“I’ve got a brilliant new strategy which is to make so many gaffes, that nobody knows which one to concentrate on… they cease to be newsworthy… completely out-general the media in that way, and they despair. And so… they leave you alone. You shell them. You pepper the media… you pepper their positions with so many gaffes that they’re confused. It’s like chaff. It’s like a helicopter throwing out chaff. And then you steal on quietly and drop your depth charges wherever you want to drop them.”

So said truth-vacuum Boris Johnson in a 2006 interview. For the first time I found myself quite impressed by the Clown. Not that I believe the chaff/error analogy was his idea. But, from a contradiction-solving perspective, it makes for a rather elegant illustration of how the Business Matrix works. Here’s how we might best map Mr Pants-on-Fire’s contradiction:

Hey presto, out comes Inventive Principle 27, ‘Cheap Disposable’. Definitely the best match to the uber-liar’s still evident ‘gaffe-chaff’ strategy.

Meanwhile, just for interest, here’s the more usual use of chaff in its defensive context:

And here’s how we might best get to that solution. This time using the technical version of the Contradiction Matrix:

Not quite the same problem, but the fact that we end up with the same Principle 27 solution strategy is hopefully telling. All we need to do now is hope that Principle 2 – one of the other recommended solution strategies for the business version of the problem – will soon be on its way. Fingers crossed y’all.