My wife and I are watching The Crown and are greatly enjoying it, as well as learning quite a bit about British history (don’t worry, after each episode we check on the dramatic license the writers took). We’re now on the fourth season, which brings the advent of Margaret Thatcher as played with frightening accuracy by Gillian Anderson. (Point of Hattic interest: the accents of the English characters seem to be spot-on; those of the would-be Americans are awful — JFK, Jackie, LBJ, the astronauts, none of them are remotely believable.) And suddenly everyone was using the slang term “wet,” which I remembered from the ’80s but had no real sense of other than knowing it was a putdown. So I checked the OED:
15.b. Inept, ineffectual, effete; also as quasi-adv. and in combination wet fish, a wet individual, a ‘drip’. Also spec. in Politics (see quots. 1981, 1983). […]
1916 I’ll give yer a clip ‘longside the ear’ole if you ain’t careful. Don’t act so wet.
‘Taffrail’, Pincher Martin ii. 27
[…]1924 A man is wet if he isn’t a ‘regular guy’; he is wet if he isn’t ‘smooth’; he is wet if he has intellectual interests..; and he is wet..if he is utterly stupid.
P. Marks, Plastic Age 192
[…]1969 The Jesus of the Gospels can be a bit of a wet liberal at times.
K. Amis, Green Man iv. 180
[…]1980 The contrast between the splendid façade and the rather wet interior of the man [sc. Havelock Ellis], who was kind and gentle and distinguished, but also distressingly absent, indifferent and faint.
Times Literary Supplement 28 November 1355/21981 The term ‘Wet’ was originally used by Mrs Thatcher, who meant it in the old sense of ‘soppy’, as in ‘What do you mean the unions won’t like it, Jim? Don’t be so wet.’ It meant feeble, liable to take the easy option, lacking intellectual and political hardness. Like so many insults, it was gleefully adopted by its victims, and so came by its present meaning of liberal, leftish, anti-ideological.
Observer 26 July 12/31982 In considering the promotion of wet (or wettish) Ministers, she will tell herself that Pope was right.
Listener 23 December 6/31983 Britain’s Tory Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, began this vogue terminology by contemptously dismissing dewy-eyed dissenters from her arid Right-wing policies as ‘wet’.
Age (Melbourne) 5 October 13
(I thought “contemptously” in that last citation must be a typo, but it turns out the OED has it as a variant spelling, and a Google Books search finds lots of examples.) So we see that it is in fact associated with Thatcher, but I confess I still have only the vaguest idea of what it means. Oddly, Green has no examples of the Thatcher-adjacent use.
“Wet” is all too familiar in the UK as Thatcher’s term for traditional Conservatives who did not subscribe to her own neoliberal gospel.
In those innocent days there actually were Conservatives who thought that compassion might possibly be a central human virtue.
As with Reagan, the moral depravity of Thatcher has become clearer in retrospect than it actually was at the time, as their epigoni have obligingly worked through the consequences of their ideology for us. But it is now clear that it was always a cesspool. As Trump is the true heir of Reagan, so Farage is the true heir of Thatcher.
In the early writings (1953) of Sir Nigel Molesworth QC:
“You are uterly wet and a weed and could not lift wot the french call a concombre.”
wot @DE said. Wets and dries. The term was used with undisguised glee by the usual suspects: Private Eye, New Statesman, The Guardian.
I expect “wet” to make a comeback amongst the Tories, since their preposterous selection process has managed to evict even the slightly-damp-around-the-edges Cleverly (sic).