There is a move in politics so well known that it has its own name, its own origin story, and its own printed confession from a man who later became prime minister. It is called throwing a dead cat on the table. It works on you every few weeks, and the reason it works is that the press is the machine that throws the cat. * The idea is simple enough to explain in one sentence: when you are losing an argument on the facts, do something so startling that everybody stops arguing about the facts and starts talking about the startling thing instead. * You do not have to take a critic's word for how it works, because the clearest description of it was written by a politician, for a national newspaper, under his own byline. * ### The column that gave it a name * On March 3, 2013, Boris Johnson - then mayor of London - published a column in The Daily Telegraph under the headline "This cap on bankers' bonuses is like a dead cat - pure distraction." In it he laid the tactic out in full, crediting it to an unnamed "Australian friend" and "a great campaigner." * "Let us suppose you are losing an argument," Johnson wrote. "The facts are overwhelmingly against you, and the more people focus on the reality the worse it is for you and your case. Your best bet in these circumstances is to perform a manoeuvre that a great campaigner describes as 'throwing a dead cat on the table, mate'." * Then comes the part that matters. The point, Johnson explained, is not that people will be outraged, alarmed or disgusted. He concedes they will be. He calls that outcome true but irrelevant. The point is that everyone will shout that there is a dead cat on the table. The argument you were losing is over. Nobody is talking about it. They are talking about the cat. * That is the entire theory of the tactic, published in a broadsheet, by a sitting mayor, thirteen years ago. It never needed a leak or an investigation to expose it. It was volunteered. * ### Who the Australian friend was * The great campaigner was widely assumed to be Lynton Crosby, the Australian strategist who ran Johnson's London mayoral campaigns in 2008 and 2012 and went on to run the Conservative Party's 2015 general election campaign. Johnson never named him in the column, and Crosby has never confirmed the attribution. Treat that as the strong consensus reading rather than a documented fact. The tactic is real either way, because the man who wrote it down went on to run the country. * ### What it looks like when it lands * The textbook example in British politics came on April 9, 2015, days into a general election campaign the Conservatives were not obviously winning. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon told The Times that Ed Miliband "stabbed his own brother in the back to become Labour leader" and would "stab the United Kingdom in the back to become prime minister." * On paper this was a story about Trident renewal and whether Labour would trade the nuclear deterrent for SNP support. That is a defence policy question with numbers, timelines and shipyard jobs attached to it. Almost none of that got covered. What got covered for the next two days was whether a cabinet minister should have said it, whether it was beneath him, and Miliband's reply that Fallon "is a decent man but today I think he has demeaned himself and demeaned his office." * Note what actually happened there. Fallon's line was reported by nearly every outlet in the country, criticised by most of them, and defended by almost nobody. The coverage was overwhelmingly negative. It also completely replaced the policy story. That is not a failed dead cat. That is a dead cat working exactly as designed. Condemnation and attention are the same currency. * ### Why the press cannot help itself * A newsroom has a fixed amount of space, staff and front page. Two stories arriving on the same morning are not two stories; they are competitors for one slot. The dead cat wins that competition almost every time, for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone's politics. * An outrageous remark is cheap to cover. It needs no documents, no freedom-of-information request, no data desk, no lawyer read. You have the quote, you ring three people for reaction, you file by four. The story it displaced - the procurement audit, the missing money, the select committee evidence - is expensive. It needs a reporter who already understands the file and an editor willing to hold space for something with no fresh quote in it. * Then add the incentives on top. Outrage travels further than accounting does. Every outlet knows its rivals will cover the remark, and an outlet that skips it looks slow rather than principled. So the cat gets thrown once and lands on every table at the same minute. * None of this requires a conspiracy or a bought editor. It requires only a deadline, a budget and a traffic dashboard. The tactic exploits how newsrooms are built, not who owns them - which is precisely why it works on outlets that despise the person throwing the cat. * ### How to spot one from your side of the page * Three tests, none of which require you to be an insider. * First, look at the timing. Ask what the outrageous statement interrupted. If a minister says something wild on the morning a report into their own department was due, the report is the story and the wild thing is the packaging. The awkward part is that you often have to go looking for what was scheduled that day, because the coverage will not tell you. * Second, ask what the remark actually costs the person who made it. A genuine gaffe damages the speaker with the people they need. A dead cat is usually aimed at an opponent, plays fine with the speaker's own base, and costs them nothing but a day of tutting from people who were never going to vote for them anyway. * Third, ask which of the competing stories had paperwork attached. Dead cats are made of adjectives. The thing they bury usually had a number, a document or a date in it. If one story is entirely a matter of tone and the other one contains an audit, you can guess which one somebody wanted on the front page. * ### The uncomfortable part * The reason this tactic has survived a decade of being publicly named, explained and mocked is that naming it changes nothing. Journalists write "this is a classic dead cat" in the fourth paragraph of a story that is itself the dead cat's coverage. The knowingness is included in the price. A strategist does not need the press to be fooled. They need the press to be busy. * So the only real counter is structural and boring: outlets that keep a story running on day three when it is no longer new, that put the buried report back on the homepage the following week, that treat "what did this replace?" as a standard question rather than a clever one. Those outlets exist. They tend to be the ones with the smallest budgets, which is its own comment on the industry. * For you, the counter is smaller and easier. When a story arrives that is pure outrage and no paperwork, do not just decline to be outraged - go and find out what else was published that day. The dead cat is not the story. The dead cat is the receipt for a story somebody wanted you to miss.