What’s truth got to do with it?

Peter Oborne says New Labour has latched on to postmodernist philosophy to replace mere facts with a ‘narrative’ that serves party interests As his premiership has persisted, many of Tony Blair’s statements have ceased to be grounded in ordinary, practical, testable fact. It is as if he has departed on an epistemological adventure of his own; as if truth for the Prime Minister boils down to little more than what he believes or says at a particular moment. On the eve of the Iraq war he told Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, ‘I may be wrong about this but it’s what I believe.’ The appeal here was ultimately not to evidence, or fact, or to documentation and empirical proof. It was a simple statement of strength of conviction and purity of motive. The Prime Minister produced an even more remarkable comment 12 months later when attempting to explain the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: ‘I only know what I believe.’ The same special attitude to truth is to be found in the United States. In the summer of 2002 the New York Times writer, Ron Suskind, met a senior adviser at the Bush White House. He was surprised to find that the aide dismissed his remarks:

The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works any more,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality judiciously as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.

Hostility to a ‘reality-based’ analysis of events can be traced back to postmodernism, which has become a fashionable orthodoxy among teachers of philosophy, and indeed other academic disciplines. Postmodernism is one modern manifestation of extreme philosophical scepticism, a tradition which can be traced right back to the beginnings of thought and the ancient Greek school of Pyrrho. This school despaired of the notion that truth was accessible and deduced that no ultimately sta ble distinction could be drawn between truth and falsehood.

Postmodernism denies that the truth can ever be known. It holds that words like falsehood, accuracy and deception, at any rate as used in ordinary speech, have no validity. That is because it concerns itself with the competing claims of rival truths. The idea of verifiable reality, so important to the AngloAmerican school of empirical philosophy, is dismissed as an absurdity.

Postmodern thinking grew up in the astonishingly influential school of French philosophy which flourished in the 1970s and 1980s and is perhaps associated in particular with the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault and the philosopher Jacques Derrida. Truth was, for Foucault, no more than an effect of the rules of discourse, itself a highly problematic concept, and for Foucault all discourses were equally valid. Perception and truth were there to be created. Though he was famous for historical studies of sex, madness and prisons, Foucault declared, ‘I am well aware that I have not written anything but fictions.’ Foucault sometimes argued that truth was the effect of power relations, the expression of dominance, whether political, economic or sexual.

The influential American philosopher Richard Rorty helped take the work of Foucault and Derrida across the Atlantic. Rorty shared the view of the French school that truth claims could never be incontestably grounded, and argued that an alternative way of giving weight to words was to ‘construct’ what he called a ‘narrative’. This has the effect of shifting the emphasis of argument from truths which can be verified to ‘narratives’ that can be manufactured.

Right from the start of the Blair period ‘narrative’ and ‘discourse’ fascinated New Labour intellectuals. Agonisingly aware that the British Left had become associated with degradation and failure, New Labour thinkers were fascinated by the way the Conservative party, through Margaret Thatcher, had created what they saw as a benign myth which carried great power in the public mind. The Left resolved to create an alternative. The historian Tristram Hunt — a protégé of Peter Mandelson who at one stage worked as a neophyte inside New Labour’s Millbank machine — has given an interesting glimpse into the political utility of the postmodernist concept of ‘narrative’. Writing in the New Statesman some time after the 1997 general election victory, Hunt observed:

It is this use of power to close down alternative visions of the past that makes the idea of narrative so irresistible to politicians. Once the New Right had established the idea of British postwar decline as the dominant discourse, Thatcher’s narrative of neoliberal renewal seemed all the more convincing. The self-imposed challenge for New Labour appears to be to establish the 1980s as a valueless time when there was no such thing as society, and boom and bust stalked the land.

The passage above could not have been written either by a Tory or by an Old Labour writer. What makes it quite unmistakably New Labour is the assumption that political reality was not something that exists ‘out there’, checkable and subject to independent verification. On the contrary, it has suddenly become something that can be shaped and used as part of the battle for power. Tory party propagandists certainly used advertising and other techniques to make the most of Mrs Thatcher’s various triumphs and play down her mistakes and failures. But they never departed from the commonsense assumption that her national reputation was firmly based on what they continued to think of as real achievements, like the Falklands war and the defeat of the min ers’ strike. Old Labour was no more imaginative. It stolidly continued to present what it saw as the truth.

New Labour has always felt liberated from this boring reliance on mere facts. From the very beginning it believed that reality was capable of being created afresh. It imported the postmodernist notion of ‘narrative’, and the associated proposition that the truth is something that can artfully be ‘constructed’, into the British political system. It is quite easy to show that this is the case through the use of traditional empirical methods, thankfully without recourse either to the language or to the methods of the French philosophical school. It can be done through study of the use of the word ‘narrative’ in British political debate and ordinary language over the past two decades.

