ANOTHER VOICE

What the President's situation tells us about lying in politics (and life)

MATTHEW PARRIS

Suppose the President of the United States were secretly left-handed. Suppose left-handedness were seen by many in the news media as a condition so disabling to the dignity of that office as almost to dis- qualify a man from the job. Imagine that, as a young political aspirant who had already learned discretion, Mr Clinton had neither forsaken his left-handedness nor his politi- cal ambitions but instead chosen the course adopted so often throughout history by those with something to hide, and denied his flaw.

Imagine he had signed treaties with a right-handed flourish, and conducted all his other duties with every appearance of an easy and confident right-handedness. Imag- ine that when asked, 'Are you right-hand- ed?' the President had replied with an unhesitating 'Yes, sir!'

But suppose that, covertly and persistent- ly and all along, the President had been reverting to left-handedness in the privacy of his own boudoir. Worse, that he had acted left-handedly in the present of close friends and confidants, penning billets- doux, plucking grapes and even blowing his nose with his left hand. He did not have to do any of this, of course — he could have reformed — but it was a side of his nature with which he felt confident. He found it relaxing to revert in private; he thought it didn't matter and he thought he could get away with it.

Imagine, now, that rumours of the Presi- dent's hidden vice began to circulate. So widely did the tittle-tattle spread that jour- nalists were emboldened to ask him straight out whether there was anything in the stories that he was privately a left-hand- ed president. Imagine the reply was unam- biguous and always the same: no, absolute- ly not.

But still the rumours flew. The President was obliged to multiply his denials, repeat- ing them in response to a growing list of specific dates and allegations. Some of those he had thought he could trust began to join the whispering. Others sought his advice on what to say if questioned. The President urged them to conceal the truth at all costs. 'As long as you say it didn't happen, it didn't happen,' a close presiden- tial aide was reported as advising one potential security risk.

Things are getting hot. By now, you will guess, it is probably clear to our hero that it would have been a great deal better if he had never acted left-handedly, even pri- vately; or that, failing an effective change in his behaviour, better if he had admitted at the outset that there had been private laps- es. The world could have handled this news if presented in a matter-of-fact way from the start. But now it is too late. He just has to go on, brazening it out, upping the stakes in the vehemence of his denials, and praying that nobody will be able to prove he has lied.

For that is what the issue has now become. Has the President lied? Grown-up sorts of chaps — the kind who would not want to sound prudish at dinner pat-ties — have taken to braying that, of course, they don't have a problem about left-handed- ness — does anyone, these days? If the President wants to be a left-hander in the private rooms of the White House and a right-hander on the lawn and in the Oval Room — well, good for him.

But that isn't the issue, they add, with a knowledgable shrug. The problem is that the President is said to have lied, and to have involved others in his lies. Could America really trust the word of its Presi- dent on any great issue if on this matter — small in itself — his reflex when cornered has been a resort to mendacity? The issue, in short, is the character of the President.

Following the imagined train of events to this juncture, I find it hard at any point to part company with the moral reasoning. I certainly don't think presidents should always lie. Asked how one could feel confi- dent a man would be truthful on a big issue if he would lie on a small one, I am at loss to answer.

And yet if that President were to declare, 'Yes, I have been left-handed in private; yes, I lied about it; and no, I do not plan to resign,' my instinct would be to back him. Ask me why and I would have to say that, for me, the central fact remains the behaviour of which he was first accused, of which I simply cannot take a serious view. As for his subsequent lies — well, why do we push a man into a corner on an issue of palpable irrelevance? We give him little choice but to lie. You can make any child lie, if you frighten him enough.

I do not blame the Jews who pretended not to be Jews in order to keep their pos- sessions. I do not blame the Catholics who hid their faith in order to attain public office. I do not blame the homosexual sol- diers who deny it on pain of dismissal. I do not blame Mrs Teresa Gorman for saying she was 50 when she was 60 in order to be selected as a Conservative candidate. And, while promiscuity is neither irreversible, a faith or a matter of principle, it is not to me a sin so grave that a presidency should hang upon it.

As for the lying — heavens, this is going to sound awful — doesn't everybody, if the stakes are high enough? Clinton's lies, if lies they are, are designed to hurt nobody, but simply to protect himself. Good luck to him. It's a dangerous world and I hope he does know how to lie. I should feel rather vulnerable were the free world to be led by a man who was incapable of dissimulating.

As for those chaps who tell you that the real sin is to mislead your colleagues — that is what they said about Jack Profumo. It has become a received truth that what was unforgivable was to lie to the Com- mons, and a sillier piece of nonsense never graced the history books. If the war minis- ter had told the House he had been sleep- ing with the Soviet naval attaché's tart, he would have been out within hours. He had nothing to lose.

I do not like press bullies who corner a man into evasions, then tell him it is for his evasions that he is to be beaten. I dare say Clinton is now finished, I do not believe he is an unusually bad man, and I'm sorry. When the hysteria abates in a few years, this is all going to look very silly.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.