The Guardian (USA)

From Trump to Boris Johnson, we’re moving from post-truth to post-shame

- Alastair Campbell

Aconfessio­n: I tend not to read the online comments about anything I write for the Guardian. But as I am about to embark on a short “politics of mental health” speaking tour down under, I made an exception for the comments section beneath an interview I did for Guardian Australia. I am glad I did. For there were two comments so good they left me wishing I had written them myself. I shall certainly be using them in future.

I have no idea who sleuthfort­ruth is, but someone should find them and hire them as a speechwrit­er. “Voting for a populist party is like diving headfirst into an empty swimming pool, because you’re angry that there’s no water in it.” Brilliant. Trump and Brexit to a tee.

Trump: the inherited wealth billionair­e who became president by ventilatin­g and capitalisi­ng on public anger at politician­s and elites, winning over many among the disaffecte­d working classes, yet now pursuing policies aimed at further enriching the rich, and a politics of narcissism and family aggrandise­ment at the expense of the US’s global reputation.

Brexit: won with the help of the votes of those who will be hardest hit by its impact, as every regional analysis has shown. Those votes were secured with arguments about sovereignt­y, economic strength, more money for the NHS, trade deals galore falling from trees, big falls in immigratio­n – arguments that have faded and died as campaign-winning rhetoric has been exposed to the real world of EU negotiatio­ns, the law and parliament­ary arithmetic. So now the populists are reduced to saying simply that Brexit must happen because people voted for it, and a likely incoming prime minister, to be elected by a majority of the less than 0.25% of the country with a say in the matter, happily parrots his support for a no-deal Brexit that he and everyone else said was not even an option three

years ago.

When a few populists piled in on sleuthfort­ruth, they held their ground and added: “Populism is the art of agitating the disaffecte­d voters to vote against their best interests, by amplifying problems and not really offering anything in return.” Trump, Salvini, Johnson, Farage: sleuthfort­ruth has your number.

Sleuthfort­ruth is a good name for the holder of such a viewpoint, for truth has been a prime casualty of the populist era. According to Washington Post factchecke­rs, Trump has averaged 12 misleading or outright false statements for every day of his presidency. Worse, he shows politician­s around the world that – thus far – he can get away with it.

We are not just in a post-truth world, but a post-shame world. How else to explain that Boris Johnson once lost his job at the Times for lying, yet the same newspaper now endorses him to be prime minister?

The £350m a week that was promised for the NHS was post-truthery. The fact that Johnson is rarely challenged on it, and waves it away when he is, is post-shamery – his, politics’ and the media’s.

We saw a vignette of the same kind of thing in Andrew Neil’s BBC interview with Johnson last Friday. Neil was pressing Johnson on whether his failure to back Kim Darroch in the ITV leadership debate a few days before was a factor in Darroch’s decision to resign as UK ambassador to the US (spoiler alert: it was). Johnson gave a version of events that was directly contradict­ed by the account Darroch had given to friends. He also – and well done to Neil for calling it out as a regular Johnson tactic – sought to deflect the question by answering one that hadn’t been asked, about the leaker. Post-truth and post-shame both take place in a world where, as chancers such as Johnson and Trump know, events move so fast that the caravan quickly moves on.

If our democracy was functionin­g well, there would be an opposition in the wings, a government-in-waiting, providing the answers and the solutions, the leadership and the strength in depth, that the government is failing to. But that is not happening, is it? In recent polls, Labour has been closer to single figures than the kind of support needed for a majority. Populism is not about being popular. It is the relegation of fact and reason to lies and emotion. The main point I made in my interview with Guardian Australia was that the populism of the right would not be defeated by populism of the left. Yet if I were to think of two words to sum up Labour’s handling of antisemiti­sm, especially in recent days, posttruth and post-shame would be right up there.

Populism means never having to say you’re sorry, and never having to say you’re wrong, because you just say something different about something else. Take the latest policy announceme­nt of the Brexit party. “The Brexit party will invest £200bn in the regions by scrapping HS2, halving the foreign aid budget, and refusing to pay Brussels £39bn,” it says.

There are so many unanswered questions in there it is hard to know where to start. “Refusing to pay £39bn” presumes that we are leaving the EU without a deal and preparing to break the law to do so. Do their calculatio­ns include any economic hit at all, or are we still fantasisin­g that a no-deal exit can be managed without economic downside, even before the EU understand­ably decides that such an act of bad faith might merit some sort of retaliatio­n?

The aid budget totals about £14bn, so scrapping half of it only gives you £7bn. And even if you assumed you could somehow get back to the Treasury the estimated £56bn cost of HS2, which you can’t, and even assuming there would be no economic costs of reversing the project, which there would, you still only have half of the £200bn promised in total. Post-truth, post-shame. I can see Nigel Farage laughing his head off: “Can you believe that Campbell has actually gone and tried to fact-check our ‘policy for the regions’ like it was serious?”

But this is not a policy at all. It is an attempt to pretend that they have one, so they can go around the country and say they care about the regions. It is a very empty swimming pool. Diving into it would be dangerous indeed.

The same goes for Johnson’s no deal – and, in some ways, even worse has been the sight of Jeremy Hunt, Matt Hancock, Amber Rudd, Damian Green and others pretending to share his view that no deal need not be, as they had previously argued, an unmitigate­d disaster. Jump in, the water’s … all gone.

• Alastair Campbell is an adviser to the People’s Vote campaign and editorat-large of the New European. He is cofounder of Equality4M­entalHealt­h

 ??  ?? ‘I can see Nigel Farage laughing his head off. “Can you believe that Campbell has tried to fact-check our policy like it was serious?”’ Photograph: Isabel Infantes/PA
‘I can see Nigel Farage laughing his head off. “Can you believe that Campbell has tried to fact-check our policy like it was serious?”’ Photograph: Isabel Infantes/PA

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