Vol. 43 No.

9 · 6 May 2021

Ruthless and Truthless

Ferdinand Mount

T A T : B J ,D T E N M B  
by Peter Oborne.
Simon and Schuster, 192 pp., £12.99, February, 978 1 3985 0100 3

P A : P , P F  
edited by Colin Kidd and Jacqueline Rose.
I.B. Tauris, 240 pp., £65, February, 978 1 83860 004 4

T
always something a little weird about the scene: the heavy lectern hurriedly
dragged out into the street from behind the famous front door, as though the premises
were suddenly out of action because of ood damage or a bomb threat; on the other side
of the road, the hacks and the pap pack awkwardly mustered and jostling for position. And the
statement itself, all too obviously scrabbled together by some sleep-deprived spad, failing to
match the historic signi cance of the occasion – an election lost or won, a leader toppled or
triumphant. How strange that the queen’s rst minister had nowhere to speak to the nation from
except a draughty stretch of pavement, competing with the noise of the birds and the rain and the
tra c in Whitehall.

Not anymore. Carved out of the old Privy Council Court Room in 9 Downing Street, where judges
used to meet to hear appeals from convicted murderers in Barbados or the Cayman Islands, there
is now a purpose-built grande salle for press conferences, knocked up for £2.6 million by friendly
Russian contractors. It is not a pretty sight, resembling one of those crematorium chapels painted
in bright colours to reassure you that death is nothing to be afraid of. The polished pilasters and
the Union Jacks hanging limp at either side of the podium suggest a newish nation-state searching
for self-con dence, one of the lesser-known stans perhaps. The lectern has ‘DOWNING STREET’
gilded on it, as though we might forget where we are.

But the gimcrack xtures and ttings should not delude us. This is intended to be a crucial new
space in British politics: a place where the prime minister can get his message across, unvarnished
and unspun except by himself, mediated by nobody, with only footling interruptions from a tame
lobby. The process of disintermediation that swept over the banks y years ago has now well and
truly arrived in Whitehall. The pandemic gave the PM and his ministers licence to address us
directly almost daily, even when they had nothing very new or very true to tell us. Now it looks like
becoming a permanent feature.

The new arrangements got o to a sticky start. No sooner was the chamber unveiled than Johnson
abandoned his scheme for Allegra Stratton, his chief spokesman, to give daily televised press
conferences, suddenly realising that a badly managed press conference could blow any passing
contretemps up into a scalding embarrassment. Instead, the lectern would be le to ministers,
notably to the Prime Ponti cator himself. Alas, Johnson’s own debut didn’t go too well either. In
no time some cheeky reporter was asking about his a air with Jennifer Arcuri. All the same, a
taste for addressing the nation is as hard to give up as alcohol.

Under the old dispensation, familiar from Bagehot, Dicey and Jennings and surviving into the
Crossman era and beyond, the prime minister spoke rst and foremost to the House of
Commons. By contrast, communications (not yet shortened to comms) to the media and via the
media to the public were sparse and obsessively private. In the morning, the PM’s press secretary
briefed the parliamentary lobby in a scru y underground cavern in Number Ten. In the
a ernoons, as political correspondent for the Spectator, I trooped with the rest of the lobby up a
winding stair to a pokey room at the top of the Palace of Westminster. There, on Thursdays, we
were briefed by what were coyly termed ‘Blue Leader’ and ‘Red Leader’ – the leader of the House
and the leader of the opposition or vice versa – and coded signals and sly digs were doled out to
the hungry journos. All on terms of the utmost secrecy. I still have my copy of Lobby Practice, the
slimmest of slim volumes, bound in burgundy rexine, which carries among other stern injunctions
– ‘Do not “see” anything in the Members’ Lobby’, ‘Do not run a er a minister’ – the overarching
commandment: ‘Members of the lobby are under an obligation to keep secret the fact that such
meetings are held and to avoid revealing the sources of their information.’

Younger members chafed, of course. The etiquette seemed to us as medieval as the Groom of the
Stole. We itched for a more open dialogue, in which statements would be on the record and the
speakers identi able and accountable to the public at large. Impatience with the old ways had
spread far beyond the media. Sir John Hunt, a former cabinet secretary, broke cover as early as
election day 1983 to voice the discontents of the mandarins:

In the absence in our system of a chief executive with his own supporting sta , a ‘hole in the
centre’ of government was perceived which an overworked cabinet seemed incapable of ful lling.
It was widely felt that the decentralisation of so much cabinet business made a coherent strategy
much more di cult. It was suggested that the hard grind of a subject through the cabinet
committee system led not only to unnecessary delay but also to unsatisfactory compromises.

In Cabinet (1986) Peter Hennessy records that, under Mrs Thatcher, ‘cabinet does meet less
frequently, it discusses fewer formal papers, it is presented with more virtual faits accomplis at the
last moment, and she does prefer to work in ad hoc groups – many of the most important ones
remaining outside the cabinet-committee structure.’

At the same time, the role of Parliament as the grand inquisitor of the nation seemed to be
slipping. By 1995, the Labour MP Jack Straw was lamenting that ‘in the last six years, every serious
newspaper has abandoned its straight reporting of Parliament.’ Almost overnight, a tradition that
dated back to the Victorian era of devoting a page or more every day to coverage of the most
important speeches delivered in the House had simply vanished. Much had been hoped from the
televising of the Commons, which began in 1989, but the networks broadcast only juicy snippets,
and fewer and fewer of those as time went by, leaving it to their own correspondents to gloss the
goings-on. Only the sketchwriters remained in the reporters’ gallery to squeeze whatever fun
might be had.

The stage was set for what Tony Blair’s chief of sta , Jonathan Powell, claimed would be ‘a change
from a feudal system of barons to a more Napoleonic system’. The sta at Number Ten used,
notoriously, to be no larger than the sta of a mayor in a middle-sized German town. Over the last
decades, it has swelled to a cast of hundreds. Under Thatcher, according to the Institute of
Government, fewer than seventy people worked at Number Ten; under Blair the number increased
to 225. When asked on Radio 4 to describe being prime minister, Boris Johnson exulted that ‘it’s a
job that is brilliantly supported by a massive team of people who have all evolved over hundreds of
years into what is a big department of state now ... So this is an incredible institution that has
evolved over time into this extraordinary centre of a G7 economy.’ All this has been engineered,
not simply in the supposed interests of better government, but of dominating ‘the narrative’ – that
postmodernist vogue word which was unknown in British politics before Blair. ‘We are going to
take the initiative with the media announcing stories in a cycle determined by us,’ New Labour
told government press o cers at the outset. Less well remembered perhaps is Alastair Campbell’s
creation of a head of ‘story development’. The post of o cial fabulist was lled by Paul Hamill,
who would play an inglorious role in the fabrication of the Dodgy Dossier of September 2002.

We weren’t careful what we half-wished for. We did not anticipate the e ects a free- owing,
direct, 24/7 style of communication would have on the quality of the output. In retrospect, the
stu y old rules guaranteed a certain vigilance against inaccurate, overblown or deceitful
statements. Corrections and withdrawals could be demanded and insisted on, by the Speaker or
by a resolution of the House. Careers could be wrecked on a single breach of etiquette, on a casual
‘misspeaking’ (another pretty neologism). Take, for example, three celebrated postwar
resignations: Hugh Dalton in 1947 as chancellor for casually letting slip a couple of Budget secrets
to a reporter while on his way to deliver the speech; John Profumo in 1963 as secretary for war for
lying about his a air with Christine Keeler; and Amber Rudd as home secretary in 2018 during the
Windrush scandal for claiming to be ignorant of the government’s immigration targets, although
the gures had been sent to her. In Dalton’s case, it was at worst a bit of indiscreet showing o . In
Profumo’s case, the lie was outrageous, but more remarkable was the fact that he could be
compelled to come to the House to make a statement about a girlfriend (let’s not think about the
demands on parliamentary time if such a compulsion still operated). In Rudd’s, if she hadn’t read
the gures, she ought to have. But they all had to go. Now ministers stick like barnacles to their
ministerial posts, with Johnson’s encouragement. Under previous PMs, the home secretary, Priti
Patel, would have had to go for being o cially found guilty of bullying her sta ; so would Robert
Jenrick, the housing secretary, for a ripe lobbying scandal.

As for policymaking, a concern for accuracy was supposed to go hand in hand with a thorough
and detailed examination of pros and cons, a proper submission of papers and keeping of records,
rather than an aide scribbling on a pad during co ee on the sofa. There might, a er all, be
something to be said for ‘the hard grind’.

