Macqueen - The Lies of Land: an Honest History of Political Deceit

THE LIES
OF THE
LAND

Also by Adam Macqueen

The Prime Ministers Ironing Board and Other State Secrets

Private Eye: The First 50 Years, an AZ

The King of Sunlight: How William Lever Cleaned Up the World

A BRIEF HISTORY OF
POLITICAL DISHONESTY

Adam Macqueen

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2017 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright Adam Macqueen, 2017

The moral right of Adam Macqueen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 249 4
E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 250 0

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books
An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
Ormond House
2627 Boswell Street
London
WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For my brother Andrew
who likes books which are true
and isnt keen on politicians who lie.

An old gentleman had been serving on a battleship as a young rating in early 1940 when Churchill had come aboard. Put in a group to question the great man, he had nervously asked, Is everything you tell us true? The answer, he alleged, was: Young man, I have told many lies for my country, and I will tell many more.

Anecdote recounted by former
Cabinet Minister William Waldegrave
in his memoirs, 2015

Truth is a difficult concept.

Ian McDonald,
official at the Ministry of Defence,
in evidence to the Scott Inquiry, 1993

I only know what I believe.

Prime Minister Tony Blair
on his approach to events after 9/11
and the Iraq War, speech, 2004

You are fake news!

President-elect Donald Trump
refuses to answer a question from CNN,
press conference, 2017

How do you know when a politician is lying? runs the age-old joke. Answer: Their lips are moving. Always gets a big laugh in the saloon bar, that one. Bet Nigel Farage has trotted it out more than once.

Like most jokes, its 90 per cent nonsense wrapped around a hard kernel of truth.

There are plenty of elected representatives out there living perfectly upright lives. They do their best for their constituents, balance their beliefs with the demands of office and professionalism, speak truth to power and attempt to wield what power comes their way in a manner that brings the greatest benefit or at least does the least damage all round.

So why are we convinced otherwise? Why, as the Brexit referendum and an embarrassment of elections in recent years have repeatedly demonstrated, have we become so determined to think the very worst of those who aspire to serve us?

Some of it is down to the extraordinary polarization of contemporary politics. Many voters have evacuated the centre ground for entrenched positions held independently of the traditional redoubts of the party system. If you bolster your own righteousness by dismissing the other side as inherently evil and beyond salvation, what can their every utterance be but a lie? Trumps army of deplorables call it fake news. Hard-core Brexiteers rail against project fear. The cult of Corbyn dismiss the smears of the mainstream media. And the laser-focused EU negotiation team offered to the nation by Theresa May in the summer of 2016 appeared to deem any and all alternative points of view as something not far short of treason.

As sure as night follows day, the louder you shout about your opponents lies, the less obliged you feel to tell the truth yourself. The book is far from closed on the presidential teams links to Russia. There is not, and there was never going to be, 350 million a week to solve the problems of the NHS. Leaders are capable of looking incompetent all by themselves. And the prime minister could boast of as big a parliamentary majority as she likes, but its not even a minority interest of Guy Verhofstadt, Michel Barnier, Donald Tusk or anyone else beyond our borders.

But while downright dishonesty may have increased in volume and visibility in recent years, it is not a new development in politics. For decades now we have felt that our elected representatives speak with forked tongues. There is a very good reason for that. It is the other 10 per cent of the joke. It is the fact that they do.

Of course they dont lie all the time. Thats only true in a few cases, those of pathological liars programmed to believe whatever happens to be coming out of their mouth at any given moment. Well see some examples in the stories of Jeffrey Archer and Donald Trump, both of whom have built a well-deserved reputation for their lying. Well also see it in the tales of Mohamed Fayed, who though he is not a politician himself has nevertheless been the facilitator and funder of more than one incident of spectacular lying which appears in these pages.

But then, very few people out there are listening all the time either. Beyond the wonks of Westminster, the loyal partisans and the dedicated readers and viewers of political journalism (who for All too often, these moments are not exactly the ones the spin doctors want us to be focusing on.

As one prime example, how often these days do you hear people bring up the topic of how tirelessly Tony Blair worked first to corral George W. Bush and then to get the UN Security Council to pass Resolution 1441 condemning Saddam Husseins non-compliance to ensure the US didnt go into Iraq without some international backing? and youll have every opportunity to denounce me as a Blairite lickspittle neocon. But as we have already seen, one of the curious things about the loudest accusations of lying is that those making them dont feel obliged to tell the whole truth.

Its always the bad behaviour that sticks. Can you name one achievement of the Nixon administration other than Watergate? Do you have any idea what government positions John Profumo held before he had to resign from them in disgrace? Which action taken in the Oval Office by Bill Clinton is the first to spring to mind? And those are just the classics. Within these pages you will find many less well-known incidents of chicanery, double-dealing, alternative facts and outright falsehoods. En masse, they form the folk memory that has ushered us into the much-vaunted post-truth era. They are the reason so many of us feel unable to believe anything a politician says.

The bigger question is why politicians lie, dissemble, mislead or simply go to great efforts to avoid telling us the truth in the first place.

Discipline obliges dishonesty. I write this introduction from the midst of an election campaign which the incumbent party are fighting in the form of a stuck record, repeating nothing but the phrase strong and stable for fear that anything else might offer hostages to fortune and doing their best not to answer the very few questions that make it through their fortified defences. If their own foot soldiers make it into government they will face immense pressure to keep up a similar parroting of the party line. The system is rigidly enforced with the carrot of career advancement and the stick of a media mauling.