The Rise of Political Lying

Peter Oborne

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780743275606
• eBook ISBN: 9781471142031
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Post-truth, fake news - when did it all really start? Being 'economical with the truth' has become almost a jokey euphemism for the political lie - a cosy insider's phrase for the disingenuousness that is now accepted as part and parcel of political life. But as we face the third term of a government that has elevated this kind of economics almost to an art form, is it now time to question the creeping invasion of falsehood? What does the rise of the political lie say about our society? At what point, if we have not reached it already, will we cease to believe a word politicians say? Tracing the history of political falsehood back to its earliest days, but focusing specifically on the exponential rise of the phenomenon during the Major and Blair governments, Peter Oborne demonstrates that the truth has become an increasingly slippery concept in recent years. From woolly pronouncements that are designed merely to obfuscate to outright and blatant lies whose intention is to deceive, the political lie is never far from the surface. And its prevalence has led to a catastrophic decline in trust, at a time when people are more politicised than ever. Rigorous, riveting and profoundly shocking, this is a devastating book about one of the single biggest issues facing us today.

PART ONE

1

THE ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL LYING

‘The truth becomes almost impossible to communicate because total frankness, relayed in the shorthand of the mass media becomes simply a weapon in the hands of opponents’ – Tony Blair, The Times, 24 November 1987

On 8 March 1994, as a junior reporter on the Evening Standard, I heard the Conservative minister William Waldegrave tell the Treasury and Civil Service Committee that it was sometimes acceptable to lie to the House of Commons. Waldegrave maintained that ‘in exceptional circumstances it is necessary to say something that is untrue to the House of Commons. The House of Commons understands that and accepts that.’ Waldegrave cited as an example the need to protect the pound ahead of a devaluation crisis.¹

I sprinted out of the committee room, up the stairs to the press gallery, consulted and filed the story. It made the front-page splash in later editions. Ever since I have felt a slight guilt. William Waldegrave was not lying or evading the question when he spoke to the Treasury Committee. Quite the reverse. Waldegrave, a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, was simply attempting in his characteristically agonised and intellectually fastidious way to set out an acceptable moral code for ministers.

And yet his remarks produced a media firestorm. For the best part of a week newspapers condemned Waldegrave’s remarks as a fresh instance of ‘Tory sleaze’. Labour marched in on the offensive. When reporters tackled Giles Radice, chairman of the Treasury Committee, he declared: ‘Frankly, I was amazed. I do not think it right that ministers should justify misleading the House. Questions of procedure make it absolutely clear that ministers should not mislead the House whatever the circumstances are and when they do mislead the House should resign.’²

Waldegrave’s front bench shadow, Michael Meacher, was more vehement still. He claimed that the ‘Waldegrave doctrine exposed just how relative the minister’s commitment to truthfulness has become,’ adding that ‘truth and reliability are at the heart of democracy’. Meacher told me that ‘The principle of telling lies or untruths to the Commons is extremely damaging and dangerous. The principle of telling the truth is absolute.’³

Soon John Smith, the Labour Party leader, jumped on the bandwagon. ‘We don’t really need Mr Waldegrave to tell us the Tories don’t tell the truth,’ he stormed. ‘We know they don’t tell the truth. And that is why no one will ever believe their promises again.’⁴

There was a great irony at work here. William Waldegrave was doing something very rare for a modern politician and trying to give an honest answer to an honest question. If anyone was guilty of lying, it was his Labour opponents, who set an impossibly high standard of truth telling, and one they had no intention of meeting themselves. It was Waldegrave’s misfortune that his remarks played straight into the Labour Party’s strategy. Labour was determined to portray Conservative politicians as liars and cheats. This policy was started by John Smith not long after he became Labour leader in 1992, and brought to a climax by Tony Blair after Smith’s death in 1994. The policy worked brilliantly, partly because Labour’s claims about Tory mendacity contained an element of truth.

