Parliamentary discourse may seem old-fashioned but modern slang still creeps in. An analysis of Hansard by Politics Home found that debates in 2024 featured the first mentions of “delulu”, short for delusional, used by Labour’s Amanda Martin, and “nepo baby”. The latter, someone who owes success to family connections, was first used in September by Peter Fortune, a new Tory, about Pitt the Younger, and repeated later by Oliver Dowden about various hereditary Labour MPs.
This year also saw a record usage of “union paymasters”, a phrase that first appeared in Hansard in 1971 but was deployed 11 times on September 10 alone this year, while the 27 instances of Nimby was one shy of the record. There were also 490 uses of “black hole”.