A few years ago political commentator Peter Oborne published a book which, meticulously researched, thoroughly revealed the lies of then Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Boris may be seen as the master of political duplicity and mendacity but, sadly, the “profession” is littered with people who are also, as the late Alan Clark put it, “…economical with the actualité”.
Whilst Johnson almost seemed to revel in his lies Donald Trump outranks him in virtually never telling the truth. As Wikipedia summarised it “During and between his terms as President of the United States, Donald Trump has made tens of thousands of false or misleading claims. Fact-checkers at The Washington Post documented 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first presidential term, an average of 21 per day” His second term is infinitely worse!
Churchill said “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” Now the great man could be a tad “economical” at times himself. But few would question the contention that lies spread like wildfire. And his deadly German foe Joseph Goebbels knew how powerful it was “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.”And that I think is what is going on these days.
It’s not just Trump who has lost the capacity to distinguish fact from fiction (assuming he ever had it). British politicians are caught out daily spreading obvious untruths. Sir Keir Starmer once said of Boris Johnson: “There’s a guy who is detached from the truth… his instinct will be to lie.” – but Starmer himself needs to take care. If he wants to occupy the moral high ground he better make his footing firm, and take care.
The biggest mendacious low for Britain was the EU Referendum in 2016. The “Leave” campaign was utterly dishonest, as if Goebbels was pulling their strings and writing their advertising copy. And they had a couple of outrageous snake oil salesmen in Johnson and Farage leading their campaign.
The Aegean Stables cleaning job was easy compared to what we need to do now to cleanse our politics of the liars.
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