The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism

by Peter Oborne

Close inspection reveals that he has a history of deception, misrepresentation, false statements and serial fabrication.

In the first two chapters of this book I explain how this happened. This involves two tasks.

The first is simple. I will use a mass of irrefutable evidence to prove that Johnson (and regrettably his most senior advisers and ministers as well) habitually lie, fabricate and misrepresent the facts. Such a weight of material is also a burden. Publishing it all would make this book too long. So I won’t expose every lie.

I will then examine Johnson’s methodology of deception. This means presenting some of the most vivid, s...

What led the British people to put a liar into Downing Street? And what made the Conservative Party, which has played such a famous role in ...

The superficial answer is that he was lucky in his opponents, first in the Conservative leadership election and even more ...

Under Boris Johnson political deceit has become not just commonplace but automatic. His election as prime minister suggests that British people no longer care about the difference between fact and fiction, or truth and falsehood. What kind of a society have we become?

Ambrose Bierce’s famous description of politics as ‘the conduct of public affairs for private advantage’.

In Chapter Three I will show how morality changed in public life. Our Victorian ancestors, many inspired by evangelical Christianity, erected a series of protections against deceit and corruption.

The Victorian system, based on the rule of law and an honest, impartial civil service, lasted throughout the twentieth century.

Ministers, human nature being what it is, continued to lie and cheat. But their misdemeanours were individual, not structural.

The left has a tendency to believe that it is uniquely virtuous, and that this special virtue gives it a privileged relationship with the truth.

Tony Blair’s government was by no means alone in believing that it was allowed an exemption from the constraints of truth telling.

But this belief led directly to calamity when New Labour peddled lies about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction

Blair’s three immediate successors as prime minister – Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May – ...

They were not habitual liars, and all three were driven (like Wilson and Major before them) by a sense of public duty and integrity.

Standards of truth telling, I will prove, collapsed at the precise moment Boris Johnson and his associates entered 10 Downing Street in the early afternoon of 24 July 2019.

Voters cannot make fair judgements on the basis of falsehoods. Truth has been taken out of the public domain.

This means that lying, cupidity and lack of integrity have become essential qualities for ambitious ministers.

It has become all but impossible for an honest politician to survive, let alone flourish, in Boris Johnson’s government.

For years and years, even popular and partisan publications prided themselves on being newspapers of record.

In Chapter Seven I will show that when it came to Boris Johnson much of the press and media renounced that role.

This was worse than negligence. Senior journalists facilitated, disseminated and collaborated with Johnson’s lies.

A great deal of political journalism has become the putrid public face of a corrupt government.

Too much of the media and political class have merged.

It is at this point that the comparison between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump becomes especially haunting.

Johnson and Trump find themselves joining in a common crusade against liberal democracy, and using lies and falsehood to fight their battles.

This brings me on to the second theme of this book. Why should anyone care?

Treating all politicians as liars is a gift to the ones who are.

It induces cynicism and political apathy, on which they thrive.

But cynicism is not just lazy. It is dangerous. If history teaches one lesson it is this: we cannot enjoy freedom without truth, just as we cannot speak truth without freedom.

In Xi Jinping’s China or Putin’s Russia it’s a crime not to lie. Criticism of the ruler is forbidden.

Such regimes kill and torture truth tellers.

Saudi Arabia sent a death squad to Istanbul where it murdered and then dismembered my magnificent former colleague Jamal Khashoggi,II a journalist whose only offence was to make uncomfortable observations about the ruling family.

The law courts, Parliament, an impartial civil service and free press are part of a constitutional arrangement which for two centuries has prevented liars, charla...

But we are in the process of abandoning the institutional protections that in the past have saved us from dictatorship. The Johnson government is set on a sustained, poisono...

This distinction means that it’s important to define what we mean by a lie.

The first test of a lie is that its user intends it to be believed.

Above all, any kind of lie must also be intended to deceive. This judgement of motive makes the use of the term ‘lie’ especially hard.

Unfortunately for Boris Johnson the Blair/Vanuatu defence does not work for him. Take his notorious ‘inverted pyramid of piffle’ denial that he was having an affair with a colleague at The Spectator magazine.VI Here Johnson was not simply making a statement that contained a falsehood. He knew that the statement he was making was false.

Or take the claim repeatedly made by Johnson and senior colleagues during the 2019 general election that the government was building forty new hospitals (an

Yet the prime minister went on repeating the claim about forty hospitals as the general election drew near.

Johnson and Hancock were lying, pure and simple,

One of Johnson’s lies was especially shameful. He said Corbyn’s Labour ‘point their fingers at individuals with a relish and a vindictiveness not seen since Stalin persecuted the kulaks’.

Jeremy Corbyn did not threaten anyone with imprisonment, starvation or execution.

Johnson’s inflammatory falsehood was emblazoned in large bold type over the front page of the Daily Telegraph. This is one of many examples of mainstream media complicity in amplifying Johnson’s lies and falsehoods,

Russia haunted the general election. In late 2017 Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) had launched an investigation into allegations of Russian interference into British politics.XXXV

The fifty-page report was completed by March 2019. It then went through the usual vetting and clearance with Whitehall and the intelligence agencies.

After all three stages were complete, the report was submitted to the prime minister on 17 October.

By refusing to publish the report, it was the prime minister himself who had failed to conform with the normal timetable for publishing ISC reports.