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

by Peter Oborne

But in ordinary language the Number 10 sources who spoke to the Mail on Sunday were lying.

As for the Mail on Sunday itself, it was disseminating false information to its...

Johnson’s role in this unedifying affair was repellent. On the Today programme, the British prime minister could, and should, have taken the opportunity to tell the truth. Instead, he fuelled the smear with his statement that ‘there are legitimate questions to be asked’.

As for the Mail on Sunday, it had entered into something like a conspiracy with Downing Street to mislead its readers into thinking that three honourable British politicians were conniving with a foreign power.

This client journalism allows Downing Street to frame the story as it wants.

This article marked the end of my thirty-year-long career as a writer and broadcaster in the mainstream British press and media.

Fifteen years ago Boris Johnson hired me as political correspondent at The Spectator magazine. He was a joy to work for, a fine editor and a loyal colleague with the quickest mind I’ve ever encountered.

While writing this book I’ve found myself trying to reconcile the person I knew then with the prime minister of Britain today.

Boris was sunny, liberal, optimistic. So how did the Johnson of The Spectator turn into today’s prime minister?

All politicians are in one sense actors in search of a scriptwriter. In Vote Leave’s director, Dominic Cummings, Johnson found his scriptwriter. I now turn to what this meant for the Conservative Party.

Upon his becoming prime minister, Downing Street was at once captured by Vote Leave.

Vote Leave was a tiny organisation with no members, a handful of executives and a powerful donor base. This group despised the Conservative Party and hated British institutions.

Cummings and Johnson are creatures of big money – a point persistently ignored by Britain’s client political press.

‘Whatever it takes’ became the motto in Downing Street – a term reminiscent of Malcolm X’s use of the phrase ‘by any means necessary’ when he rejected the non-violence of Martin Luther King.XIV

this context, that means: Lie. Cheat. Bully. Threaten. Independent-minded Tory MPs were driven out.XV Loyalty became the only criterion for promotion.

The Conservative Party turned into a Vo...

Vote Leave is destroying these institutions.

Vote Leave and Johnson systematically seek to create division and culture wars, something else they have in common with Donald Trump.

So it was with Cummings’s Vote Leave. Lacking a moral system of his own, Johnson adapted easily to this new epistemology. It gave him the freedom to make any statement he liked.

This assault on truth was part of a fundamental assault on the values and institutions that had governed Britain for centuries.

The unhappy fact that a fabricator and cheat controls the destiny of Britain raises deep, troublesome questions that go way beyond the moral character of Boris Johnson. What happened to the British?

One immediate answer is to look at the quality of his opponents,

In the leadership contest, only one contender, the relatively unknown and politically exotic Rory Stewart, carried the war to Johnson,

Then Johnson had the good luck to be faced by Jeremy Corbyn – in a general election gifted to him by Corbyn’s decision to allow him to hold it at all.

Johnson was certainly very lucky in his opponents.

We took political stability, something which history shows is rare and precious, for granted.

He is the perfect leader for a country where you can say or do anything without suffering the consequences.

is suggestive to contrast Johnson’s escalator to the top – private school, Eton, Oxford University, the Daily Telegraph and the Conservative Party – with Angela Merkel in communist East Germany, repressed and deprived.

Unlike Johnson, Merkel is a serious person running a serious country. She had to be, having been raised in a hardline communist state whe...

Moreover, she represented a country which had thought with humility and acute intelligence about how to avoid a repeat of the horror of the twentieth century.

For Angela Merkel, freedom of movement, stable institutions and democracy were in themselves miracles, not something to be taken for granted. They needed protection.

In this world, argument descends into sloganeering.

For example, terms like ‘Get Brexit Done’ – which helped Johnson’s Conservatives to win the 2019 election

The moment you attempt to grapple with them you realise they are a minefield of contradictions, lie...

These endlessly repeated slogans are about selling product rather than actual political discussion.

Cummings’s blog is almost unreadable, endlessly spewing out managerial babble of this kind, and very scanty with actual policy proposals for government.

Hearst foreshadowed Rupert Murdoch, whose outlets likewise blur the boundary between news and entertainment, spreading lies about immigrants while targeting vulnerable minorities and waging war against liberal institutions.

the British prime minister and the American president are driven by a hauntingly similar political philosophy.

19 November an investigation found Home Secretary Priti Patel guilty of bullying civil servants.

On 16 November the Johnson government announced that the death toll from Covid-19 stood at 52,147. The real figure was around 75,000.

The former British ambassador to the US, Kim Darroch (who Johnson had sacked on Trump’s insistence), remarked how ‘fascinated’ Johnson had seemed by Trump and his use of language: ‘The limited vocabulary, the simplicity of the messaging, the disdain for political correctness, the sometimes incendiary imagery, and the at best intermittent relationship with facts and the truth.’