Can a conclave be secretive? 

During the conclave the BBC headlines kept on calling it ‘secretive’. The effect on my husband each time was much like that of a child kicking the back of his seat on an aeroplane. He was annoyed. I could tell by the way he shouted.

Secretive is a pejorative adjective. The ending –ive implies a permanent or habitual quality. I suppose the people who wrote the news bulletins wanted to make it clear that the existence of the conclave was not a secret. But that is not how secret would be used. After all, we benefit from the secret ballot in Britain, but it is not the holding of the election that is secret, just the mark made on our ballot paper.

Milton knew about secret conclaves, and ended the first book of Paradise Lost at Pandaemonium, ‘the high Capital of Satan and his Peers’, where ‘The great Seraphic Lords and Cherubim / In close recess and secret conclave sat’. But then Milton averred that ‘all true protestants account the pope antichrist’, so he wouldn’t have been jumping with joy at the white smoke.

Our own dear Pandemonium of Parliament might sit in secret session too, Bagehot suggested: ‘The discussion upon treaties in Parliament like that discussion in the American Senate should be “in secret session”, and no report should be published of it.’ I’m not sure that would work with the Indian prawn trade or American chickens.

What really surprised me was to find examples of secretive in the sense of ‘secret’ in respectable newspapers, such as the Guardian, in describing the conclave. The Mirror mentioned a woman whose work at Bletchley Park ‘was so secretive her mum never knew how she helped to win the second world war’.

One more thing about popes. News reports like to use the word pontiff by way of elegant variation instead of repeating pope.