Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
The truth is Johnson and his lies will be found out
LIES, damned lies, and who cares anyway?
I was having a bit of banter with a friend when he came out with the statement we are living in “a post-truth age”.
Having few morals when it comes to stealing a well-turned phrase I decided there and then, ‘I am having that’. Just what I needed.
The basis of our conversation was the startling disclosure by both Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former chief of staff, and Ian Paisley MP that the Prime Minister only signed the protocol to get the Brexit withdrawal deal over the line before the last Westminster election.
According to Paisley and Cummings, what was not disclosed to the electorate was, armed with a new mandate, he planned to dump it.
When news of this deception went public former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar took an unusually hard line, warning governments across the globe intending to do future trade deals with Britain that it “is a nation that doesn’t necessarily keep its word”.
As he had probably talked to half of the EU by that stage we can take it as read it hadn’t gone down well in the capitals of Europe.
Boris, of course, is not the No1 seed in the telling untruths game. Not by a long shot.
According to the Washington Post President Donald Trump told a whopping number of whoppers during his four years in the White House – 30,573 to be exact.
The day after taking office – start as you mean to continue, as my mother used to say – he sent out his then press secretary to chastise the press corps for suggesting his inauguration was not the biggest ever in terms of numbers attending.
When it was subsequently put to Trump’s principal advisor, Kellyanne Conway, that her boss had sent out the press secretary to “utter a provable falsehood” – photographs of Obama’s inauguration clearly indicated a far larger crowd – she said it wasn’t a lie, it was an “alternative fact”.
And that, folks, I would contend marked the public launch of our posttruth era.
But back to Boris – he is clearly a politician who proves the old adage ‘my word is my bond’ no longer applies.
He was sacked by the The Times for fabricating a quote in an important article, he was dismissed by the then Tory Party leader Michael Howard for lying about an affair and if you throw in numerous political deceits – think £350million a week for the NHS on a big red Brexit bus – you’ll rapidly come to the conclusion telling lies hasn’t harmed his career in the least. Far from it.
But somewhere along the way karma kicks in. It always does. Behind the scenes you can bet the EU is massively pissed off by what has been disclosed.
This was acknowledged by Lord Gavin Barwell, Theresa May’s former chief of staff, who pointed out if you agree something but then almost immediately “start to unpick it” the people you were negotiating with will think you didn’t agree it in good faith in first place.
That’s pretty obvious, I would think.
And speaking at an Institute for Government event last Thursday he went on to state the UK’S proposal for changing the Northern Ireland protocol has “no chance of success and is going to do even further damage to our relationship with our nearest neighbours”.
Believe me, all this could yet end in tears.
Johnson proves ‘my word is my bond’ does not apply