Boris, Trump and tripping the lie fantastic

There was a time when voters valued honesty in politicians. Not that they expected ever to find any. There’s an old joke about a man lost in a wood and stumbling into a clearing, in which he sees a blind old woman, a pink elephant and an honest politician. So who does he ask to show him the way?

The answer is, of course, the blind old woman, as the other two are just figments of the imagination.

Boris and the great lie

But even if we didn’t expect honesty from them, we kept up a vaguely optimistic pursuit of the honest politician, or maintained the notion as some kind of ideal towards which we might aspire.

Not any more, it appears. In Donald Trump, we have a US president who, if we really push our generosity, may feel is not an actual liar, in the sense that he may not always be deliberately stating as a truth something he knows not to be true. It may rather be that he suffers from a pathological inability to tell the truth from anything he happens to want to believe. Or, worse still, happens to want his voters to believe.

He may simply be lying, but it may actually be that he thinks that his wanting to believe something is true, makes it true.

North Korea hasn’t actually disarmed at all? So what? The disarmament deal that Trump proclaimed after his first meeting with Kim Jong Il is the best disarmament deal there ever was.

All that nonsense about Trump putting pressure on Ukraine to dig up dirt on his opponent? All made up. The fact that a transcript of the call exists, and it confirms the allegation, is neither here nor there. It never happened.

Isn’t a great achievement that China is paying for the tariffs Trump has put on its exports to the US? The miserable line about tariffs being paid by the population of the importing country, not the exporting one, is just an inconvenient factoid. An unattractive notion, and therefore untrue.

But in Britain too we have our version of Trump. Like Trump in the US, Boris holds the highest elective office in Britain. Unlike Trump, I think he has sufficient knowledge and intellectual horsepower to know when a statement is actually false. So when he utters a falsehood, he is undoubtedly lying.

And he seems to lie as naturally, as casually, as automatically as he breathes.

Perhaps the most embarrassing instance came when he visited Whipps Cross hospital in North London. When the father of a child who had been admitted to the appallingly understaffed and overstretched emergency department accused him of only being there for a photo opportunity, Boris replied that there were no press present. That was despite the fact that, as the father pointed out, the press were clearly visible just a few steps away. 

Omar Salem points out the photographers at Whipps Cross
whose presence Boris had just denied

The father, Omar Salem, is a Labour activist. But that doesn’t alter the fact that he’s a father, his child was seriously ill, and the staff were hopelessly overstretched. It seems that Boris’s first instinct is to lie, even when it’s obvious that he’s going to be caught out almost immediately.

There were so many other instances. Another was the decision of the Daily Telegraph to apologise for an article Boris published in the paper, forecasting that a post-Brexit Britain would overtake Germany as an economy within a few decades. It seems his argument was based on an analysis he’d ready which simply didn’t bear it out.

Perhaps the most notorious deceit ever was the one Boris associated himself with during the Brexit referendum campaign, that leaving the EU would free £350 million a week to invest in the NHS (the National Health Service). It was particularly barefaced, because it deliberately overstated the contributions the UK made to the EU, ignored the subsidies it received back from it, and left out of account the additional costs associated with Brexit and the revenue loss it was likely to entail.

A far wilier campaigner than Theresa May, his immediate predecessor, far being put off by his terrible track record in this field, Boris has boldly taken the battle to his Labour opponents, precisely on the grounds of the NHS. That takes courage for a Conservative, because this is traditionally Labour’s strong ground. But Boris is promising to spend more on the health service, to employ more clinicians, even to build more hospitals.

In other words, Boris is promising to address the very scandals that the distraught father tackled him over at Whipps Cross.

And yet Conservative Central Office has instructed candidates to sign no pledges on the NHS (or indeed on climate policy). So Boris is making the promises but preparing the ground for reneging on them. As he did over Brexit, when he promised to deliver it by 31 October, “do or die” – he didn’t do, but he didn’t die either.

What’s most surprising about this trail of blatant lies and broken promises is, in an election as wide open as any I’ve seen, with four major parties contesting nationally, as well as the SNP massively powerful in Scotland, Boris continues to lead the polls. At nearly 40%, his standing is weak, but way ahead of anyone else’s.

Above all, what that 40% means is that, for two voters out of five, honesty in a politician is simply not an important consideration. They see it as perfectly legitimate to vote for him anyway.

Sadly, 40% is enough to win in a wide-open field.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but in Britain, you only need to fool 40% on election day to get to do what you want for the next five years.