Mark Twain gives credit to 19th Century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (later Lord Beaconsfield) for the classic statement, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”
The tenure of another prime minister, Tony Blair, might have been characterized by this phrase, especially because of Blair’s reliance on the Bush Government for the statistics on weapons of mass destruction.
Now the latest British prime minister, David Cameron, is going through his own version of the Disraeli dictum, except that in this case it is a matter of lice, damned lice and failing economic statistics.
The bald truth is that three weeks ago, during an ITV news bulletin, rats were seen on the steps of No. 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the British prime minister.
However, according to www.politics.co.uk, “David Cameron has enough to scratch his head over without head lice, but the prime minister is facing a nit outbreak in Downing Street.”
The prime minister told journalists visiting No. 10 that his children, Nancy, seven, and Arthur, four, had returned from school with head lice. He warned journalists that they might find their heads scratching as a result of their brush with power.
Problem contained
“If you find them when you get home, I apologise,” Mr Cameron told the visiting journalists. “Let me know and I’ll send you a comb and some ointment.”
The prime minister’s spokesperson said the problem was “contained”. He did not say that the prime minister was ticked off about the problem, especially since it affected official visitors to his office, not hitherto known for any licentious behaviour.
One commentator admitted he always knew that Cameron was a nitwit. Another quipped that Cameron was such a nitpicker he just had one more problem to go through with a fine-tooth comb.
Conspiracy theorists argue that the pull-out of the British battleships in the Caribbean was to facilitate their use in England to deal with the lice problem and they had been given a “00” designation or “lice-ence” to kill.
Upon hearing the news, the Downing Street lice committed insecticide.
The abrupt closure of the BBC’s overseas services was attributed to Cameron’s intention to keep the news from spreading while he dealt with the lice problem.
He was supposed to be asking the Afghans to let him use the brick factory that the CIA converted into a prison so he could water-board the offending lice.
There was also talk of transferring the children to a French school until Cameron heard that the French refer to their secondary schools as “Lycees”.
The one good thing that has come out of the whole episode is that the Camerons have become a truly “close-nit” family.
Some people associate lice with poor hygiene or sanitation. The article on Cameron’s children stressed, “A lack of cleanliness does not seem to be the problem, however – head lice are mainly attracted to healthy hair.”
This was reassuring since I remember in my school days getting lice and having to endure the pain of a fine-tooth comb digging into my scalp and the laborious search for “nits”.
We used to think that the lice jumped from the hair of someone infested onto the heads of people near them.
Joanne Moorhead, writing in The Independent, explained: “The problem with nits is almost everything you thought you knew about them turns out to be nonsense.”
“They can’t jump from head to head,” says another nit expert, Christine Brown, a former school nurse. “You can only catch them if your head – and your hair – is in direct contact with that of an infected person.”
The Camerons are not the only family that has found itself with a lice problem. The situation has become positively hairy. Moorhead says: “Nits are all around us: they’re in a head near you, even if they’re not in yours.”
According to leading UK nit expert Ian Burgess, director of the Medical Entomology Centre (it researches not only nits, but also cockroaches, fleas and bed bugs), between eight and 15 per cent of the school population is affected at any one time.
And it’s not just kids who get them, as many parents (including, perhaps, Mr Cameron) discover to their horror. Maybe the people who sit beside Mr Cameron at cabinet meetings should move just a fraction further away, so there’s no chance of catching them.
Moorhead asked the critical question: “Given that they’re so ubiquitous, and they’re not actually life-threatening, should we bother about them at all?”
As Moorhead said, going back to the roots of the word, having lice (even if you’re a prime minister) can make you feel lousy.
Tony Deyal was last seen asking what do you call lice on a bald man’s head? Homeless.