This is an elementary exercise to carry out, greatly helped by the search engine on the Hansard website and the easy availability of newspaper databases. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word narrative has no fewer than three meanings. There is a strict legal usage, dating back centuries: ‘that part of a deed or document which contains a statement of the relevant or essential facts’. There is a literary usage: ‘an account or narration; a history, a tale, story, recital (of facts etc)’. It can also be used to describe ‘the practice or act of narrating; something to narrate’.

Nowhere does the OED refer to the kind of use made of the word ‘narrative’ by postmodern theorists. That is not surprising. This usage, while prevalent in philosophical schools and university English faculties for two decades, did not start to enter more general circulation until the early 1990s. The evidence suggests that this was a direct result of the emergence of New Labour.

The first case I have found of the word being given its novel meaning, but used outside its academic birthplace, comes in spring 1994. The agent of this act of liberation was none other than the New Labour intellectual Geoff Mulgan, founder of the Demos thinktank from which Tony Blair pillaged so many of his ideas, who later held powerful jobs in Downing Street and Whitehall. He was writing shortly before the death of John Smith. ‘But now under John Smith,’ complained Mulgan, ‘all sense of narrative seems to drown in a morass of platitudes about social justice and economic efficiency.’ The Mulgan article appeared in the Guardian at the very end of the two-year period between the resignation of Neil Kinnock and the death of John Smith when the New Labour clique — Peter Mandelson, Philip Gould, Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair — were out of sympathy with the leadership and played the role of an internal opposition. Mulgan supported this faction and frequently articulated its concerns. It is highly significant that this very early New Labour use of the term ‘narrative’ in its postmodern mode should crop up in the context of an attack on Smith, an old-fashioned social democratic politician scornful of the modernisers.

Mulgan seems to have concluded that the word, with all the weight placed upon it by postmodern thinkers, was far too good to be wasted on academics. The following July, the month that Tony Blair was crowned party leader, Mulgan teamed up with another New Labour intellectual, Charles Leadbeater, to write, also in the Guardian: ‘Politics is essentially about communicating ideas, choices and decisions between the governed and the governors. It is about constructing narratives that make sense to people: stories that encompass their identities, aspirations and fears, and the policies that reflect them. Yet it is in these central tasks that politicians seem at times to be most deficient.’ (The inventive Leadbeater at this stage was an assistant editor of the Independent newspaper where, the same year, with the author Helen Fielding, he dreamed up the Bridget Jones’s Diary column.) Will Hutton, then a fashionable economics commentator friendly to Tony Blair, was swift to spot and make use of the neologism. He lamented in the Guardian on 9 July 1995 that the Labour party’s policy commissions ‘have not been organised into a strong political narrative and sold hard’. Hutton soon embraced the term as if it were his own. The following year he once again scornfully blamed the traditional Left for failure to organise a ‘strong political narrative’. He said that ‘the Old Labour Left still hankers for more traditional responses’. Once again the postmodern concept of ‘narrative’ is being used to express the concerns of the New Labour faction around Tony Blair, and undermine the traditional methods of the Labour party.

Peter Mandelson, the foremost New Labour strategist, understood the thinking, or at any rate employed the language, of postmodernism. He entertained the proposition that truth is independent from reality with an alarming enthusiasm, announcing to the interviewer Katharine Viner in the Guardian in August 1997 that he pleaded guilty to the charge of trying to create the truth. ‘If you’re accusing me of getting the truth across about what the government has decided to do, that I’m putting the very best face or gloss on the government’s policies, that I’m trying to avoid gaffes or setbacks and that I’m trying to create the truth — if that’s news management, I plead guilty.’ I emailed Mandelson some years later to ask him exactly what he meant. He claimed he had meant something else. His full reply read as follows: ‘In haste: the quote (of which I have no memory) reads a bit like a stream of Mandelson consciousness. I was not weighing every word (or so it seems to me). If I am quoted accurately — I cannot verify — it seems fine that I would have meant “establish” rather than “create”. You cannot create truth although you can create an understanding of truth.’ Purists are entitled to object that there was a Stalinist as well as postmodern undertone in this Mandelson remark — a thoroughgoing postmodernist would have said, ‘I’m trying to create a truth.’ As far as I can discern, the first MP of any party to give the word ‘narrative’ its postmodern meaning in Parliament was the modernising Labour MP Patricia Hewitt, soon to accelerate through the ranks of the Blair government, when taking evidence on the social security committee in June 1998. She declared that ‘for these measures to mean something they have to reflect a story, there has to be a narrative in here’. To be sure, the old uses of the word persisted. The Labour MP Joyce Quin, not a member of the Blairite vanguard, attempted to stem the tide when she used the word in its increasingly quaint dictionary sense, referring to the ‘narrative report accompanying the expenditure of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’. Lord Donoughue, a Downing Street aide during the long-lost days of the Harold Wilson governments, nostalgically informed the House of Lords that ‘the Victorian County Histories include narrative and analysis and [are] a key part of our national heritage’. Doubtless all this was the case. But resistance was useless. By the start of 2000, the new usage had become commonplace in Parliament. Even comparatively obscure Labour MPs like Angela Eagle were thoughtlessly adopting the postmodern idiom: ‘We shall be extremely interested to ascertain whether we can establish an effective narrative on rights and responsibilities.’ Soon it was being let loose on the television studios. Ace Labour strategist Douglas Alexander told Newsnight in March 2002 that ‘we face a challenge of explaining not just policy changes but the political narrative that accompanies it’.

