Don’t laugh at liars like Boris Johnson and Sean Spicer. Call them out
Liars lie. The more they get away with it, the more they do it. Trump lies as he breathes, bombarding us with untruth upon untruth until we stumble in disbelief. This is all part of what we call fake news, but fake news is enabled by two things: individuals who lie and an equivocating media culture that is cautious about calling certain people liars.
Thus we have Boris Johnson – a known liar, somehow still considered a possible prime minister – doing what exactly? “Misleading” us? Though the evidence is presented to show that his figure of £350m a week that will come back to us once we leave the EU is false, no one wants to quite say that his claims are a deliberate lie. That this sum would go to the NHS was the leavers’ magic promise, emblazoned on the side of a campaign bus. It was, we are required to say, not a downright lie but a distortion. David Norgrove, head of the UK Statistics Authority, said it was “a clear misuse of official statisitics”. So this figure is in dispute. Maybe we can call it “an inverted pyramid of piffle”, as Johnson once said when lying about a fouryear affair that he denied.
Johnson was sacked by Michael Howard for lying. As a journalist he was known for “embroidering” stories. He was sacked from the Times for lying. Making up quotes. Or, as he explained it to Eddie Mair: “I mildly sandpapered something somebody said.”
Still, he has risen to the top because this lying (he backs Theresa May, and I am a straight banana) is all part of his chaotic and colourful life. The media stand by, seemingly afraid to confront his lies with evidence. The £350m claim is a lie and even if he is half as clever as his mates say he is, he knows it. But why wouldn’t he lie? So far he has reaped significant rewards for it. His appalling behaviour is consequencefree. Indeed, he can now look across the Atlantic and see that lying is not a bar to power but an attribute of it.
The hapless Sean Spicer, Trump’s former spokesman, who lied not just about the crowds at his boss’s inauguration, but about the Holocaust, turned up at the Emmys. Hilarious, right? At least he can laugh at himself !
He lied for money and those who encourage others to laugh at him invite him right back into the inner circle. Satire is not dead, it is merely comatose because it no longer has anything to tell other than a vague truth (that Trump is stupid). Nor does it have any idea who it is telling it to – people who already think Trump is an idiot?
To watch the rehabilitation of these liars is galling, but it happens with media consent. It is a disgusting spectacle. If we stop demanding truth or even the semblance of it, we bypass any possibility of integrity in the name of entertainment. We shrug off the very notion that there can be anything other than fake news.
Boris Johnson is in the business of creating fake news. It is his modus
operandi, as it was Sean Spicer’s. One of these men will do a round of chat shows and write some godawful memoir signifying nothing. The other is spoken of still as a possible prime minister. This is frankly unbelievable. The lies that we know these men have told are not funny, or bombast, or “sand-papering” or “truth–stretching”, or mere quirks of character or ego. They cannot be normalised by showbiz or fellow politicians. Their lies are a violation of decency. Call them out every time.
• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist