Politicians have the oddest of sensibilities.
In last night’s BBC Scottish Leaders’ debate there was a spat between Conservative Leader, Ruth Davidson and Labour Leader, Jim Murphy.
While Murphy was speaking, fairly early on, he threw in an allegation that the Conservatives had introduced a target-led system which meant that when you went to the Job Centre you were virtually certain to be sanctioned – and you wouldn’t know a thing about it until you went to a hole-in-the-wall machine and tried to get money out of your account.
A furious Davidson interrupted him at once, saying she respected the cut and thrust of debate but that this was beyond that; that she had checked out this particular issue for herself; and that – she ‘was going to have use unparliamentary language here’ – it was ‘a lie’.’
Murphy summoned all the pomposity of faux moral outrage and serially declaimed ‘How dare you call me a liar. How dare you. How dare you.’
There was a ridiculous hush in the auditorium for a moment.
For some daft synthetic reason, everyone seemed to feel they were present at something momentous. Why?
Then it all carried on as before.
But hang on with the moral outrage bit.
Murphy finds it easier to admit to having supported Blair in taking Britain to war in Iraq on a knowingly false prospectus than to admit to – or shrug off – a lie on a political hustings. What sort of value system is that?
Of any cadre imaginable, outside formally designated crookery, lying is the acknowledged and routine stock-in-trade of the political class. It becomes interesting when they get caught at it because the mask of propriety is ripped off and we see them for the grubby salesmen they too often are.
- Margaret Thatcher lied in parliament in the Westland Helicopter row and expected it to be the end of her political career. It would have been had not the so called ‘Welsh Windbag’ Neil Kinnock taken off in a hot air balloon in the House and lost track of his direction of shot.
- Sir Robert Armstrong, Thatcher’s Cabinet Secretary, galvanised Australia in the ‘Spycatcher’ trial when he admitted to having been ‘economical with the truth’, a phrase that passed into mocking common usage.
- Alan Clark, as a junior Defence Minister in a Thatcher government, used a version of the same euphemism in the trial of a UK arms business for illegally supplying arms to Iraq – in saying that he had been ‘economic with the actualite.’
- Tony Blair lied over many issues involved in the sequence and the promotion of the decision to take the UK into what was an illegal war in Iraq.
- Alex Salmond lied in saying that he had legal advice on an independent Scotland’s position in applying for EU membership – when he had never even asked for such advice.
- Alex Salmond lied in claiming that he had a ‘Plan B’ alternative to Sterling on the currency issue during the same indyref 1 campaign.
These are the headline lies – but lying is no more than one of the everyday devices of political life and of government.
There are times when governments have to lie – to protect public order, for example; but lying quickly becomes a simple and habituated convenience of public life.
Rather than attribute credence to clearly faked ‘shock horror’ responses in being accused of lying, while punishing the guilty of this breach of trust we should look for and celebrate that very rare manifestation [when we find it] – an honest person in public life.
But let’s have an end to this sophist fake-horror at accusations of lying. It’s not just politicians who do it, after all.