Don't point at Pinnochio's nose: 'Politeness' and palling around in British politics produces piss poor analysis
Dawn Butler's 'stunt' was to tell the truth in defiance of a rule that pretends she works in a parliament full of 'gentlemen'...
When Dawn Butler was ejected from the Commons yesterday for stating an objective fact — the Prime Minister is a liar and he lies a lot — the response from The Independent’s Chief Political Commentator was typical of many in the British political press:
There isn't even a Labour deputy leadership election in the offing and yet here is the cheap publicity stunt.
He went further in his deeply curséd newsletter1, writing witheringly — the only way it’s possible for a centuries-old vampire to write, to be fair — that:
Today in the Commons had an end-of-term air. This included a general debate on anything MPs wanted to talk about, in which Dawn Buttler, the Labour MP, got herself thrown out for calling Boris Johnson a liar. I believe this is the kind of publicity stunt you’d expect from the Scottish National Party, not an MP of a serious party of government.
It was a bit unfair to do it when Judith Cummins was in the chair — a Labour MP standing in as deputy speaker for Rosie Winterton, who has been pinged — but Cummins handled it fine.
The clerks take over on these occasions, handing Cummins the laminated sheet that ought to be headed ‘One of these jokers’ so that she could read out the bit from standing orders requiring the member to withdraw for the rest of the day.
There is a good reason for the rule against an MP calling another MP a liar which is that it is an insult, not an argument and it gets nobody anywhere…
Aside from his own cheap insults (“the kind of publicity stunt you’d expect from the Scottish National Party…”, “One of these jokers…”) and putting aside Rentoul’s life presidency of the Tony Blair Appreciation Society, a group for whom ignoring massive lies is an article of faith, his last point is abject horse shit.
Calling someone a liar is an argument. If you have the proof — and in the case of the endlessly blustering Boris Johnson, a human being who often seems like he’s stuck buffering when he encounters a fact he’d prefer to forget, there are vast dung heaps of deceptions and distortions to pick through.
Rentoul has form for reacting as if the word ‘liar’ is a bottle of holy water or a really big sharpened stake. In November 2010, he wrote:
I think that most politicians tell the truth, more so than most other human beings. I dislike the use of the words ‘lie’ and ‘liar’ in politics.
I think less of William Hague for using it against Blair in 1999 and I thought it contemptible of Michael Howard to use it in the 2005 election campaign of Blair’s case for joining the invasion of Iraq, which Howard supported. I hope that most people are capable of telling the difference between assertions that turned out to be mistaken and deliberate deception.
Yes, yes, John, we know you sleep every night beneath a Tony Blair duvet set, staring up at a large Tony Blair poster blu-tacked to the ceiling, before falling into a happy slumber where Tony tells you he thinks you too are a “pretty straight sort of guy” and then waking to the sound of your Tony Blair alarm clock shouting, “It is a new day, is it not?” But I’d like you to tell the families of dead Iraqi children that there’s a very important distinction between “being mistaken” and “deception”. I’m sure it would come as a great comfort.
In a column that the chaotic Independent website lists as from October 2011, but which appears to have been written during the 2005 general election, Rentoul wrote under the headline, Beware the playground chants of 'Liar! Liar!', that:
If anything, [Blair] exaggerated the intelligence [arguing for us to go to war with Iraq] because he believed it and sought to persuade others to take the dangers seriously. The intelligence agencies in Britain and the US had convinced themselves that Saddam was hiding something. Blair's was not an unreasonable view. He was not looking for reasons to avoid military action; he had long been convinced that Iraq and the world would be safer if the international community were prepared to use force against Saddam.
Nor, in the anti-war view, can cabinet ministers and MPs possibly have supported Blair's decision unless they had been misled or bullied. Proper procedure must have been short-circuited or abused. Parliament must have been lied to, or - in the weaselly code of the supposedly impartial BBC - the failure to find weapons of mass destruction has undermined "trust" in the Prime Minister. But at least it uses code, rather than joining in the debasement of political language.
The most extraordinary development of the final phase of the campaign has been the cynicism of Michael Howard in trying to use the anti-war poison of the "liar" word for his own purposes. I do not know who leaked the Attorney General's advice, but it is a bit of a coincidence that the Conservatives should have unveiled a poster the day before saying of Blair: "If he's prepared to lie to take us to war, he's prepared to lie to win an election."