T
veteran political correspondent Peter Oborne is unrepentantly nostalgic for the old
order. He begins his philippic, The Assault on Truth, by quoting two sentences in the
Ministerial Code: ‘It is of paramount importance that ministers give accurate and truthful
information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity. Ministers
who knowingly mislead Parliament will be expected to o er their resignation to the prime
minister.’ ‘Philippic’ is, I think, the right word. The deliverers of the original Philippics,
Demosthenes and Cicero, targeted what they regarded as the abuses and perversions of the
enshrined practices of the Athenian and Roman republics by Philip of Macedon and Mark Antony
(although those of Demosthenes were calls to arms rather than constitutional critiques).

There are at least six books now in print with the words ‘Assault on Truth’ in their titles: Oborne’s;
Je rey Masson’s polemic against the slipperiness of Sigmund Freud, which a er more than thirty
years retains its power to enrage Freudians; a book by the fact-checkers of the Washington Post
listing the lies of Donald Trump (the only instance I can think of in which that shy fraternity has
ventured into authorship); Deborah Lipstadt’s book on Holocaust denial; Daniel A. Farber’s
Beyond All Reason: the Radical Assault on Truth in American Law (1997); and Fox Nation v. Reality: The Fox
News Community’s Assault on Truth by Mark Howard. I toss these books together to indicate how this
digital age, which prides itself on its abundance and freedom of information, has become so
uneasy about the pervasiveness of lying. We might add to these indictments three of Oborne’s
earlier books: Alastair Campbell: New Labour and the Rise of the Media Class (1999), The Rise of Political
Lying (2005), and How Trump Thinks: His Tweets and the Birth of a New Political Language (2017).

Over the past twenty years and more, Oborne has conducted a lonely war against the mendacity of
modernity. And much good it has done him. In his journalistic heyday, his columns appeared in
the Spectator, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph. All these are now barred to him. He’s lucky if he
can squeeze a piece into Middle East Eye. As far as I can see, his latest book has been reviewed only
in quarters likely to be sympathetic, such as the Guardian and the Observer. From his former
comrades in the right-wing press, not a cheep, only frosty silence. He hasn’t been forgiven for his
last-minute abandonment of the Brexit cause which he championed so ercely, or for his
relentless exposure of Johnson’s bs and fabrications. Nor will he be easily pardoned by
newspaper managements who remember the way he stalked out of the Daily Telegraph when he
discovered they were censoring critical coverage of big advertisers such as HSBC and Cunard and
printing advertorial pap instead.

Oborne is not only a doomsayer. He has defended Iran’s right to better treatment from the West;
he has pleaded for the people of Zimbabwe to be freed from their dreadful government; he has
extolled the beauties of cricket as it is played in Pakistan. But it is his insistence on truth-telling
that marks him out among political commentators as ‘obsessive’, ‘erratic’, or ‘eccentric’. It’s not
that others fail to mention the lies and obfuscations of the politicians they write about. As Oborne
points out, both John Rentoul’s book on Tony Blair and Donald Macintyre’s on Peter Mandelson
record the ripest examples of their subjects’ mendacity. But they do so ‘unobtrusively, in the
muted, matter-of-fact tone of a bank manager drawing embarrassed attention to a bounced
cheque’. Much the same could be said of the normally tigerish Tom Bower’s recent book on
Johnson. The prime minister’s oa sh betrayals, his ghastly puns, his shameless self-
contradictions are not to be taken seriously because he is not posing as un homme sérieux. And the
same is true of his lies. You have to laugh, or you are a prig.

From the start Johnson has been a clown, but a useful clown. Now and then he has to be sacked,
but he is always taken back, perhaps with a mock sigh. He has never quite equalled the stream of
lies that he manufactured as Daily Telegraph correspondent in Brussels in the early 1990s: that the
EU wanted to ban prawn cocktail crisps and British sausages, and to standardise the size of
condoms because Italians had smaller penises. Week a er week, he produced juicy bs which had
news editors on other papers demanding similar stu from their own reporters in Brussels.
Conrad Black, then the owner of the Telegraph and himself on the receiving end of several Johnson
lies, was delighted. When Johnson was about to become prime minister in the summer of 2019,
Black saluted his old employee, who ‘was such an e ective correspondent for us in Brussels that
he greatly in uenced British opinion on this country’s relations with Europe’.

