The Lies of the Land

An Honest History of Political Deceit

Adam Macqueen

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786492500
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría política

Trust in our politicians is at an all-time low. We're in a "post-truth" era, where feelings trump facts, and where brazen rhetoric beats honesty. But do politicians lie more than they used to? And do we even want them to tell the truth? In a history full of wit and political acumen, Private Eye journalist Adam Macqueen dissects the gripping stories of the biggest political lies of the last half century, from the Profumo affair to Blair's WMDs to Boris Johnson's £350 million for the NHS. Covering lesser known whoppers, infamous lies from foreign shores ("I did not have sexual relations with that woman"), and some of the resolute untruths from Donald Trump's explosive presidential campaign, this is the quintessential guide to dishonesty from our leaders - and the often pernicious relationship between parliament and the media. But this book is also so much more. It explains how in the space of a lifetime we have gone from the implicit assumption that our rulers have our best interests at heart, to assuming the worst even when - in the majority of cases - politicians are actually doing their best.

1

OUT OF DEFERENCE

There is a famous political interview from the General Election of 1951 in which the BBC’s Leslie Mitchell promises to ‘cross-question’ senior Conservative Sir Anthony Eden. ‘I would like to feel that I am asking, so far as possible, those questions which you yourselves would like to ask in my place,’ he told viewers. Then he goes in with a real zinger: ‘Well now, Mr Eden, with your very considerable experience of foreign affairs, it’s quite obvious that I should start by asking you something about the international situation today, or perhaps you would prefer to talk about home. Which is it to be?’¹

Paxman he was not. It would be a further four years before Robin Day on the new ITV jump-started the sort of adversarial political interview to which we have become accustomed. Day-to-day political reporting consisted mostly of producing page after page of transcripts of parliamentary speeches, taken down at shorthand speed and reproduced verbatim, thus allowing MPs – and their unelected counterparts in the hereditary House of Lords – to effectively write their own accounts of their activities.

None of this seemed remarkable at the time. Hierarchies, and the deference that was due to them, were embedded and enforced in every institution: the arcane pecking order of the public schools was echoed in the state sector by the eleven-plus division, which defined the course of a pupil’s life. And whether they then found themselves on a factory floor or in a professional body, they were locked into a rigid system of willing conformity. National service, which lingered as a hangover of the war right up until 1960, trained every man to unquestioningly accept the authority of his elders and betters, while women were expected to know their place, which, once married, was in the home.

Through everything ran the vast system of self-regulation that is class in Britain. As if stamping down on the brief socialist aberration of Attlee’s government, when Winston Churchill was re-elected in 1951, he appointed two marquesses, four earls, four viscounts and three barons as ministers. The commoners in the cabinet seemed to work on the hereditary principle too. Anthony Eden married Churchill’s niece Clarissa in 1952 before following her uncle into Number 10, and Duncan Sandys, another of his cabinet colleagues, married Churchill’s daughter Diana.

In such an atmosphere, is it any wonder that honesty and openness to one’s social inferiors was not a priority for politicians? But voters did demand that their rulers be accountable for their actions. And that was a lesson Britain’s political elite were about to learn the hard way.

* * * * *

‘For a long time the Prime Minister has had no respite from his arduous duties and is in need of a complete rest. We have therefore advised him to abandon his journey to Bermuda and to take at least a month’s rest.’

Lord Moran and Sir Russell Brain,
doctors to Sir Winston Churchill, press bulletin, 27 June 1953

The prime minister was on fine form that night. He had been knocking back the booze in his customary manner, and when he rose to say a few words in honour of his Italian counterpart, Alcide De Gasperi, the guests in Downing Street agreed it was a classic of its kind. ‘He made a speech in his best and most sparkling manner, mainly about the Roman Conquest of Britain,’ noted his principal private secretary Jock Colville, who not so long before had been worrying that the increasing amount of speechwriting he had been asked to do was ‘a sign of advancing senility’ in his seventy-eight-year-old boss.² The mood in the room was boisterous and joyful as the meal concluded and Churchill stood up again to urge his guests through from Number 10’s dining room to the drawing room. But he only made it a few steps before he staggered and sat down heavily on a recently vacated chair. Elizabeth Clark happened to be beside him at that moment, and he clutched her hand. ‘I want a friend,’ he muttered, not quite focusing on her face. ‘They put too much on me. Foreign affairs…’ Then he tailed off into silence.³