Tory Lies, 1979–90

The charge sheet against Margaret Thatcher begins before the 1979 general election. Labour leader Jim Callaghan claimed that the Conservatives would double VAT in order to pay for the income tax cuts they promised. Margaret Thatcher dealt with his accusation by asserting: ‘we will not double it’. Her words were strictly true, but disingenuous. The Conservatives jacked up VAT from 8 per cent to 15 per cent within months of taking office, as near to doubling the tax as made no difference. (It was not actually doubled till Norman Lamont lifted the rate to 17.5 per cent shortly after the 1992 general election.)⁵

There is no doubt that Margaret Thatcher lied to the electorate over the sinking of the Belgrano, the Argentine cruiser which sank as a result of British military action at the start of the Falklands War, causing terrible loss of life. The ship was torpedoed by the British nuclear-powered submarine HMS Conqueror, even though it was outside the 200-mile exclusion zone imposed by the British around the Falkland Islands. Britain had warned that ships breaching the zone would be targeted under British rules of engagement.

Margaret Thatcher justified the action by claiming that the ship had been sailing towards the Royal Navy taskforce. In fact it was sailing away. Mrs Thatcher has always said that she did not know the precise course of the Belgrano when she authorised the attack on the cruiser on 2 May 1982. She claims she was only told six months later, just ahead of publication of the Government White Paper on the Falklands Campaign.⁶ Her refusal to address the truth about the Belgrano in that White Paper led to accusations of lack of candour. In private some Tories were more than happy to own up. An unlikely friendship between the Labour MP Tam Dalyell and the future Defence Minister Alan Clark began one morning in the Commons library when Dalyell strode up to Clark and asked him whether Margaret Thatcher was lying. ‘Of course she bloody is,’ replied Clark. Several months later, however, Margaret Thatcher lied publicly about the Belgrano when she appeared on the BBC Election Call programme during the 1983 general election campaign. A Mrs Diana Gould asked about the sinking. The prime minister falsely replied that the warship had been heading towards the British taskforce.

The Tory leader’s next collision with the truth came with the Westland Affair in 1986. This bitter cabinet row involved the future of the Westland helicopter company. Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine was eager that it should be sold to a European consortium, while Trade and Industry Secretary Leon Brittan was keen that it should find an American partner. Margaret Thatcher backed Brittan in this argument. The grave issue became who authorised the leaking of confidential guidance by the Attorney-General Sir Patrick Mayhew in an unscrupulous attempt to smear Michael Heseltine.

Copies of Patrick Mayhew’s letter had been sent to two press secretaries – Bernard Ingham at 10 Downing Street and Colette Bowe at the DTI. While Leon Brittan had everything to gain by leaking Sir Patrick Mayhew’s letter, which was very damaging to the European solution Michael Heseltine supported, Colette Bowe did not have the authority to leak such a document without Downing Street consent.

Mrs Thatcher, however, insisted it was Leon Brittan who authorised the leak and that it was arranged by officials at the DTI and Downing Street without her knowledge. She claimed that she had not known the ‘full facts’ about the leak until afterwards. According to the reporters Magnus Linklater and David Leigh, ‘To accept Mrs Thatcher’s full explanation it was necessary to believe that both she and Bernard Ingham had behaved entirely out of character; that she had never thought to ask a man in her own office, and with whom she worked in conditions of great intimacy, how a leak of major political significance had been effected.’⁷

The full truth has never been established one way or the other since. The fact that Mrs Thatcher herself seems to have believed, on the eve of the Commons Westland debate, that she might be forced to resign suggests that she may have been guilty. Michael Heseltine in his autobiography, published years later, does not accuse Margaret Thatcher of deceit. Most people close to the story, even if they have no axe to grind, tend to assume that she was implicated.

The evidence that Margaret Thatcher was a liar more or less rests there. In the early 1990s the political journalist Tony Bevins wrote two long and painstakingly researched articles listing alleged Tory mendacity. He cited these two examples – one clearly a demonstrable lie and one merely alleged. But that – a maximum of two lies in ten years – was broadly the extent of the Bevins charge sheet against Margaret Thatcher. The John Major administration presented a different story.

