Sir Gus O’Donnell is the British government’s cabinet secretary. In other words, he’s a pretty top civil servant. His job is to make sure that ministers and their advisers uphold agreed values and codes of conduct.

So it’s a surprise to find him making a common mistake in a statement he issued about the recent ‘smearmail’ scandal that has engulfed Gordon Brown’s office.

His words:

What happened constituted a clear and serious breach of the Code of Conduct for Special Advisers. It cannot and has not been tolerated.

What’s happened here?

Sir Gus has tried to shorten his statement by making the word ‘tolerated’ do double duty, once with ‘be’ in the present tense and once with it in the perfect tense. Nothing wrong with that, except that readers have been short-changed in the verb department, which could leave them feeling slightly uncomfortable.

It should be possible to unpick the compressed sentence

It cannot and has not been tolerated.

into two separate sentences:

It cannot be tolerated.
It has not been tolerated.

But the ‘be’ is missing, leaving readers to ask subconsciously, as they scan the the first three words, ‘cannot what?’

The moral for us all: compression is good, but make sure you are still making sense. If Sir Gus had said

It cannot be and has not been tolerated.

he would have avoided the feeling of awkwardness that always comes from a failure of logic.

Perhaps the revised, ‘correct’ version sounds a bit pedantic, though. It might have been simpler and more forceful to say

It cannot be tolerated. It has not been.

What do you think?