ANOTHER VOICE
Mr Blair's pants may be on fire, but he understands human nature
BORIS JOHNSON
i. Right. I've had enough of this. I just won't put up with it any more. I find it quite extraordinary that the Tory party can persist in this assault on the dignity of the Prime Minister. They keep calling him Phoney Tony. They say he's a Walter Mitty, living in a kind of fantasy world, and they allege furthermore that he's a liar and that his pants are on fire. Have they no soul, no imagination?
When Tony Blair told Des O'Connor three years ago that he stowed away, aged 14, on a flight bound from Newcastle to the Bahamas, this sent the Tory Research Department into an ecstasy of rabbinical cross-checking. 'Ha!' said William Hague recently at Prime Minister's Questions, after his sleuths had come up with the dope: 'In Newcastle airport's 61-year histo- ry, there has never been a flight to the Bahamas. In 1969 the only exotic destina- tions served by Newcastle were Jersey and the Isle of Man.' But is it not possible, you gnomes of Smith Square, that our adoles- cent future Prime Minister, using his abun- dant charm, had persuaded the pilot to drop the Isle of Man from the schedule, and head for Nassau?
Why are you so plonking, so unimagina- tive? In 1997, the Prime Minister, who played rugby at school, was telling a local radio station about his passion for football, and reminisced about watching his favourite Newcastle player, centre-forward Jackie Milburn, from a seat behind one of the goals at St James's Park. 'There are two problems with that statement,' said Mr Hague recently in his best nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah way. 'Seats were not installed behind the goals until the 1990s and Jackie Milburn left the club when the Prime Min- ister was four years old.' Well, is it not cred- ible, nonetheless, that a special seat was constructed for the infant Blair? And, as for Jackie Milburn, he may well have staged a special benefit match; for the benefit of the future Prime Minister, that is.
Perhaps Blair really did watch Jackie Milburn aged four. As I write these words, I find myself teetering on the precipice of persuasion, of belief. The truly amazing quality of Blair is not that he fibs — in that respect he is not unique among politicians or the rest of the human race. What makes him so interesting and so engaging is that his lying seems to matter so little; and, because it matters so little to him, it doesn't seem to matter much to us, the electorate at large. Take other prime ministers. Mar- garet Thatcher almost certainly lied over Westland, in the sense that she knew Leon Brittan had leaked the Attorney-General's letter. Merely to put it like that, to ask the reader to try to remember what the blasted letter was all about, shows what a small lie it was, in the cosmic scheme.
But she felt the oppression of it, righ- teous Methodist girl that she was; she felt the guilt of that lie; and she knew that the debate over Westland was one she might not have survived had Kinnock not blown his chance. Or take John Major, another leader who was not above massaging the truth, if he felt that his enemies had him cornered, and that it would buy him time. The important point is that, in almost all cases, the act of lying in politics is accompa- nied by a twinge of conscience, a sense that dreadful things will result from being found out. The existence or otherwise of the lie becomes a matter of immense importance. Politicians will go to embarrassing lengths to avoid being convicted of lying, and there- by, like Jonathan Aitken, make things far worse.
The fascinating thing about Blair is that he does not bother to cover up his lies; he just repeats them. Even when his handlers must have known it was a porkie, he per- sisted, over several weeks, in saying that the Hunting with Dogs Bill was 'blocked by the hereditary peers in the House of Lords', when in fact it had run out of time in the Commons. When Blair is caught hare-faced in the act of deception, so blatant a liar that the smoke is billowing from his trousers, he just carries on. Indeed, perhaps under some kind of mass hypnosis, we all ignore the sul- phurous odour of burning pants, because Blair ignores it. William Hague tells us that tax is rising fast under this government. Blair denies it, and denies it, and denies it. The facts support Mr Hague; but which of the pair does the public find more credible?
The people of Northern Ireland have just embarked on devolved government; and anyone sensible will be praying that all works out for the best. The fact remains, however, that the process was assisted by a series of mendacities from the Prime Minis- ter. On 20 May last year, three days before the referendum on the Good Friday Agree- ment, the Prime Minister allowed the fol- lowing slogans, suffixed by his signature, to be paraded before the electorate: 'Those who use or threaten violence excluded from the government of Northern Ireland', and 'Prisoners kept in unless violence is given up for good'. No doubt some cunning logi- cians had advised the Prime Minister that these phrases, devoid of a main verb, were strictly meaningless. They were certainly taken as promises, though; they were meant to be taken as promises; and insofar as they turned out to be wholly insincere, they were lies. And yet, were they insincere?
We are now at the crux of it all, the most important feature of Blair's psychology, the mental trick that has made him such a tow- ering figure in modern politics. A lie, classi- cally defined, is a witting statement of false- hood. In other words, you not only have to say something which is not true, but you have to know it is not true. Blair, as Bruce Anderson hinted last week, has perfected a kind of De Niro-esque technique of politi- cal method acting, so that at the moment he declares some great whopper, with his chin clamped and his eyes blazing, the lobes of his brain go into a kind of spasm from which the real world is excluded, and in that instant he believes that he is telling the truth, conviction radiates from him, and indeed, on any proper definition, therefore, he is not guilty of lying.
It is that aura of belief which is so power- ful. Blair has discovered a truth, which has been exploited for good or ill by all manner of saints and sickos down the ages, that instead of working out whether something is true or false, human beings will tend to believe in that which is strongly believed in.
Previous page
