This week Jeremy Corbyn called Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson a “fake populist and phoney outsider”. It was unclear what he meant by “fake populist”, since populists are always fakes in their pretence of caring about the people. Strictly, a “fake populist” should be someone who poses as a populist but is actually a thoughtful and ethical leader, which is probably not what Corbyn meant.
For many readers, meanwhile, the adjective “phoney” will be indelibly associated with JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), in which the teenage Holden Caulfield applies it liberally to the hypocrites he sees around him. (“He was the kind of a phony that have to give themselves room when they answer somebody’s question.”)
The word “phoney” goes back more than 100 years as a description of cheating bookmakers and other frauds. It derives, the OED suggests, from an old con called the “fawney rig”: you drop a gold-plated brass ring (or “fawney”) in front of the mark, and sell it to him for less than its apparent value, but far more than its real worth. So too, “£350m a week for the NHS” was a giant fawney rig perpetrated on the British public.
