No, Boris Johnson isn’t ‘missing in action’

Someone in the Guardian wrote that Boris Johnson had his ‘out of office’ on, and the Chancellor was ‘missing in action’, but the Sun reported that ‘Downing Street denied Boris Johnson had been missing in action during the cost of living crisis’. Ed Miliband said: ‘The Tories are missing in action.’ A Liberal Democrat spokesperson called Christine Jardine said: ‘We have a zombie government and a Prime Minister missing in action.’

Dozens of people are using the phrase missing in action. What is the matter with them all? Don’t they realise it means ‘missing presumed dead’? Thomas Hood in his ‘Waterloo Ballad’ pictures a dying man on the battlefield found by his lady love. He says to her: ‘You’re come to my last kissing;/ Before I’m set in the Gazette/ As wounded, dead, and missing!’

If the politicians and journalists want a military phrase they could use absent from parade. People pursuing their family history come across notes like ‘Absent from parade. 3 Days CB’ meaning confined to barracks, which entailed fatigue duty and perhaps punishment drill. Alternatively, absent without leave, or Awol, would be apposite. Absent without leave is older than I thought, and with a more parliamentary connection, for in 1648 William Prynne published a book mentioning, among other parliamentary punishments, that ‘a fine was assessed by the House on every Member that was absent without leave’ in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In 1690, an act was passed in Scotland, still with its own unicameral parliament, demanding ‘that all Members of Parliament do precisely keep the Dyets of Parliament, under the Pains following, viz. Each Nobleman, for each Dyets absence without leave, Twelve Pounds Scots’. A Scots pound was worth, I think, one shilling and eightpence sterling.

I was wrong in thinking Awol a second world war acronym too. It originated in America in the 1890s. The term could be applied to the man absent: in 1919, the Century magazine had someone saying: ‘Most of the fellows in here are just plain drunks or awols. Awols? Why, absent without leaves.’ Sometimes the phrase was absent without official leave. Awol was usually written in capitals, but still pronounced ay-wol.