Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

In response to those who say, “Oh, come off it, it was just a bit of cake”. Or, “what did you want - for the dogs to be abandoned to the Taliban?” Or “Who cares who paid for the wallpaper?” the complainants are now insisting “We just want to be told the truth. We just want transparency. We don’t want to be lied to.” A shame then that they don’t hold themselves to the same standards when concocting a simple lie about the Foreign Secretary using an expensive ‘private jet’ when she in fact used an official government aircraft manned by the Royal Air Force.

Did you ever tell your kids about Father Christmas, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy? Well there you go. But, you will protest, at that age they need to be protected from the harsh realities of the big, bad world, and a bit of pretend magic does no harm, surely? Would you be surprised if the salesmen of wine companies, while forbidding pilfering, see no harm in helping themselves to their product while wooing new business? Do you really believe that stationery manufacturers don’t covet the odd paperclip?

In many parts of the world – including all those holier-than-thou, Labour-run councils – a backhander, a bung, a little sweetener is an open secret. The wheels of commerce are greased by lies, insider information, nepotism and graft. And nobody bats an eyelid. Why should we hold governments up to a level of scrutiny we rarely manage for ourselves? And what, seriously, is wrong with a leader possessing a few human foibles? Let he who is without sin and all that…

Dare you even imagine a world run by perfect humans? My god, what A sanctimonious, joyless, beige place that would be. We love our pantomime villains, our cads, our rogues; so what is it about petty politics that turns mediocre public figures into arbiters of the greatest virtues? Do they imagine the public applaud their daring quest to uncover the truth, or is it more likely, to paraphrase Colonel Jessop said in A Few Good Men, that they can’t handle the truth?

The latest anti-Johnson hashtag doing the rounds is #ALiarNotALeader and it is predictably being promoted by the same old toothless circus lions who have, no doubt, never in their lives lied to gain any sort of advantage. Hypocrisy, thy name is Davey, Rayner, Starmer, Lucas, Blackford, and so on and so on and so on. The emotional investment alone must qualify them for therapy.

I really hold no candle for Boris Johnson (I feel the need to keep saying this) but don’t you just get bored when the same tired old hacks trot out the same tired old lies of their own? They told the electorate a million times before the election that Johnson is a liar. The electorate voted for him in their millions (and yes, the UK general election IS now a presidential style affair) knowing exactly what they would get.

So what that the Met asked Sue Gray to delay publication? ‘They’ wanted the police involved, but now that they are they cry foul. Establishment fix! Conveniently forgetting, of course, that in this case ‘the establishment’ is their own. Cressida Dick, I’m sure, would be delighted to scupper Johnson. And her boss politico, Sadiq Khan, must be salivating at the chance. I neither know nor care how the police will interpret events, but it isn’t Big Dog who is riding roughshod over democracy here.

Liar, liar!

So, conference season is over and what have we learned? I was listening to a bank spokesman on Radio 4 yesterday, trying to wriggle out of answering plain, simple, direct questions about the miss-selling of packaged bank accounts – you know, the ones that claim to offer all sorts of essential benefits (mostly unnecessary and sub-standard insurance you’ll never need or never be able to claim on) for a monthly fee that soon adds up to a small bloody fortune. The term ‘package’ refers not to the wonderful bundle of benefits but to the packaging up of a load of useless tosh as beneficial and in some cases signing you up as part of an impenetrable package of sales flannel.

We used to call such sharp practice fraud, involving only a casual relationship with truth and a very deliberate intent to deceive; lying, in other words. We used to be taught that lying is ‘a bad thing’ and reinforced the lesson by catching out and shaming the liar from an early age. Of course, a child’s lies are easy to spot, being all too naive:

“I never!” (On being caught red-handed.)

“A big boy did it and ran away!” (Always worth a try.)

And the classic, for when you haven’t done what you promised to do and no immediate fabrication springs to mind: “I dunno…” accompanied by an endearing shuffle of feet and the deployment of sad eyes.

As I reported the other day Lord Ashcroft said “In politics perception IS reality.” In other words the truth matters not one jot; what matters is what you can make people believe. And this is being spoon-fed to kids every day; when they sound confident and exuberant more often than not they are aping the noises of the advertainment industry, long a bastion of base dishonesty. Evidence-based assertions are old hat; today the loudest lies get the widest hearing. Thus a ten-year old saying, “It is my life, it is my dream.” Can go on national television and show their delusions in public with nary a hint of ridicule.

But it’s not all bad news; the modern economy needs liars. Back in the days when we made things you needed precision; a quantifiable type of truth. There’s no point in bragging that you need a twenty metre steel joist for your build when you only need ten; you would just look stupid. And to obtain a mortgage you had to actually prove you could pay it back. In the age of real jobs with tangible output the futility of trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole was evident to all, so you only employed on merit.

But now, none of that matters any more. When the worth of a diversity consultant is elevated above that of a doctor and juvenile misbehaviour can be easily diagnosed as a medical condition which then attracts funding. When being a nasty bastard is a cry for help and being bone idle is an occupation as worthy of reward as any engineer. When being parked on benefits is somehow acceptable because we’re all multicultural now and the East Europeans do the cleaning, who needs the truth when lies will get you so much further?

The party conferences are over but their legacies will live on. We are so used to being lied to by politicians that nobody cares whether they can do what they say they will do. All we care about now is which batch of lies we liked the best. We’ll vote for those that offered them while secretly admiring their bare-faced dishonesty and hope that one day we too will be able to lie our way to success.