While it’s easy to be distracted by Rentoul’s grotesque fanboyish defence of Blair, the key part of that quote is his high dudgeon about “the debasement of political language”. For commentators like Rentoul, who obsess about tone and often get distracted from substance, it’s worse to call someone a liar than to be one. That’s because you can always find a way to avoid stating what everyone else can see.
So it is that we have a parliamentary culture where calling someone “a liar” in the House of Commons is a slur so MPs have to reach for elegant variations. An MP cannot accuse another of lying but can say they are guilty of terminological inexactitude (a lie) or that, rather than simply lying, they have been “economical with the truth”.
“Lie”, “lying” and “liar” are only three of the words deemed “unparliamentary” under parliament’s standing orders. It’s also forbidden to call another MP a bastard, blackguard, dodgy, drunk2, a git, a guttersnipe, a hooligan, an idiot, an ignoramus, a pipsqueak, a rat, slimy, a sod, a squirt, a stoolpigeon, a swine, a tart, a traitor or a wart. Those are all insults and if they were allowed in the chamber it’s unlikely that MPs would get around to doing anything else.
But suggesting an MP is a hypocrite, has used falsehoods (which are just lies with more expensive shoes) or has been deceptive are all disqualified as terms considered unparliamentary despite, as with lying, each of them being provable. Hypocrisy leaves evidence as does repeated reliance on falsehoods.
The ‘fine’ political language that John Rentoul and others fetishise is a means to obscure public discourse. It forces our representatives to play language games to describe what everyone can see as lies. But we have a class of political reporters, among who Rentoul is a long-standing example, who are comfortable with telling us that Boris Johnson’s lies are “priced in”.
Here’s what happened in the Commons yesterday:
Dawn Butler: The Prime Minister has said we have severed the link between infection and serious disease and death, not only is this not true, Madam Deputy Speaker, but it is dangerous and it is dangerous to lie in the pandemic. And I’m disappointed that the Prime Minister has not come to this House to correct the record and to correct the fact that he has lied to this house and to the country over and over again.
Deputy Speaker: Order. I’m sure that the member will reflect on her words just there and perhaps just correct the record.
Dawn Butler: Madame Deputy Speaker, what would you rather a weakened leg or a severed leg? At the end of the day, the Prime Minister has lied to this house time and time again, and it’s funny that we get in trouble in this place for calling out the lie rather than the person lying.
Deputy Speaker: Order. Order. Order. Can you, please, please, reflect on your words and withdraw your remarks?
Dawn Butler: Madame Deputy Speaker, I’ve reflected on my words and somebody needs to tell the truth in this house that the Prime Minister has lied.
Deputy Speaker: Under the power given me by Standing Order No.43, I order the member to withdraw from the House for the remainder of the day’s sitting.
Of course, Butler knew that if she did not withdraw her remarks she would be made to leave the chamber and, of course, it was a stunt. But using the rules of the Commons against it to get attention is one of a small toolbox available to campaigning opposition MPs. Commentators, like Rentoul — who echoed the ugly line of drink driving enthusiast and perpetually thirsty bully Guido Fawkes — who demand ‘politeness’ are actually telling those who dissent to shut up.
Parliament is not designed to deliver MPs who tell the truth nor to enable those who want to do so. Instead, its rules and regulations act to make its debates one step removed from reality, favouring those like Boris Johnson who spent their student years posturing in front of identical dispatch boxes at the Oxford Union.
Speaking to Byline — who I have started writing for recently — Butler says:
So I got thrown out of the chamber and out of parliament today because I called Boris Johnson a liar on the floor of the house. The thing is, Boris Johnson is a serial liar. That’s been proven time and time again.
He said, for instance, that the economy has improved 73% since the Tories have taken over, that’s a lie — it’s 20%. Boris Johnson said that we have severed the link between infection, hospital rates and death. That’s a lie. But not only did he lie, but he said the scientists said this, and the scientists had to correct Boris Johnson and said that the link had been weakened. Weakened is very different to being severed.
Butler is far from alone in saying that Boris Johson is “a serial liar”. In her book, Goodbye Britannia, France’s former ambassador to London, Sylvie Bermann, said he “lies to embellish reality, as a game, and as an instrument of power” and that for him “the ends justify the means. He has no rules”.