Tory Lies, 1990–97

John Major secured victory in the 1992 general election after a campaign dominated by scaremongering claims that Labour would raise taxes in government. For these charges to retain all their credibility it became essential to deny that the Tories would themselves raise taxes. John Major duly did so, repeatedly stating that ‘I have no plans and see no need to increase’ VAT.⁸ His chancellor Norman Lamont issued the same message, insisting to the House of Commons in his budget statement of 10 March 1992 that ‘I have no need, no proposals and no plans either to raise or to extend the scope of VAT.’ These pledges were, of course broken by the Tories, who soon raised VAT to its present level of 17.5 per cent.

Unlucky John Major was then driven towards falsehood by his increasingly desperate attempt to sustain the pound within the exchange rate mechanism (ERM). On 10 September 1992 he insisted ‘there will be no devaluation, no realignment’ of sterling.⁹

Within the week he was being forced to suspend British membership of the ERM, and the pound fell precipitously. Major’s opponents always made a great deal of the vainglorious words he used in defence of sterling: in fairness to him he did everything possible to keep his word until the matter was taken out of his hands by the currency markets on Black Wednesday, 16 September 1992. His critics were also to make much of the statement he made on 1 November 1993, after the Shankill Road bombings which killed ten people, that face-to-face talks with the IRA ‘would turn my stomach’.¹⁰ But the British prime minister went on to authorise such talks with terrorists, and these talks would slowly lead to the IRA ceasefire of 1995. It is true that the prime minister’s angry words were thoroughly misleading. But it is easy to understand both the passion with which the words were uttered, and the subsequent need for secrecy when talks were entered into.

It was the Sir Richard Scott inquiry into Arms to Iraq that, as much as anything else, suggested that the last Tory government had lost its moral bearings. Sir Richard found that ministers misled the Commons. His report¹¹ showed that ministers had issued misleading statements about the secret change in the guidelines surrounding the sale of equipment to Iraq which was agreed by ministers in the late 1980s. Sir Richard demonstrated a contempt for the truth at very senior levels of British government. Nothing exemplified this easy cynicism more vividly than the conversation between the Liberal Democrat MP Sir Russel Johnston and Alan Clark, then Minister for Defence Procurement, on Wednesday 5 December 1990. Sir Russel asked Alan Clark (who, it later emerged, was one of three ministers at the meeting where guidelines were changed) whether he ‘was aware of and connived at sales from the United Kingdom to Iraq of equipment which could be used for military purposes’. Clark replied that ‘I have a complete and total answer to these allegations, which are rubbish, trash and sensational.’¹²

But Sir Russell Johnston was right, and Alan Clark’s answer was lies and bluster. Two years later Clark’s confession that ministers had not been straight about arms sales caused the trials of three executives from the arms exporter Matrix Churchill to collapse. He told Presiley Baxendale at the Scott Inquiry that ‘I had to indulge in a fiction, and invite them [UK companies exporting to Iraq] to participate in a fiction.’¹³

Alan Clark was by no means the only minister to mislead MPs during the Arms to Iraq affair. The Scott Report concluded that ministers deceived parliament about a change in policy on Iraq. Scott said that letters sent out by William Waldegrave and other ministers were ‘in my opinion apt to mislead the readers as to the nature of the policy on export sales to Iraq that was currently being pursued by the government. Mr Waldegrave was in a position to know that this was so.’^{14 2} But Scott went on greatly to mitigate this criticism, saying that he accepted that Waldegrave ‘did not intend his letters to be misleading and did not so regard them.’ This qualification was of extreme importance because it meant that William Waldegrave could not be accused of lying, merely of making a mistake in good faith.