When recalling these peccadilloes, there is a risk of a faint smile crossing one’s face; his japes are
comparable in neutralising e ect to the so ening charm of Tony Blair. How can such a matey,
blokey person, ‘someone you could have a pint with’, possess darker, colder qualities, be awed
not merely by an indi erence to the truth, but an indi erence to the wellbeing of other people,
including his wives, lovers and closest colleagues? Ruthless and truthless: these twins were also
intrinsic to the rise of New Labour, and to its dominance of British politics for a decade. Oborne
charted this in his rst two books. Alastair Campbell, the combative political correspondent of the
Mirror, who had a reputation for pouring buckets of vitriol rather than for news-gathering, let
alone political analysis, was a er the 1997 election not only given the grandiose title of director of
communication and strategy but the unprecedented power to issue instructions to civil servants –
a move vainly resisted by Robin Butler, the cabinet secretary, whose own power was further
restricted by Jonathan Powell being given similar powers as Blair’s chief of sta . Johnson would
give the same powers to Dominic Cummings. Within two years of taking power, New Labour had
sacked or moved on 17 of the 19 information chiefs in Whitehall. Cummings’s treatment of press
o cers and Downing Street sta ers was if anything more brutal. Blair only dabbled in taking over
the civil service. Johnson has got rid of six permanent secretaries and refused to allow Sajid Javid
to remain as chancellor unless he accepted personal sta nominated by Number Ten. This is not
to mention the 21 Conservative MPs, including two former chancellors, who were purged by
Johnson. No supposedly dictatorial previous prime minister, not Lloyd George, not Churchill,
certainly not Thatcher, came anywhere close to this Stalinist ruthlessness.

As we are now seeing, any centralisation of power tends also to centralise corruption. The
lobbyists gather like ies or vultures round Number Ten, because no other department is really
worth nobbling. Lobbyists, of course, are always with us. More than thirty years ago, I was taken
out to lunch at a restaurant just o Dolphin Square by a sparky junior minster at the Ministry of
Defence. He pointed out to me, at table a er table, one of his senior civil servants being lunched
by a major defence contractor. But in a pluralised system, abuses are easier to identify and root out
– over the years several MoD civil servants have been jailed. I doubt if any of Johnson’s frequent
phoners will su er the same fate. The centralisation is one of the principal things that attracts
freebooting tycoons like Sir James Dyson and Sir Jim Ratcli e, along with the press barons, to the
Brexit cause. As Rupert Murdoch, always more candid than his fellows, once remarked, the
trouble with the EU was that you never knew who to call.

All of Oborne’s books have been published in the mid-career of their subjects. We might wish for a
fuller retrospect in each case, but at least it allows the reader to judge the accuracy of Oborne’s
insight and foresight. The last thing he can be accused of is hindsight. He catches the bird on the
wing. In the rst book of this undeclared series, published in 1999, we leave Alastair Campbell as
cock of the walk, bullying civil servants and cabinet ministers and o en Blair himself, chairing
meetings of intelligence chiefs, and o en referred to as the deputy prime minister. And yet ...
Here is the way Oborne ends his book on Campbell:

From his early days Campbell was a vivid and colourful gure, a dangerous man. Before he met
Fiona Millar he was a womaniser. Before and a erwards he was a drinker and a pub brawler. In
his late twenties, for reasons that are hard to understand, he su ered a breakdown. To his
enormous credit, and thanks to the love and loyalty of those around him, he survived and
emerged a stronger and better man. But there was a cost. He would seem to have survived only by
the suppression of large tracts of his own personality ... the demons are lurking there
somewhere. They will never go away ... People who see a great deal of him say that he is a man
who sometimes gives the appearance of being frightened of himself, what he might do or what
he might become.

In other words, he was an accident waiting to happen. The Rise of Political Lying came out six years
later, in 2005, in time to show the yawning gap between Blair’s claim to the House of Commons
on 24 September 2002 that the intelligence on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction was
‘extensive, detailed and authoritative’ and the Joint Intelligence Committee’s assessment that the
available evidence was ‘sporadic and patchy’ and ‘remains limited’. By that time, Oborne also had
access to the memo of 14 March 2002 by Sir David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser,
reporting to his boss on his conversations with Condoleezza Rice: ‘I said that you would not
budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public
opinion that was very di erent than anything in the States.’ But it wasn’t until May 2005, a month
a er Oborne’s new book came out, that a report dated 23 July 2002 surfaced in the Sunday Times
detailing the conversations that the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, had with his counterparts
in Washington. It contained the killer quote: ‘The intelligence and facts were being xed around
the policy.’ This con rmed, if con rmation were still needed, that Blair’s lie to the Commons was
not a careless overstatement of the facts but a deliberate untruth. And on top of that, an untruth
which utterly failed to foresee its own consequences.

Campbell and Blair and others involved in the WMD lie have never apologised for it, stoutly
asserting that they did what they believed was right. Which reminds me of the many respects in
which it resembles the Suez lie. Selwyn Lloyd, foreign secretary at the time, continued to assert
that ‘I have no sense of guilt about the events of 1956. Whatever was done then, was done in what
was genuinely believed to be the national interest.’ ‘I have always thought collusion [with France
and Israel, which he denied in the Commons] a red herring – I did not mislead the House of
Commons – I certainly did not tell them the whole story.’ The unanswered question, according to
Lloyd, was ‘supposing we had reoccupied Egypt, what would we have done with it?’ This of course
was the question that bedevilled the Allies when they did reoccupy Iraq. In an essay on Eden’s
premiership the historian Robert Blake wrote that ‘no one of sense will regard such falsehoods in
a particularly serious light. The motive was the honourable one of avoiding further trouble in the
Middle East.’ But how would a successful invasion have assisted that project? The big lie o en
seems to be a means of avoiding serious calculation about the future, designed not only to deceive
the public but to lull the liar into a false belief that the problem has been solved.

Oborne claims that ‘had Tony Blair been open with the British people about the fact that his
objective was regime change, he might well have taken voters with him.’ But Blair was right in
thinking that neither the Labour Party nor the British public would have tolerated such a agrant
breach of international law. The lie was essential. No lie, no British participation in the invasion.
Oborne quotes Churchill’s reply in 1940 to a young rating on a battleship who asked him whether
everything he told them was true: ‘Young man, I have told many lies for my country, and will tell
many more.’ In wartime, and in sterling crises too, Oborne accepts that the truth is not only the
rst casualty but a legitimate one. But deceiving the enemy about the location of the D-Day
landings, or speculators about a forthcoming devaluation, is one thing, deceiving the Commons
and the country quite another. Oborne insists again and again that the deliberate lie is not simply
a sort of venial slipperiness but a serious betrayal of the democratic contract between the rulers
and the ruled.

Lies are not forgotten. It was the sense of having been duped over Iraq that led MPs to refuse to
support Cameron over Syria ten years later. To this day, the Iraqis have not forgotten Churchill’s
insistence on ordering not-yet-Bomber Harris to machine-gun defenceless women and children
from the air in 1921, an episode Churchill then hushed up for fear of public outrage. Nor have the
Iranians forgotten the coup fomented by the CIA and MI6 – and approved at a distance by
Churchill – which toppled Mossadeq in 1953 and installed the shah, with consequences that are
with us still. In retirement, Churchill was sort of in favour of the Suez invasion, though he thought
the Allies should not have given up so easily – rather reminiscent of Thatcher’s private view a er
the rst Gulf War that ‘we should have gone on to Baghdad’ in de ance of the UN mandate. It
would be hard to deny that deceit and manipulation have been the hallmark of Western policy in
the Middle East ever since the Sykes-Picot Treaty, that shameful secret carve-up, and even harder
to argue that it has all been a glorious success. The term ‘blowback’ was rst used by the CIA in its
internal history of the 1953 Iranian coup. It has had plenty of outings since.

The temptation to resort to lying is all the more irresistible when power is concentrated in
Number Ten, where the PM is surrounded by toadies he appointed, and alternative sources of
criticism are silenced or sidelined: for example, the sceptical advice on WMD pro ered by Dr
Brian Jones, head of the nuclear, biological, chemical, technical intelligence branch of the
Defence Intelligence Sta , and totally ignored.
D
the Brexit negotiations, Johnson didn’t have a problem with telling outright lies. Starting
in Parliament on 22 October 2019, he repeatedly stated that ‘there will be no checks
between Great Britain and Northern Ireland,’ although his own Brexit secretary and the
Treasury brie ng on the Northern Ireland Protocol said precisely the opposite, and so did the
government’s own impact assessment. A purge of his advisers was required if he was to maintain
his favourite line that it was possible to have our cake and eat it, to enjoy a free trade agreement
with the EU with none of the disadvantages of being a third country. One a er another, Sir Oliver
Robbins, Sir Ivan Rogers and others who persisted in telling truth to power were eased out,
culminating last year in the departure of the cabinet secretary, Sir Mark Sedwill, leaving Michael
Gove and the acerbic David Frost, Johnson’s chief Brexit negotiator, in charge.

