews about spire heights. The Russian state’s troll farms and high-level hacks are well documented, as is the Russian state’s hack and leak on the US Democratic party. London, meanwhile, is awash with sensationally questionable Russian money and people who service it, including those in the House of Lords. And it’s regarded as totally normal for the ruling party to raise funds for itself by whoring out the prime minister and other senior lawmakers for £160,000 tennis games with wives of former Russian ministers. Otherwise irrelevant businessmen whose sole claim to fame is funding part of the Brexit vote imagine they’re “mates” with the Russian ambassador. According to reports, the Russian state recently attempted to perform some kind of Covid vaccine-jacking from Oxford University’s labs. Historically, meanwhile, the British state has always had more whitewash than the deepest whitewash-mining concession in the Urals. Presumably this is why the intelligence services didn’t even bother looking for evidence of electoral interference. So yes, you don’t particularly need to put a smoking gun to my head to get me to say: I think we pretty much know Russia tries to influence UK affairs, including elections. They’re still best at their own, of course – Putin just notched up another landslide in a referendum that will allow him to stay in power until 2036. Having said all that … a word on “the dead cat”, an increasingly hard-to-kill phrase. This political term of art was beloved by election strategist Lynton Crosby, and denoted the practice of distracting from an unhelpful story with something too eye-catching to ignore. But it was – as far as I can see – most popularised after a very appealing little explainer on it back in 2015 by the Spectator’s Isabel Hardman. That was when it caught the imagination of some nascent political obsessives, and over the past few years the dead cat has taken on a life of its own. It seems to have 9,000 lives. It is produced daily by people who understand everything better than you. And yet, do they? “Dead cat” is certainly meant to be one of those terms designed to show the user has an arch familiarity with politics as it is, not as it should be. Alas, it is such a sledgehammer signifier that it reminds me of a hilarious Clive James review of the Judith Krantz bonkbuster Princess Daisy, where he remarks upon the author’s endless heavy-handed allusions to the trappings of wealth. “Mrs Krantz would probably hate to hear it said,” he observes of one breathless passage on the gold bordering of the menus at the Connaught hotel, “but she gives the impression of having been included late amongst the exclusiveness she so admires. There is nothing wrong with gusto, but when easy familiarity is what you are trying to convey, gush is to be avoided.” Through sheer unconvincing overuse, “dead cat” is now political gush. It is bandied about so incontinently that these days it conveys nothing so much as the gaucheness of the bandier. Above all, it should be treated with deep suspicion as it seeks to flatten complex events into an endless series of binaries in which only idiots are paying attention to the “wrong” side. In fact, two things can be important at the same time. It is extremely important we understand the government’s post-Brexit trade machinations, and it is extremely important that we understand they and their predecessors didn’t want to understand what Russia was up to. Can we please finally give the “dead cat” its last rites? Pretending you know EXACTLY what is going on, all the time, is a form of conspiracist mindset. While distraction is absolutely a major weapon in the arsenal of the majority of politicians, it is neither accurate nor illuminating to reduce virtually all events down to simple “dead cats” – much less a feline centipede of them. More than being unhelpful, it is itself riven with a dangerous kind of contempt, perhaps of the same type the denouncer thinks they’re denouncing. What is it really born of, bar the sense that you know better, and the sheeple who don’t agree with you are dupes or idiots? In that specific respect, perhaps those dead-catting around are not so different from Putin himself. After all, both are gripped by the deeply superior belief that electorates need to be saved from themselves.