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Quietly, the culture of lying has taken root in politics
The right to vote is supposed in our culture to be one of the greatest goods on earth. George Bush and Tony Blair were prepared to bomb, kill and maim thousands of Iraqis to bring them this precious right. Yet in Blair’s own country, after eight years of his unconventional rule, his fellow citizens now look on their right to vote not just with apathy but with unprecedented cynicism.
I cannot remember such weary, angry indifference to a general election in my life. If the turnout proves to be as low on May 5 as psephologists predict, Blair will, if he is in the least capable of examining his own conscience, have to ask himself why.
A major part of the answer is that new Labour has imposed upon political life a culture of lying. Of course, politicians have always lied at times and no doubt always will. What is different is that under new Labour, lying has become institutionalised.
Deliberate lies, deceptions, evasions, omissions, confusions and the thousand other tricks of bamboozlement are characteristic of new Labour and of Blair himself. This has been peculiarly demoralising in a man who came to power claiming “to uphold the highest standards in public life”, undertaking to be “purer than pure”, promising as late as 2002 to sack any minister who lied, preening himself on his personal integrity. That is why public apathy is now spiked with a new cynicism.
My own electoral torpor was interrupted, briefly and thrillingly, by Jeremy Paxman’s interview with Blair last week; apathy gave way for a moment to high television drama. It was an encounter for which Blair must have been extremely carefully briefed and it had all the shameful pleasure of a bullfight.
The glossy prime ministerial bull could not (or would not) defend himself from the feints and surprises of the ageing bespangled torero that is Paxman. About 20 times Paxman attacked him with the same barbed question — how many illegal immigrants are there still in this country? — and every time Blair tried to skip away from the blow, becoming ever more wounded and confused.
He could not or would not say. “So you have no idea,” repeated Paxo yet one more time, with a manly twitch of his matador’s eyebrow as the prime minister sunk to his defeated knees. I don’t usually enjoy spectator sports, but this was poetry.
It was also constructive lying of the most determined, shameless kind — a kind we now particularly associate with new Labour. It is quite inconceivable that Blair should have no idea whatsoever of the number of illegal immigrants in this country. His people would have known that Paxman would bring this up; immigration is a central question in this election.
Admittedly, any figure must be an estimate. As Blair said, it is difficult to make such a reckoning, for various good and bad reasons. However, it is not impossible. His own government commissioned just such an estimate more than a year ago from Professor John Salt at University College London. He arrived, some time ago, at a figure of 450,000-500,000, excluding dependants.
I find it impossible to imagine that Blair did not know of this report. He is alleged to have called for it himself. Besides, there are other well-informed estimates. So what was he doing, refusing again and again to answer Paxman and making himself look ridiculous in the process? Incidentally, a separate lie emerged from that interview. People who remember with disillusion the behaviour of the government at the time of the death of Dr David Kelly, during the “sexed up” intelligence scandal, may also remember that on July 22, 2003, Blair twice denied that he had authorised the naming of Kelly.
Last Wednesday, however, he said “it was a terrible, terrible thing to have happened. I don’t believe we had any option, however, but to disclose his name, because I think had we failed to do so, that would have been seen as attempting to conceal something”. Rather like attempting to conceal the estimated number of illegal immigrants, in fact.
The question is why. Why did Blair prevaricate to the point of lying? Why was he not ashamed or even politically wary of doing so? Does he imagine — rightly, probably — that we’ll soon forget? Why are those around him equally or even more shameless? Some extremely interesting answers are offered by a brave and coruscating book published, with excellent timing, last week. It is The Rise of Political Lying by Peter Oborne, political editor of The Spectator. Those who assume he is politically biased ought to know that he writes of Conservative lies too, particularly during the Major era. And anyone seriously interested in the political culture of our time ought to read this book, or at least watch Oborne’s television programme tomorrow.
The presence, Oborne writes, “of a group of shameless, habitual liars at the centre of power is an amazing state of affairs, without precedent in modern British history”. It is a formidable charge, but one that he supports with a mass of evidence, much of which we all half-knew but have half-forgotten. It’s a deeply depressing story.
Oborne’s theory is that while Conservatives have lied for many of the conventional reasons, including personal self-interest, new Labour’s attitude to mendaciousness is different. After decades in the wilderness, with (as they saw it) systematic opposition from the media, those closest to the new Labour movement under Blair early on took the view that it was quite legitimate to deceive to obtain power.
This mentality took hold, it succeeded and, once new Labour was in power, it was too deeply rooted to be abandoned, as it could and should have been. Power-hungry paranoia survived even eight years of a massive and liberating majority in parliament. It’s a culture of institutionalised lying, not for personal profit (or not usually) but in the name of the new Labour project.
That is why, as Oborne points out, even arch deceivers such as Alastair Campbell become so enraged when their probity is questioned. They feel morally pure. I now understand why Campbell was so deeply, aggressively angry during his famous interview with Jon Snow during the Andrew Gilligan affair. It seemed clear that he was morally in the wrong. But new Labour doesn’t do morally wrong. New Labour is inherently morally right, regardless. Regardless of the truth.
The institutionalisation of political lying is not ascribable only to the ambitions of new Labour and Oborne doesn’t suggest that it is. There are other, wider reasons — the trivialising pressures of advertising and media profits are at odds with the complexities of truth-telling. So are the fashionable pressures of postmodern relativism and its “narratives”.
These pressures weigh on all parties equally. But in the end, the idea of telling the truth remains simple and appealing. It might, who knows, one day prove to be a vote-winner. And then elections might become interesting again.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, April 24, 2005