Towards the end of 2000 the word starts to crop up in lobby briefings by Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman (PMOS). In September that year he was telling journalists that ‘the Prime Minister and Chancellor were absolutely clear that we had an underinvested country and we had to take the decisions necessary to modernise it for the long term. This was the narrative of this government for this Parliament and it was not going to change.’ In December the PMOS pronounced, ‘As the Prime Minister had said on Friday there was a clear narrative to this Parliament. We believed the economic foundations that had been laid were strengthening.’ The following month the PMOS declared that ‘we had always recognised there would be an economic narrative to this Parliament’, that ‘there was a narrative for our public services which was unfolding’, that ‘clearly there was an overall narrative to the government’s public service reform agenda’ and that ‘there was a clear narrative for our public services’.

In an exquisite manifestation of this new method, Campbell even created a Whitehall post called ‘Head of Story Development’. This was filled by one Paul Hamill, who played a role in the production of the shambolic February 2003 dossier on Iraq’s socalled weapons of mass destruction. In due course MPs questioned Alastair Campbell about this curious new public office, its title as characteristic of the postmodern period as Gentleman of the Bedchamber was of the 17th century. Campbell explained: ‘What that means is somebody who takes a brief, an issue — as I say, we are talking about different themes that we are trying to pursue — and then turns it into a product that might be of interest to the media. That is what they do.’ This new environment meant that anything that got in the way of Downing Street, whether an inconvenient statistic or an annoying piece of Whitehall convention, was bypassed or suppressed. Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair were justified and sanctioned by their privileged access to a higher vision. They felt free to treat the facts in a contingent manner, use them as instruments to an end, make misleading statements, and recount false and sometimes laboriously elaborated accounts of events because they were so utterly confident in the virtuousness of their motives. The facts became what they said they were, and the rules were the ones which suited them. By the start of the 21st century the destruction of Whitehall procedures had created near perfect laboratory conditions for the radical New Labour epistemology to flourish.

Before long, political commentators and, very shortly afterwards, modernising Tories anxious to ape Tony Blair’s success were all using the word ‘narrative’. The postmodern use of ‘narrative’, released from its thralldom to academia by Geoff Mulgan, had become what the grammarian H.W. Fowler deprecated as a Vogue Word. This is Fowler’s definition from Modern English Usage:

Every now and then a word emerges from obscurity, or even from nothingness, or a merely potential and not actual existence, into sudden popularity. It is often, but not necessarily, one that by no means explains itself to the average man, who has to find out its meanings as best he can. His wrestlings with it have usually some effect upon it; it does not mean quite what it ought to, but to make up for that it means some things that it ought not to, by the time he has done with it.

In a House of Lords debate on 31 October 2000 the political scientist Lord Dahrendorf noted the derivation, and significance, of the new usage. He observed, ‘The Third Way was never actually a programme. It was intended to be what in postmodern language — not mine really — would be called a narrative.’ He went on:

It is a narrative in the sense that it was intended to provide a big story which pulled together the necessarily varied and diverse strands of the policy of a government. Such big stories are rare. I am not talking about the very big stories of communism and fascism, I am talking about the next level the national big stories.

There were two big stories.... There was the Attlee story of extended citizenship rights for all and everything that goes with the extension of citizenship rights, not least as a response to the experience of the nation during the war.

There was the big story which one might call the Thatcher story of rolling back the state, and perhaps curtailing private power within the country in the interest of a more open economy and society.

If one does not have a narrative of this major kind, one is left with a list of achievements. That is fine. But it marks the difference between great governments and good governments. New Labour at a certain point hoped to have such a narrative.

New Labour appropriated the idea of ‘narrative’ to illuminate its presence in government, and create an explanatory framework that would define the political landscape in its own terms. It is noteworthy that it has its origins in a school of philosophy that holds that standards of truth and falsehood are determined by power and expedience. The Prime Minister has often spoken of his desire to ‘modernise’ Britain. But it is rather more accurate to assert that he and his New Labour coconspirators set out to postmodernise British political debate. As Tony Blair and his New Labour faction seized power in the Labour party, they set about — to use their own private language, purloined from French postmodern philosophical salons — the ‘construction’ of the truth.

This is an edited extract from Peter Oborne’s new book, The Rise of Political Lying, the Free Press, £7.99.