This at least had the e ect of persuading the Brexit ultras that any deal this residual cabal came up
with must be kosher. The story of the negotiations that led to the trade deal on Christmas Eve is
really rather peculiar and strangely neglected. As the bargaining reached its frenzied climax,
leading Brexiters such as Martin Howe QC, a member of the Eurosceptic Tory MP Bill Cash’s self-
styled Star Chamber, said that Johnson should reject the EU’s ‘one-sided and damaging trade
agreement’: ‘Once the EU has pocketed its huge concessions on goods, with the UK getting
almost nothing in return,’ he argued, ‘it becomes impossible to negotiate something better later.’
Robert Tombs, the leading academic Brexiter, agreed: ‘We must not make unreasonable
concessions over sh. Even more importantly we must not sign up to one-sided legal obligations –
the so-called “level playing eld” – keeping us tied inde nitely into the EU system.’

Yet when Christmas Eve arrived, what happened? A er a hasty examination of the terms, the Star
Chamber could nd no serious aw in them. Tombs himself exulted that ‘the EU knew what it
stood to lose and backed down’. But what do the 1246 pages of the Trade and Co-operation
Agreement actually say? At the outset, the European Commission emphasises that ‘the agreement
goes beyond traditional free trade agreements and provides a solid basis for preserving our
longstanding friendship and co-operation.’ In particular:

Both parties have committed to ensuring a robust level playing eld by maintaining high levels of
protection in areas such as environmental protection, the ght against climate change and
carbon pricing, social and labour rights, tax transparency and State aid, with e ective domestic
enforcement, a binding dispute settlement mechanism and the possibility for both parties to
take remedial action.

And all that’s before we get on to a sheries agreement which preserves a huge share of the catch
for Continental shermen, and that pesky border in the Irish Sea. If I were Michel Barnier or
Ursula von der Leyen, I would be quietly pleased with my handiwork.

How then do the wizards of the Star Chamber reconcile themselves to this settlement, which
appears to contain most of the things they hate? They argue that the TCA enshrines the legal
sovereignty of the UK and that a ‘robust’ – that word is always a sign of bluster – UK government
can weasel out of anything it nds inconvenient. If the EU protests, then under the TCA we can
give twelve months’ notice to quit, or wait to renegotiate the whole thing in ve years’ time. In
other words, the main reason for signing up to the agreement is the ease with which we can get
out of it. Not exactly a good start to what Gove is now calling a new ‘special relationship between
sovereign equals’. The whole performance seems to be based on mistrust or actual deceit, with a
large measure of self-deception thrown in. We can live with it only if we maintain a state of denial,
which seems to come quite easy to the right-wing press, where you have had to look very hard
these last three months to nd any reports of lost trade, infuriating hold-ups or disillusioned
exporters who have simply given up on Europe. The burning vehicles on the streets of Belfast early
in April were harder to overlook.

Now that trade in goods with the EU is recovering at a decent rate, the denial seems to be taking a
di erent form. Only by making a success of the TCA in all its aspects (many of them still under
negotiation), can we continue to enjoy relatively free trade with the Continent. In other words, we
are not nearly as far out of the EU as we like to boast (or lament).

The idea of the ‘noble lie’ has an ancient parentage. Karl Popper points out in The Open Society that
it won’t do to pretend that Plato was merely talking about ‘a bold invention’ – to quote Francis
Cornford’s formulation – or a ‘necessary myth’, as it is also sometimes translated. The word Plato
uses is pseude, ‘lie’, not muthos, ‘myth’. The Greeks in general weren’t so on lying. On the contrary,
Liddell and Scott cite about two hundred compounds of pseude to t every kind of deplorable
falsehood. I am disappointed only not to nd my own coinage of pseudagora, or ‘fake market place’,
to describe the new press centre at Number Ten. Plato’s praise of the high- own lie is a
deliberately shocking ight of fancy, designed to emphasise the arti cial, fragile nature of a good
society, and the need for its guardians to deceive the common people, and as many as possible of
the upper echelons as well, in order to keep the show on the road.