She kept it together. Although she couldn’t spot Churchill’s wife, Clementine, in the melee, his daughter Mary was still in her seat at the opposite end of the long table, and Elizabeth dispatched her husband – the eminent art historian Sir Kenneth – to quietly attract her attention. Mary sent her own husband, Christopher Soames, to retrieve his mother-in-law from the crowd next door. Not wanting to cause a diplomatic incident in front of the Italian prime minister, he told her, slightly pointedly, that Winston was ‘very tired’. Perhaps thinking her husband had had too much to drink, Clementine nodded and said, ‘we must get him to bed then.’ She soon realized it was something more serious when Soames whispered: ‘we must get the waiters away first. He can’t walk.’⁴

He couldn’t walk properly the next morning either, when his personal physician, Lord Moran, came to his bedroom for a check-up. Wanting a second opinion – his own – Churchill insisted that the doctor open the door of his wardrobe so he could see his own unsteady efforts in its mirror. ‘What has happened, Charles?’ he asked sadly. ‘Is it a stroke?’⁵

It was. And Moran told him that walking might be the least of his problems: ‘I could not guarantee that he would not get up in the House and use the wrong word; he might rise in his place and no words might come.’ The doctor might also have been tempted to say ‘I told you so’: just one day previously he had warned Churchill that he was ‘unhappy about the strain’ upon him, that ‘it was an impossible existence.’⁶ As well as his own duties, the prime minister had insisted on shouldering those of the foreign secretary too: Anthony Eden was off sick after an operation to remove gallstones went disastrously wrong. Churchill, whose main medical complaint was a deafness that became particularly acute when colleagues mentioned the word ‘retirement’, was rather chuffed about this fact: Eden was twenty-three years his junior and his chosen successor, although his boss was determined to make him wait for his promotion as long as possible.

Thankfully the cabinet were an unobservant lot, because none of them noticed the state the prime minister was in when he insisted on chairing a meeting that morning. Despite the fact he was slurring his speech and unable to move his left arm, the chancellor only noticed that he was ‘very white’ and didn’t speak much.⁷

By lunchtime Churchill had difficulty getting out of his chair. The following morning Moran found him, ‘if anything, more unsteady in his gait’ and ‘becoming more blurred and difficult to follow’ when he talked. But Moran’s main concern does not seem to have been medical: ‘I did not want him to go among people until he was better. They would notice things, and there would be talk.’⁸

So a plan was hatched – or rather a plot hardened around Soames’s first instinct for discretion over resuscitation. The prime minister’s illness must be covered up at all costs. That afternoon he was driven down to his private residence, Chartwell, in Kent, accompanied by Clementine and Colville, who noticed sadly that his boss was now having difficulty finding his mouth with his trademark cigar. By that evening the paralysis had spread over most of Churchill’s left side; by the next day, he could barely move. Moran gave his professional opinion that he didn’t expect the PM to live through the weekend. But they had their orders, slurred to them by Churchill himself: they were under no circumstances to let it be known that he was incapable of running the country. Government was to continue as if he were in full control.

Certain people did have to be told. Colville telephoned the Queen’s private secretary to pass on a message that the monarch – herself in the job for just eighteen months at this point – might find herself having to appoint a new prime minister at very short notice. The US president had to be told too. Churchill was due to hold a summit in Bermuda with Eisenhower on 9 July, the first face-to-face manifestation of the ‘special relationship’ since the death of its wartime third wheel, Joseph Stalin, in March. In January Churchill had travelled by boat to meet the newly elected president after Moran warned him that air travel posed a danger to his circulation; now that the risk had become a reality, there could be no question of him going at all. ‘You will see from the attached medical report the reasons why I cannot come to Bermuda,’ the prime minister – or rather Colville on his behalf – telegrammed the White House.⁹ The US administration could at least be trusted to keep the secret. After all, they had helped disguise the extent of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s paralysis, brought on by polio, from voters for years.

