ANOTHER VOICE

The only thing Mr Blair won't roll out is the barrel

MATTHEW PARRIS

Prosecuting tricksy politicians requires at times a sort of pedantry. Your witnesses will try to slip through your fingers, change the subject, broaden the focus. Instead, narrow it. Nail them on a detail. Steady, unforgiving focus on the slightest of deceits may yield much.

Especially this is true of language. Some weeks ago, writing in the Times, I concentrat- ed on a new piece of jargon sprouting every- where in Hansard. The expression 'roll-out' Is now used obsessively by ministers to describe the launch of (to use more jargon) Initiatives'. Only that week the newly on-line Tony Blair had told Internet browsers that a national concessionary bus pass for pension- ers was to be 'rolled out' next year. Every minister is promising to roll things out. Tex- tual analysis would confirm that over the last two years the number of parliamentary instances of the juxtaposition of 'roll' or its variants with 'out' exceeds the total number of instances over the last two centuries.

The trouble (and the advantage for minis- ters) is that few are quite sure what it means. To announce an imminent `roll-out' gives a general impression that something new is being readied for general release. The con- notations are of wraps being removed, a starting gun being fired, kettledrums, cur- tains rising, or a bottle of champagne break- ing over a ship's bows as she trundles down the ramp. Phrases have moods and this mood is hold, optimistic and exciting.

But the reality, my investigation showed, is different. 'Roll-out' is a rather technical term and, according to the press office of the Department for Education and Employment (Which had to check), means 'phased' intro- duction. So, contrary to the expansive mood the phrase connotes, its function, on closer scrutiny, is to limit. We are to understand that what is promised is no more than an early instance of (hopefully) more to come. A roll-out is cheap.

That, at any rate, is what I wrote. It was simply my hunch that the public was likely to be confused and that the restrictive offi- cial interpretation was at odds with the gen- erous impression the words were calculated to convey.

That hunch has now been, confirmed. Just how confused people are about this term, I had only an inkling. Ever since, Times read- ers have been writing to me explaining its origin and meaning. Most differ. So forgive me, but I am not going to let this drop. Here

are seven submissions from seven intelligent voters — the likely and intended audience for ministerial boasts — as to the meaning of a fashionable New Labour phrase.

Peter Guest, a desktop technician with the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, says that roll-out 'is a computer term. It derives from instituting a new program in one centre after another, successively — as a carpet is rolled out.'

Mr Robert de Wardt of Middlesbrough believes the term 'comes from the North Sea oil industry'. For the offshore platforms, `modules' are built onshore. 'When complet- ed they are jacked up and wheeled units placed underneath ... then rolled out from the dock onto the barge' and towed off for installation. 'In the planning sequence the "roll-out" date is critical.'

Rodney Leach of west London says, " Roll-out" is a business jargon expression. You try a new (say) retail format. If it works as a pilot scheme, you "roll it out" across the country. So it does not mean "introduce" but "exploit on a wider scale".'

Mr Bailey-Watson of Sherborne advises that 'roll-out' was 'aggrandised in the avia- tion industry to denote the first "out of hangar" appearance of a new type of air- craft'. Thomas Rosser of Henley-on- Thames agrees, adding, 'The guests are seated in a stand in front of the hangar, the band plays and, before the speeches, the hangar doors are opened and the new air- craft is "rolled out".'

A chap who describes himself as 'Anon, post office clerk' has sent a magazine called Courier. An article about a new post office system called Horizon begins, 'Now that the Horizon roll-out programme moves into top gear. .. ', and describes the training avail- able 'as roll-out gets into full swing'. The system will be 'rolled out nationally over the next 18 months'. Not only is Horizon to be rolled out, but the 'training events' pre- ceding the roll-out are themselves to be rolled out 'around the country'. Fed up, Anon has scrawled across the page, 'It will

'I would like to retrain as an ordinary person.

soon be time for roll-out of my pension.' You may by now share my growing sense that there is no agreed definition at all for this term. Ministers are therefore free to trade upon its vaguely upbeat sound, know- ing that if called upon to be specific they can always insist that they only meant it in its most restrictive sense: 'phased introduction'. If the voters have chosen to hear the strains of a trumpet fanfare, if we have imagined that anything big was about to happen and a new benefit to be made generally available, then the more fool us.

Fair enough. So I was surprised to receive this week a note from the very minister upon whose use of the phrase I had lighted in the Times, Michael Wills, MP, an unstuffy and capable man. On Department for Education and Employment notepaper he takes me to task for suggesting that the dictionary does not help. It does, he says, and encloses a pho- tocopied entry in the Oxford Compendium, Ninth Edition: 'roll-out n. 1 (a) the official wheeling out of a new aircraft or spacecraft. (b) the official launch of a new product.' Curiouser and curiouser: so the minister thinks 'roll-out' does mean general release?

You deserve one last effort to settle this. Yesterday I ventured on to the Docklands Light Railway, where one encounters an educated class of passenger, with a question- naire which I put to almost 100 commuters. `If the Prime Minister,' I asked each, 'says a new scheme will be "rolled out" next year, does he mean it will be (a) published or unveiled; (b) made available nationwide; (c) made available in some places, with more planned; (d) piloted or tested, as an experi- ment; or (e) don't know?'

Here are the results. 39 per cent went for (a) `unveiled'; 24 per cent for (b) 'nationwide availability'; 6 per cent chose (c) 'phased introduction', 20 per cent chose (d) 'piloted', and 11 per cent admitted to ignorance. In other words, the official, ministerial defini- tion was understood by the smallest group. The two largest groups, 63 per cent in total, attached the most generous interpretations to 'roll-out'.

Five people prefaced their response with the suggestion that if this prime minister said it, it probably didn't mean anything at all.

One said that when Mr Blair said 'roll-out' he almost certainly meant 'flattened'.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times