Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm a big fan of editorial cartoons and often use them as a starting point for discussion and/or to illustrate language points in my classes. Anyway, the big news story in the UK at the moment is last Thursday's general election in which prime minister Theresa May's plan to increase her majority and provide 'strong and stable' government backfired spectacularly. So here's a slide presentation I put together for my EM Normandie students featuring editorial cartoons published since the election result became known. You can download the PowerPoint file here.
I don't have time to comment on all the cartoons (it's a warm, sunny day and a long bike ride beckons!), but here's just one (by Gerald Scarfe from the Times) which illustrates a common English idiom. Do you know what it is? (See below for answer.)
The idiom is 'out of the frying pan into the fire'. This expression is used to describe the situation of moving or getting from a bad or difficult situation to a worse one, often as the result of trying escape from the bad or difficult one. • After Karen quit her first law firm, she went to one with even longer hours — it was a classic case of out of the frying pan into the fire. You can read more about this saying and its origin on Wikipedia.
COMMENTARY
In fact, Theresa May wasn't in a particularly bad situation before the election, but the Conservatives were way ahead of Labour in the opinion polls and she thought that she could turn a small Commons majority into a landslide, even though she didn't need to have an election until 2020. This was a gamble which failed disastrously and seems certain to eventually cost her her job.
