Even as that tow-haired disgrace Boris Johnson is being touted in some Tory circles to make a dramatic return and rescue his party from electoral oblivion, it seems that some in his party are all too willing to distance themselves from his baleful presence.

According to a report last week, his favourite policy of levelling up is now to be consigned to the dustbin. Instead, Conservative MPs in marginal constituencies are advised to shun the phrase, using instead terms such as “stepping up”, “enhancing communities” or even “gauging up”.

I can just about to begin to fathom the first two (even though I suspect that they mean precious little), but “gauging up” is surely a step too far. What on earth does it mean? Is it even English? I think that Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling up secretary, hit the nail on the head when commenting on this directive: “Forget ‘stepping up’ or ‘gauging up’ – screwing up would be more accurate.”

I’m much enjoying Patrick Kidd’s diary in the Times at the moment and his list of euphemisms for job losses. A correspondent pointed his attention last week to a civil service redundancy exercise as “a descending flightpath of headcount”. Words failed me, until I looked online and found some equally wonderful – nauseating? – euphemisms: workspace-specific perceptual abstraction (daydreaming); inter-departmental liaison facilitation (asking your friends out to lunch); and, most fantastic of all, bossspasming (suddenly looking busy as a manager enters the room).

In the same vein, reader Tim Fairhurst sent me the following memo he received: “Following that call, my plan is to begin constructing a discussion guide that I will use on the day to steer the conversation and make sure we cover the points most important to you and to our audience. We can iterate on that document up to a day or two beforehand.” I think we should move swiftly on from that, don’t you?

Email jonathan.bouquet@observer.co.uk

• Jonathan Bouquet is an Observer columnist