As Dominic Raab flew across the Atlantic this week to feast on chlorinated chicken, a former US treasury secretary warned that we are unlikely to get a good trade deal with the US. Britain is “desperate”, Larry Summers said, but “has no leverage”.
In investing, “leverage” is the practice of borrowing multiples of your stake so you can win more if the bet pays off, as Brexit won’t, but it originally meant simply the action of a lever, from 1724. (“Lever” itself comes, with pleasing directness, from the French lever, to raise.)
The metaphorical use of “leverage” to mean advantage or persuasive power, according to the OED, was first used by none other than William Gladstone. In the Iliad, Achilles is sulking in his tent because Agamemnon has stolen his concubine; along comes Ajax, who appeals to Achilles’ fellow-feeling for the men he commands. “The leverage of this straightforward speech,” Gladstone remarks in Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (1858), “which is only saved by kindliness from falling into rudeness … produces an initial movement towards concession.”
Who knows what our own leader might yet accomplish if he leavened his brutish rhetoric with some basic courtesy?
