Politics

Fuck in politics

Politicians swear like everyone else. The difference is that they are recorded, and the record has a way of getting out.

Expletive deleted

When transcripts of Richard Nixon's Oval Office tapes were published in April 1974, the phrase "[expletive deleted]" appeared so often that it became a national joke and, very nearly, the epitaph of the presidency. The tapes revealed that the president swore constantly, and "expletive deleted" entered the language as a way of saying the word without saying it. Nixon's own dirty-tricks operatives used another word from this site's A to Z: they called their work "ratfucking".

On the record

• Dick Cheney, June 2004: the US vice-president told Senator Patrick Leahy to "go fuck yourself" on the Senate floor, during a photo session. He later said it had been "sort of the best thing I ever did".
• Joe Biden, March 2010: introducing President Obama at the signing of the Affordable Care Act, the vice-president was caught by a microphone telling him "this is a big fucking deal". The White House press secretary tweeted that "yes, Mr. Vice President, you're right", and the phrase became a fundraising T-shirt.
• Bono, January 2003: not a politician, but the case that reset American broadcast law. Accepting a Golden Globe he said the award was "really, really fucking brilliant". The FCC first ruled it not indecent, then reversed itself, leading to the "fleeting expletive" litigation that reached the Supreme Court in 2009 and 2012.
• Boris Johnson, June 2018: as foreign secretary, at a diplomatic reception, he was reported to have replied "fuck business" when asked about corporate concerns over Brexit. He did not deny it.
• Donald Trump: has used the word at rallies and in interviews more than any modern president, often to cheers, and the 2016 "Access Hollywood" tape used a different one.
• Justin Trudeau, 2011: as a backbencher he called a minister "a piece of shit" in the Canadian Commons and apologised; the sanitised version, "fuddle duddle", belongs to his father, Pierre Trudeau, who in 1971 denied saying "fuck off" to opposition MPs and offered it as what he might have mouthed instead.

In Parliament

The word is unparliamentary and members who use it are required to withdraw it, though the Speaker has more often had to deal with "liar" and "hypocrite". It appears in Hansard chiefly in quotations, as when MPs debated Kenneth Tynan in 1965, Tony Harrison's "V." in 1987, or the Ofcom rules. Outside the chamber the picture is different; Alastair Campbell's diaries and the Malcolm Tucker character exist because Westminster runs on the word.

Protest

"Fuck the Draft" on a jacket in a Los Angeles courthouse produced Cohen v. California (1971) and Justice Harlan's line that "one man's vulgarity is another's lyric". "Fuck tha Police" (1988) is discussed under Music. "Fuck the Tories" has been a football-terrace and festival chant since the 1980s, and the version broadcast from Glastonbury in 2022 drew an apology from the BBC. "Fuck Trump", "Fuck Boris" and "Fuck Putin" have each had their season on placards and, since 2022, on Ukrainian government social media. The word's value in protest is that it cannot be mistaken for anything else, and that it forces the authorities to decide whether to arrest people for a word, which they usually lose by doing.