But it certainly wasn’t the sort of thing the whole government needed to be told about. Instead, only two men were told. Chancellor Rab Butler and Lord President of the Council Lord Salisbury were summoned to Chartwell that Saturday, where Colville solemnly handed them a formal letter:

I write, very sorrowfully, to let you know quite privately that the PM is seriously ill and that unless some miracle occurs in the next 24 hours there can be… little [question] of him remaining in office. It was a sudden arterial spasm, or perhaps a clot in the artery, and he has been left with great difficulty of articulation although his brain is still absolutely clear. His left side is partly paralysed and he has lost the use of his left arm. He himself has little hope of recovery.¹⁰

With Buckingham Palace at the other end of the telephone line, the trio neatly sorted things out. If Churchill died, or had to resign, then Salisbury – who owed his place in Parliament to the favours his ancestors had performed for James I and George III – would take over running the country; not as prime minister – everyone agreed Eden was the best fellow for that job – but as ‘chairman’ of a caretaker government that might hold the fort until the foreign secretary had made a full recovery and himself moved into Number 10. There was no question of involving the electorate – or even the Conservative Party – in the matter. That was not how things were done.

The two cabinet ministers cast an eye over the bulletin that Moran and a specialist neurological surgeon, the aptly named Sir Russell Brain, proposed to issue to the press. ‘For a long time the Prime Minister has had no respite from his arduous duties,’ it read. ‘A disturbance of the cerebral circulation has developed, resulting in attacks of giddiness. We have therefore advised him to abandon his journey to Bermuda and to take at least a month’s rest.’¹¹ The statesmen agreed that this would not do at all: great war heroes didn’t get giddy, and the medical terminology might make people think Churchill was at death’s door. He was, of course, but there was no need to say so. The middle sentence was excised completely and replaced with the bland phrase ‘and is in need of a complete rest’. Moran himself was dubious – he wrote in his diary, ‘if he dies in the next few days will Lord Salisbury think his change in the bulletin was wise?’ – but he was just a doctor, and was easily overruled.¹²

Now all they needed to do was ensure that no journalists asked any awkward questions. Thankfully, that was a simple task: Colville had already gone over their heads. Twenty-four hours before Butler and Salisbury arrived at Chartwell, Colville had hosted the men with the real power in the country: Lord Camrose, owner of the Daily Telegraph, Lord Beaverbrook, who owned the Daily Express and Evening Standard, and Lord Bracken, who chaired the company which owned the Financial Times. All three were ‘particular friends’ of Churchill. Camrose had bought the very house they were meeting in and presented it to the prime minister when he found himself suffering from financial embarrassment, and Bracken and Beaverbrook had been co-opted into the cabinet during the war. As well as pledging to keep all news of the seriousness of the prime minister’s illness out of their papers, they also promised to persuade their fellow proprietors to do the same. And they were as good as their word. ‘His trouble is simply tiredness from over-work’, the Sunday People assured its readers on 28 June.¹³ ‘They achieved the all but incredible, and in peace-time possibly unique, success of gagging Fleet Street, something they would have done for nobody but Churchill,’ wrote Colville many years later, after the truth had come out.¹⁴

When Tony Blair suffered a considerably less serious health scare exactly fifty years later, his official spokesman was briefing journalists on how to spell ‘supra ventri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Out of Deference
• 2. Sex Lies
• 3. Financial Fibbing
• 4. Gamblers’ Conceits
• 5. Sins of Spin
• 6. Continental Drift
• 7. Where Power Lies
• 8. Breaking Their Word
• 9. Whose Truth is it Anyway?
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index