Time may be up for the Tories, but their legacy of lies will live on
Illustration by David Foldvari. Illustration: David Foldvari/The Observer
“It’s the lying I can’t stand.” That’s the close of the affair cliche isn’t it? We can forgive so much – incompetence, petulance, flatulence – but in the end dishonesty derails things. I suppose that’s why the nation’s 14-year abusive relationship with the Conservative party is finally finished. That’s all folks, bar an argument about who gets Natalie Elphicke, the political equivalent of a smelly pet dog with dangly yellowing genitals and incontinence that the most compassionate partner will, ultimately, come to regret taking.
Yes. It’s the lying we can’t stand. Some of Rishi Sunak’s faults are excusable. It is understandable that he would not consider the sacrifice of the soldiers of D-day especially significant when his own parents had so nobly sacrificed his family’s Sky TV subscription to pay his Winchester College school fees. But it was on Tuesday of the week before last that, unforgivably, lying Sunak vomited out his instantly discredited lie about Labour’s £2,000 tax plans, live in an ITV debate against the lightning-reflexed Keir Starmer. Luckily Starmer shut Sunak’s false claims down with all the speed of an arthritic slug lurching towards a distant cabbage (though to compare lying Sunak to a vegetable at this stage in the Conservatives’ election campaign is perhaps to exaggerate his gifts as a communicator and electoral asset and is, moreover, unfair to cabbages).
Instead of apologising for their lie, perhaps learning from Boris Johnson’s Brexit bus bullshit, slippery single market membership assurances, and persuasive Partygate prevarications, the lying Conservatives now take every media opportunity to further propagate their lies. Lying Penny Mordaunt, less impressive when shorn of her Battlestar Galactica coronation cloak and Melnibonéan soul-stealing sword, repeatedly regurgitated the same disproven tax claim on TV on Friday of last week, like an enormous blue cormorant, while ignoring the unfailingly polite, and therefore utterly pointless, attempts by the BBC’s Mishal Husain to correct her, a supply teacher powerless before a spoilt lying child.
Why do the Conservatives just lie? Is clinging to that big tax lie the best advice their election strategist Isaac Levido, the New Statesman’s 15th most powerful British rightwinger and Beard Twat Quarterly’s beard twat of the year 2019, can give them? For half of his fee, I would gladly have turned up in a campaign office with a black marker pen and written the phrase “If you throw enough shit at a wall some if might stick” on a whiteboard. Because, at the moment, that’s as far as Conservative election strategy goes.
And guess what. You, the British electorate, are that wall. And the Conservatives’ election campaign is that shit. And, as the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg watches from a defensive ditch, the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Daily Express, all Conservative MPs and Levido himself are the medieval trebuchet siege engines hurling that shit at you. Who is so shameless they could continue to be associated with such news outlets? Camilla Tominey. Quentin Letts. Sarah Vine. Rupert Bear. How did the titans of yore fall so low?
Given that the Conservative campaign is built on lies, its achilles heel is facts
The lying Conservatives have form with lying as political strategy. In November 2019, during a televised leaders’ debate, the Conservatives changed the name of the Conservative campaign headquarters X account to FactcheckUK, hoping to steer anyone trying to verify Boris Johnson’s typically dubious claims back towards the party’s own alternative truths. It’s an approach reflected by the Tory peer and Lying Brexit Negotiations Idiot ™ ® Lord Frost’s tirade against the value of facts in a column in last week’s Daily Telegraph, Britain’s worst newspaper.
Given that the Conservative campaign is built on lies, its achilles heel, as Lord Frost knows, is facts. And so, apparently, “our new establishment – academics, quangocrats, the BBC – … are obsessed with misinformation and disinformation. They believe that you are too stupid to… distinguish between the true and the false. And they think it’s the government’s job – or perhaps theirs – to do it for you instead.” Given that Frost is part of a party that literally changed the name of its website to lie, his opening remarks represent something of a reach.
No wonder Frost fears facts. Lying is a way of life for the right in British politics. The ink on the Conservative government’s death certificate isn’t yet out of the ink bottle, but already the usual shadow-funded lie-factories of the right are cranking up the culture war crap again. You can’t vote in the National Trust’s 2024 elections yet, but the first online adverts of the year from Restore Trust, the Tufton Street-affiliated limited company that annually attempts to parachute its own climate-sceptic and anti-woke place-people on to the charity’s board, are already appearing, spreading the sort of stories that the Daily Telegraph has already had to apologise for proliferating, at an estimated spend of up to £15,000 over a two-week period.
The epidemic of lying in public life won’t end when the current iteration of the Conservative party is consigned to the pedal bin of history. But it would be a start if the party could be killed off for a generation. But can the various factions of the centre and the left unite against a common foe? There are few people the left hate more than other people on the left. And who can blame them? You campaign for years for a socialist utopia and end up watching the country governed by a Labour party so keen to succeed it accommodates the former Rwanda fan Natalie Elphicke and the climate-science denying Tufton Street tool Graham Stringer, while remaining cagey about endorsing Diane Abbott.
It was, I believe, me who, in a 2008 comedy routine, coined the phrase: “You can prove anything with facts.” But it was meant to be a joke, not the kernel of an entire Conservative election strategy.
Stewart Lee introduces the garage punk greats at the Lexington, London N1, performing a 45-minute standup set before the Primevals (1 July), The Shadracks (2 July) and the Fallen Leaves (3 July)