Mind your language
ON the television the other day Anthony Holden was talking about a royal spokesman being 'economical with the truth'. He meant that the spokesman was lying, and he was perhaps hoping to raise a chuckle from his audience.
Well, I do not know about the latter, but I think that Lord Armstrong (Robert Armstrong as he was known when he was head of the Civil Service in the 1980s) has been unfairly treated by many who trot out this cliched nudge. In 1986, speaking of a letter that came up during the Spy- catcher trial, Robert Armstrong had said, 'It contains a misleading impression, not a lie. It was being economical with the truth.'
To some who read this, including plenty of journalists, the terminology seemed entirely novel: a striking metaphor taken from accountancy. It was nothing of the sort. Economy has had a complicated histo- ry. The underlying concept is one of house- keeping, from the Greek oi/cos, a house; but it soon went in two principal directions, towards political and financial economy, and towards the governance of the uni- verse through the 'economy of salvation'.
John Henry Newman is probably the author from which most people today would take the idea of economy with the truth. Newman was no liar, as he demon- strated at great length in his Apologia, but one of his favourite concepts was that of reticence, of not spattering the page with the most sacred truths of Christianity. His apologetic looked back to the disciplina arcana of the early Church.
Lord Armstrong referred to Newman When he spoke on 'Being Economical With the Truth' on his inauguration as Chancellor of Hull University. He also quoted Edmund Burke, who said in 1796, As in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth.' That seems to glance at the Aristotelian mean in natural virtues.
The new Oxford Dictionary of 20th Cen- lUPY Quotations has unearthed a reference to Harold Wilson's being 'over-economi- cal with the truth' in the opinion of the Earl of Dalkeith (now the Duke of Buc- cleuch) during a speech in the Commons in 1968. Perhaps one of the Earl's motives was to avoid the unparliamentary term liar.
As for Lord Armstrong, his usage extended, in this particular case, to a sug- gestio falsi. Mr Alan Clark, in his robust Way, took the phrase a step further when he gave evidence during the Matrix Churchill case in 1992 by referring to 'our ?Id friend economical . . . with the actual- Ile: This combines the idea of suppressio v.en with an unusual use of actua/ite, which M English I think means 'documentary film footage' and in French 'current events or even 'the news' on television. But that is another story.
Dot Wordsworth
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