The ishoos

Good to see that one of my regular readers did not lose faith in this site while I was away. Guardian diarist Jon Henley, whose slight misapprehension about the political stance of this site I cordially corrected (clearly with success) last month, writes today:

Nice to see Oliver Kamm, our favourite hedge-fund-trading leftist, returning to his blog after a fortnight in which "much of moment has happened in politics" and promising to "ignore the froth and concentrate on the crucial issues". Which do not, it seems, include leadership struggles, cabinet reshuffles or local election results. Instead, says Ollie, "I shall comment" on an interview with Noam Chomsky in a minor online mag "later in the week".

Memo to self: do not attempt irony on this site in future. The satisfaction gained from providing Mr Henley with congenial reading matter, which he may then relate to my fellow Guardian readers, is too precious to put at risk by spreading such unintended confusion.

UPDATE: A reader draws my attention to a piece in the New York Times by Martin Amis that includes this line: "In a sense, the lesson of this literary sketch, and its attendant hate mail, is an old one: Never overestimate the obviousness of your own irony."

OK, I have learned my lesson. And if I'd been thinking clearly, I would have recalled too an old essay by Bernard Levin (collected in The Way We Live Now, 1984, pp. 29-31), in which he discussed the reaction to the Cecil Parkinson affair 23 years ago:

The one figure in l'affaire Parkinson for whom I have no sympathy at all is Mr William Deedes, Editor of the Daily Telegraph. I could have told him (but he didn't ask me) that the gentle irony of his paper's leading article ('... the moral logic ... that a quiet abortion is greatly to be preferred to a scandal ... hardly seems a moral advance') was, like all irony, a weapon more dangerous to the hand wielding it than to anyone against whom it might be directed. It took Miss Keays a mere three days to work out a method of misunderstanding it (the technique included excising the last sentence altogether), and there she was, as white as Mother Teresa of Calcutta.