As Oborne points out, Machiavelli too urges that the prudent prince must be ‘a great feigner and
dissembler’ if he is to survive. He must break promises when he needs to, because other men are
equally dishonest. The benign reading of Machiavelli as the rst modern political scientist rather
glosses over this, as it does the awkward fact that the statesmen Machiavelli most admires, such as
Julius Caesar and Cesare Borgia, came to sticky ends largely because people had come to hate
them. There is a gusto about Machiavelli’s descriptions of notorious acts of treachery and brutality
which goes far beyond the value-free analysis which is now so o en attributed to him. As
commander of the Florentine troops in Pisa, his treatment of the local inhabitants would have
disquali ed him from membership of most senior common rooms.

Mendacity in its various forms retains a strange fascination for intellectuals. I was struck in
reading Political Advice, the excellently quirky collection of essays edited by Colin Kidd and
Jacqueline Rose, how o en deceit or dissembling comes up. You could be forgiven for thinking
that a successful adviser is one who tells half-truth to power. Joanne Paul, for example, describes
the debate in More’s Utopia about the obliquus ductus, the indirect approach – that is, the tactful
wiles the adviser uses to hang on to his job or his head. In More’s History of King Richard the Third,
the preacher Dr Ralph Shaa, discussing Richard’s ‘ghostly purpose’ to prove that the sons of
Edward IV were bastards, declares that ‘ye matter should be touched a slope cra ily.’ Esther
Eidenow describes the way Pericles and other Greek leaders, though themselves lacking in
superstition, used divination and the local oracle in order to build consensus and authority
around their decisions.

For Nietzsche, lying isn’t a desperate expedient, but one of the ways the Great Man demonstrates
his indi erence to conventional morality, and hence his superiority. Mendacity is a sign of
greatness: ‘He must be forced to ght his way up with ingenuity and disingenuousness; his will to
live must swell into an unconditional will to power and to supremacy.’ Nietzsche repeatedly
emphasises the need for total unscrupulousness. ‘The great man senses that he has power over a
people and that his concurrence with a people or a millennium is only temporary; he has an
enlarged sense of himself ... This forces him to adopt new means of communication; all great
men are ingenious in devising such means.’

This sense that telling the truth is for little people pops up among the American neocons, as it did
in Leo Strauss’s belief, quoted by Oborne, ‘that not all truths are always harmless’: the
popularisation of some truths ‘might import unease, turmoil and the release of popular passions
hitherto held in check by tradition and religion’. There were, according to Irving Kristol, ‘di erent
kinds of truth for di erent kinds of people’; some were suitable only for highly educated adults.
This was only to repeat the view of Senator Buzz Windrip, the anti-hero of Sinclair Lewis’s novel It
Can’t Happen Here (1935), that ‘it is not fair to ordinary folks – it just confuses them – to make them
try to swallow all the true facts that would be suitable to a higher class of people.’

How Trump Thinks was published in May 2017, a er his inauguration. It sets out to show how the
Donald carefully invented himself (including his own nickname), drawing inspiration from the
populism of Andrew Jackson, whose inauguration in 1829 brought ten thousand poor folks to
Washington, where their riotous drinking terri ed the citizenry; from William Randolph Hearst,
where he found the slogan ‘America First’ (Citizen Kane is his favourite lm); from Lewis’s novel,
which uses the phrase ‘the forgotten Americans’; from Richard Nixon’s ‘silent majority’. The
35,000 tweets that Trump put out between signing up in 2009 and his apogee were designed rst
and last to propel him to greatness, their intense direct bombardment leaving far behind
Roosevelt’s reside chats and Reagan’s weekly radio broadcast – ‘I think that maybe I wouldn’t be
here if it wasn’t for Twitter,’ he admitted. (Now he has been permanently banned from his beloved
medium.) The lies just kept on coming, which is what made them so hard to squash. To update
the old adage, the lie is halfway round the world while the truth is still rebooting.

