Two blondies with funny hair and their pants on fire
• Peter Oborne’s book suggests the absence of political virtue is as globally widespread as the Covid-19 pandemic
We in SA could be forgiven for thinking we have the worst politicians in the world, in an era where public service and honour have been replaced by self-interest and corruption.
However, veteran journalist Peter Oborne’s entertaining and well-researched book, The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism, suggests that the decline and fall of political virtue is as globally widespread as the Covid-19 pandemic.
Oborne writes in scathing terms about former British prime minister Tony Blair, who lied about intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to parachute Britain into joining the war against Saddam Hussein. Blair seems to have been a bridge between a time when “honourable members” truly had honour and a more sleazy, scary political world.
CONTEMPT
But his real venom, his real contempt, is for transatlantic blondies with the funny hair, Johnson and Trump, and their contempt for the truth. Blond and blonder are condemned for being serial liars, politicians who are not to be trusted.
He writes: “Boris Johnson and Donald Trump … lie with humour and relish. They invent damaging falsehoods about political opponents, whether it be Johnson’s unsupported assertion that [former UK Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn wanted to dismantle the British armed forces or Trump’s repeated claim that [his predecessor] Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
“Johnson does his best to preserve a cheery, benign image by getting others to spread lies and smears about his opponents while keeping his own hands clean, while Trump enjoys doing the dirty work himself.”
Having worked for Johnson when the now British prime minister was editor of the Spectator magazine, Oborne is aware of this larger-than-life character’s brilliance as a writer, his way with women, an outward persona as a likable toff in the tradition of PG Wodehouse.
It is the less charming way in which Johnson lies with impunity for which the author seems to have a near obsession, and which forms the bulk of the book.
He writes: “The British prime minister has repeatedly lied. About economic policy, about Brexit, about trade, about borders, about the Covid pandemic. He has lied to voters, to ministers, to journalists, to parliament. He has lied to adults. He has lied to children. Nobody would tolerate this level of deceit in a friend, a colleague, an employer or a spouse. Yet Johnson’s lying has been facilitated and, in many cases, defended, by MPs, the Conservative Party, allies in the press
— and by millions of voters.”
We are forced to conclude from Oborne’s analysis that where once an honourable politician would hand in his resignation, if only after being caught fibbing, it doesn’t seem to matter so much these days.
He has a dossier of occasions when Johnson has been caught out lying, going back to his first Fleet Street job when he was sacked from The Times for inventing quotes.
I first met Johnson when he arrived in Brussels as a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. He soon developed a reputation for his skill in writing dramatic, damaging stories about the EU, many of which were true.
I was working at different
times for the Daily Express, the Daily Mail and The Sun, among others, and I assume we both had a similar brief: to dig up and hype whatever dirt we could find on the goings-on inside the corridors of EU power, to feed the appetites of our Eurosceptic British media bosses.
DELIGHTFUL CHAP
Johnson had the distinct advantage that his father Stanley, a former Conservative member of the European parliament, had arrived back in EU headquarters as a senior Eurocrat, and I suspect this did not harm Johnson’s efforts to dig up juicy morsels. It helps if your best highly placed source is your dad.
I have always found Stanley to be a delightful chap. But when it came to his son, our rivalry and my instinctive distaste for Johnson meant we were never destined to be friends.
Post-Brussels, the younger Johnson went on to higher things, with his editorship of the Spectator and extravagantly paid Telegraph columns running in parallel with a political career that saw him become an MP, the mayor of London, foreign secretary and now prime
minister. Somehow.
(I am assuming that when you read this, he will still be in office. At the time of writing he is immersed in a scandal over who initially paid for the refurbishment of his Downing Street flat, with a parallel controversy over suggestions that he sought funding from a Tory donor for the child care of his latest offspring.)
We are fortunate that this book covers the start of the Covid-19 crisis, for it is at this time that Johnson’s dishonesty and other deficiencies have risen higher in prominence.
The first of his failings, we are told, is laziness, with his absence from key Cobra crisis committee meetings.
Oborne writes: “Prime minister Johnson failed for a long time to grasp the significance of the crisis. He was not paying attention. During the early weeks, when the crucial decisions were being made, Johnson retreated to the country for a ‘working holiday’. A Sunday Times article highlighted that Johnson ‘skipped five Cobra meetings on the virus’ and did not attend one until March 2, five weeks after the first took place.” However, it
is the dishonesty that is really scary, with a claim that a “technique of blame-shifting and deceit was a core part of Boris Johnson’s response to coronavirus”.
The book does not give Trump an easy ride over Covid19, either, noting his musings over the possible medicinal benefits of bleach, if ingested.
GROTESQUE
“When people started to die in large numbers, both the US president and the British prime minister responded with lies and fabrications,” we are told. “Donald Trump’s conduct was grotesque. At least Boris Johnson did not refer to coronavirus as a ‘hoax’, invite people to inject themselves with bleach or promote an antimalarial drug which increased risk of death when used to treat coronavirus patients.”
Instead of liar and liar finding their pants on fire, the two transatlantic blondies with the funny hair miraculously both found themselves elevated to the highest political positions in their respective countries.
Johnson has risen to the dizzy heights of Downing Street, seducing the British public
almost as effectively as he is rumoured to have seduced so many women. And while Trump was or was not defeated in the previous US election (depending on whether you believe him or everyone else), he did win his first election and make it to the Oval Office.
Johnson’s old-Etonian bluster and charm can be seductive, as is Trump’s showmanship and assurance.
However, the flipside is that many hundreds of thousands of people may have died from Covid because of their (mis) handling of the crisis, while both continued to fib furiously.
The Assault on Truth chronicles a turning point in politics, ushering in this new era where it really doesn’t matter whether or not we, the people, are told the truth by those who we have entrusted with remarkable power and influence.
We now have a vaccine against Covid-19. Sadly, there is no sign yet of one against our scumbag politicians.