In The Assault on Truth, Peter Oborne details the catalogue of lies, deceptions and distortions that have tumbled forth from Boris Johnson’s mouth. He writes:
[Johnson] lies habitually, with impunity, and without conscience… [His] record is as a liar, charlatan and cheat.
Oborne created a whole website to catalogue the deceptions The lies, falsehoods and misrepresentations of Boris Johnson and his government which, although it hasn’t been updated since December 2019, requires a lot of scrolling to get through. Adding all the lies that have dripped from the lips of the Prime Minister and his cabinet since the pandemic will take a long time.
But political reporters need there to be more to Johnson, a more complicated narrative to explain his rise than that he is a man whose lies are verbal carpet bombing, so knotty and overlapping that even he gets so tied up in them that he comes to believe them.
That’s why, when BBC News’ Political Editor, Laura Kuenssberg wrote an article back in May headlined ‘Boris Johnson: What is the PM's relationship with the truth?’ she tied herself in knots with justifications. Like Rentoul, she claims that politicians are really quite honest:
Politicians, even really honest ones, regularly say things they don't quite believe.
The public knows this. We don't expect our politicians to be angels. But outright lying, in my experience, is relatively rare. It is too easily found out.
This is a mix of credulousness and convenience. So much of British political journalism is about access and to maintain that access reporters have to keep their sources sweet. So they strain to believe the lines they are briefed with and often repeat them to their readers, listeners, and viewers with little real analysis applied and few caveats given.
In her article, Kuenssberg scrabbled to find excuses for the Prime Minister. He could not simply be a liar and a chancer — what would have happened if Walker from Dad’s Army was brought in to replace Winston Churchill — but instead a statesman, a tactician, a man playing five-dimensional chess. She wrote:
One insider who knows him well says it is simply "unfair and easy to cry 'liar', as the opposition has done".
"He's far more complex and strategic and people don't give him credit for how calculating and clever he is."
That cry of “unfairness” is echoed in the complaints today that Dawn Butler didn’t play nice. We don’t want an opposition that plays nice nor need one. We need people in public life who are willing to unpick lies from truth and, when they get caught, face the consequences for their deception.
Sir Keir Starmer — himself a creature of the establishment — is frequently too fair to the Prime Minister. As I wrote at the time:
His response to the flatgate scandal was to wander around a branch of John Lewis pestering the wallpaper.
Butler referred to campaigner Peter Stefanovic’s compilation of Boris Johnson lying time and time again in the House of Commons. Johnson has not — as Butler was asked to after she correctly called the Prime Minister a liar — “corrected the record” after any of the statements contained in that video.
Much of the pearl-clutching about Dawn Butler’s speech today refers back to Erskine May — “the Bible of parliamentary procedure” — and its rules on what language is permissible in parliament. But there is another aspect of the handbook that seems to have been utterly ignored while the antiquated injunction of calling a liar a liar is defended; the section headlined Ministerial accountability to Parliament states:
It is of paramount importance that ministers give accurate and truthful information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity. Ministers who knowingly mislead Parliament will be expected to offer their resignation.
The Prime Minister is on camera lying over and over and over and over again. His resignation has not been forthcoming, nor is it likely to be. The reality of British politics is lies, distortions and deceptions are par for the course. But telling the truth about those lies is the one thing that’s guaranteed to get you slung out of parliament for the day.
Gavin Barwell, the animatronic boiled egg, former MP, ex-chief of staff to Theresa May and now a member of the House of Lords, wrote:
Lots of people tweeting admiringly about Dawn Butler telling it as she sees it. In general, I’m all for politicians being authentic, but there’s enough poison in our politics as it is and we should resist a descent to the name-calling that is common in some other countries.
Gavin, A question. I can find no evidence that you complained when the prime minister called black people piccaninies or said women who wear the burqa resemble letterboxes and bank robbers. Am I wrong about this?
And there it is: The politeness that Barwell, Rentoul and the rest demand from politics is not about kindness or fairness but silence. It is the politeness of the well-polished boot, the politeness of “do as I say and not as I do”, the politeness of hypocrites, liars, and crooks.
But then, if I were an MP, it would be impolite for me to say that.
Thanks to Chimp Chirpy on Twitter for drawing my attention to the newsletter quote.
If an MP is drunk, you can say they are “tired and emotional”. Tired and emotional as a newt.