O
initially rather approved of Trump’s low-interference foreign policy, just as he
had admired Blair’s reforming zeal and the panache of Boris Johnson’s journalism,
which he had seen rst-hand when he worked for Johnson at the Spectator. His readiness
to be enchanted gives a bitter edge to his subsequent disenchantment. He quotes with deadly
e ect the tweets that Trump issued between 11.29 and 11.39 p.m. on 6 November 2012, a er
Obama’s re-election: ‘We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this
travesty. Our nation is totally divided!’; ‘Let’s ght like hell and stop this great and disgusting
injustice! The world is laughing at us’; ‘More votes equals a loss ... revolution!’; ‘He lost the
popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!’ These last
two tweets were later deleted. But the damage was done. Eight years before he provoked the
catastrophic march on the Capitol, he was promoting the same lies and the same system-
smashing – what Johnson has made light of as ‘all the to-ings and fro-ings and all the kerfu e’.
The Trump-led campaign to overturn the Democrats’ majority continues today with an even more
intense ferocity. Republicans in 43 states have introduced 250 bills to sti en requirements for
voter ID, restrict voting hours and postal voting and limit the number of drop-o boxes, despite
the absence of any signi cant evidence of voter fraud last November.

In the UK, Johnson is pressing ahead, on equally scanty evidence, with his plans to make people
show ID at polling stations, and with the introduction of rst-past-the-post voting for mayors and
police commissioners. He also has plans to limit the right of judicial review. It is claimed this is to
protect judges from being drawn into politics, but in reality it’s to protect politicians from being
drawn into the courts. Unspeci ed menaces against the BBC and the Electoral Commission are
also part of the right’s long march through the institutions, accompanied by background noise
against the anti-patriotic, woke Fi h Column, just to keep the paranoia bubbling nicely. There is
of course no evidence to justify any of this: voter fraud is almost invisible, cases of judicial review
are dropping. It’s all patently fraudulent, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

Discussing the lies told by recent governments that have been uncovered and caused humiliation
to the liars, we must not succumb to the comforting temptation to believe that the truth will
always out. On the contrary, history o ers plenty of examples of big lies that had a very long shelf
life. For two millennia, Caesar’s De Bello Gallico has been taught by schoolmasters as a model of
military history – limpid, economical and true. Only in the later half of the 20th century did it
dawn on scholars that Julius Caesar might have made a lot of it up, that he was ‘an artful reporter’,
to quote from the title of a recent academic symposium on Caesar’s deployment of his war
commentaries as political instruments. Even at the time, Gaius Asinius Pollio, who served
alongside Caesar and crossed the Rubicon with him, said his account had been put together with
little regard for the truth. Some of the gures for the casualties and the size of the opposing
armies are grotesquely improbable. At one point, the Nervii are described as having been wiped
out, but then they reappear, only to be wiped out again.

Queen Elizabeth managed to suppress the humiliating failure of Drake’s Counter-Armada to

Coruña and Lisbon in 1589 so brilliantly that for three centuries no Englishman was aware of it –
though English losses were far worse than Spanish losses had been the year before. Then there’s
Oliver Cromwell’s vain attempt to censor the ghastly fate of his expedition to capture Hispaniola,
by closing the newspapers and keeping the ships bearing the bad news in quarantine and then
pretending that the consolation prize of Jamaica was the real goal all along. Or Clive’s glorious and
decisive victory at Plassey, largely secured by bribing the Indian generals to stop ghting.

Habitual lying may be accepted as cosmetic, merely the wrapping on the pack. That is certainly
Boris Johnson’s calculation, and so far he is doing quite nicely. The braggadocio of Napoleon’s
bulletins gave currency to the expression ‘to lie like a bulletin’, but had no serious e ect on his
reputation until a er the retreat from Moscow – and even then, I imagine, caused less resentment
than his endless demands for cannon fodder via the levée en masse. Besides, millions of Frenchmen
had too great an emotional investment in the destiny of the Grande Armée to abandon the cause.
In a tiny way, the Brexit cause sings the same siren song. Even if its costs become painfully
apparent over the coming months and years, they may continue to pale beside the vision of
absolute sovereignty.

Are there any answers? First of all, reliable facts and gures, and honest assessments of the
national nances. As Oborne points out, nothing has done more in recent years to preserve
decency in public debate than the establishment of three particular bodies: the O ce for National
Statistics, the rather older Institute for Fiscal Studies and the O ce for Budget Responsibility.
Similarly, parliamentary select committees date back to Tudor times, but it is only since 1980 that
their coverage has been made systematic and permanent, and they have been more or less
properly sta ed. Broadsheet newspapers have only to look to their own City pages to see how
sustained engagement and criticism can be maintained and their wretched coverage of politics
improved. TV news programmes have become stale and trivial, o en falling below the standards
of the tabloids. Unfortunately, the facts do not speak for themselves. Like the alternative facts,
they too need to be woven into – the word cannot be avoided – a narrative.