But what was in some ways more striking than the conclusions reached by Sir Richard Scott was the response of the John Major government. Rather than apologise, or accept that parliament had been misled, ministers embarked on a mendacious and brazen attempt to assert that they had been vindicated. For the last four years of the Major administration, it was generally held that the government’s media management was poor, bordering on helpless. The glaring exception was the handling of the publication of the Scott Report in February 1996, hailed at the time as masterly. A press package was produced, with no fewer than thirteen press releases responding, department by department, to Richard Scott’s findings. Some of them blatantly misrepresented the Scott Report. One Treasury briefing, appearing under the name of Chancellor Kenneth Clarke, declared, ‘Does Scott say Waldegrave misled Parliament? No.’ When Labour complained that Scott had said nothing of the kind – in fact Scott had found Waldegrave’s statements to MPs and replies to written questions variously ‘untrue’, ‘not remotely arguable’ and ‘inadequate and misleading’ – Ken Clarke blamed a ‘drafting error’. The Labour opposition went on to cite a further four cases where they said that government press releases told less than the full story. They said that one Cabinet Office press release lied by saying that there was no policy change on arms sales to Iraq in 1989, and that the government wrongly said that ministers who signed Public Interest Immunity Certificates were required to do so by law, a conclusion that had not been reached by Sir Richard Scott.¹⁵

Before the debate, Conservative MPs were given a short three-page document. Entitled simply ‘Scott’, it set out ‘key points to make’, claiming that ministers had been completely vindicated. Ian Lang, the cabinet minister speaking for the government, asserted that William Waldegrave – found by Scott to have misled the Commons – had nothing to apologise for. In his Commons statement after publication of the report, Waldegrave went to the lengths of demanding a public apology from Labour for having suggested that there was a ‘conspiracy’ to send innocent men to jail. But the quotations he produced from Robin Cook did not use the word. In due course Sir Richard Scott’s spokesman Christopher Muttukumaru despatched a letter to John Alty, principal private secretary to Ian Lang, protesting at the way ministers were using quotes from Sir Richard selectively in their defence.¹⁶

The Matrix Churchill trial and the Scott Report laid bare a culture of deception and arrogance among senior ministers, while the subsequent handling exposed a readiness to manipulate the facts. On the eve of the vote on the affair of 26 February 1996, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, the Labour leader Tony Blair made an appeal to Tory MPs to vote against the government. He asked them: ‘Are you really going to send to your constituents the message that you don’t mind being misled by ministers and are not prepared to stand up for the principle of ministerial accountability?’¹⁷ Almost all Tory MPs ignored him.

The Arms to Iraq imbroglio and the Westland Affair helped to establish the moral status of the last Tory government. But neither scandal was quite so memorable as the two remarkable liars thrown up by the Conservative administrations of 1979–97: Jonathan Aitken and Jeffrey Archer, both of them impresarios of deceit who operated on an heroic scale.

Jeffrey Archer was a liar and fantasist. His parties at Conservative Party conferences were legendary events, attended by practically all the cabinet. Very few could resist Archer’s charm, and yet for years there was abundant evidence that he was a rogue and conman. Though he never held ministerial office, he was nevertheless a member of the intimate circle surrounding both Margaret Thatcher and John Major and, to a lesser extent, William Hague.

Michael Crick, author of a masterly biography of Archer, which does full justice to his extraordinary life story, wrote: ‘Any one of those three was surely aware of all the evidence th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Also by Peter Oborne
• Title page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE
• 1 The Origin of Contemporary Political Lying
• 2 New Labour in Power
• 3 From Truth to Falsehood
• 4 The Lies, Falsehoods, Deceits, Evasions and Artfulness of Tony Blair
• PART TWO
• 5 Why Politicians Lie
• 6 Construction of the Truth
• 7 Constructing a Culture of Deceit
• 8 Iraq
• PART THREE
• 9 Political Lying and the Threat to Trust
• 10 The Role of the Media
• 11 How to Rebuild Public Truth
• Appendices
• Notes
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright page