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Peter Oborne
The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism
The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism
I read this book with a combination of fascination and horror, but not really surprise. Most of the ground covered will be painfully familiar to anyone who is an afficionado of politics.
Peter Oborne is a political journalist, formerly part of the mainstream media consensus – writing for the Spectator and Daily Telegraph, either side of a spell at an unspeakable tabloid (think of something that rhymes with fail) – who has started to take a more critical line in…
…recent years.
“The Assault on Truth” looks at Boris Johnson’s spell as Prime Minister, from its start in July 2019, through until late 2020.
Oborne draws comparisons between Johnson’s antics and those of Donald Trump, the President of the USA – elected in 2016, defeated in November 2020, but still refusing to accept the latter result when the postscript to this book was written, over a month later.
The basic premiss is that Johnson, following the lead of Trump, and joined by his all-too-loyal allies in the current Conservative government, constantly tells lies.
At the same time, Johnson and his ministers do not receive the level of challenge, especially from the mass media, that the public have a right to expect in a supposedly democratic society. Oborne makes his point with many examples of Johnson’s repeated falsehoods.
These are evidenced by extensive footnotes, in which Oborne directs the reader to media reports – many available online – with contemporary accounts of what Johnson said.
As an aside, the layout chosen, with footnotes appearing on the page to which they relate, rather than being gathered at the end of each chapter, or even the end of the book, makes for a smooth read – I wish more authors / editors / publishers (delete as applicable) would use…
…this approach.
I was particularly struck by the second chapter, which details lots of lies told by Johnson, and other ministers, during the 2019 General Election campaign.
As a public servant, who works in the National Health Service, I was outraged by Johnson’s repeated lie that his government were building forty new hospitals.
Oborne points out the reality was agreed funding to rebuild six existing hospitals, with the possibility of further work at other hospitals across several years. At the same time, Johnson was claiming his government were investing a record amount of extra funding in the NHS.
Oborne points out that, in real terms, the proposed increase was lower than that achieved by the last Labour government, a decade earlier.
The sorry catalogue of Johnson’s Election lies, ranging from Brexit to the suppression of a Parliamentary report on Russian interference in British politics, his misrepresentation of the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn, along with much else, were amplified by inaccurate adverts…
…on Facebook. The Conservative Party Twitter account even pretended to be a fact checking service – literally creating “fake news”.
Johnson and the Conservative Party won the December 2019 Election, with a majority of 80 seats, giving them power to push ahead with an agenda previously kept in check by precarious Parliamentary numbers. A few weeks later, the Covid pandemic spread across the world.
Oborne looks at the way in which Johnson and Trump, showmen who lent themselves to good coverage, by an admiring media, had built on this to create a populist political base, and then win power.
Neither man, however, was equipped to deal with the tragic reality of the Covid crisis, leading to massive death tolls in both the UK and USA.
Oborne draws attention to the relatively successful response to Covid in Germany, a country led by Angela Merkel, a “conservative” woman with a background in science.
Jacinda Adern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, a nation of two islands which has eradicated Covid from its shores, gets a single mention. Adern is both a woman and left wing.
In April 2020, Jeremy Corbyn was replaced as Labour leader by Sir Keir Starmer, praised by his supporters for “forensic” attention to detail, but sadly failing to expose the dishonesty of Johnson in the way that Oborne, a right wing journalist, manages in this book.
In Oborne’s analysis, political lying on a vast scale was first practised in Britain by Tony Blair, the New Labour Prime Minister, who thought his dishonesty served a greater good.
After 18 years of Conservative government, led by the ruthless Margaret Thatcher, and the gentlemanly John Major, the latter of whom was surrounded by Tory MPs embroiled in sleaze – the polite 1990s word for corruption is now making a comeback – Blair liked to believe he…
…offered a fresh start. Blair lied about the reasons for the illegal Iraq war, and many other things. Blair gave way to Gordon Brown, after which Labour were replaced in power by the Tories, with David Cameron and Theresa May as premiers.
Oborne tells us that Brown, Cameron, and May “were capable of being devious” in “the pattern of worldly twentieth-century prime ministers like Harold Wilson and John Major”.
On the other hand, Brown, Cameron, and May “were not habitual liars, and all three were driven (like Wilson and Major before them) by a sense of public duty and integrity”.
Perhaps I am biased, as a member of the Labour Party (and very much on the Socialist wing), but I must differ with Oborne’s suggestion that Cameron and May offered an honest Conservatism.
There were a lot of scandals in the Cameron and May governments – the latter was even found to be in contempt of Parliament – while many ministers from those years easily transitioned to the Johnson regime.
There are some interesting digressions into political history and philosophy. Oborne recalls his meeting John Profumo, late in the life of the latter man.
Profumo, a Tory Cabinet Minister, famously lied to Parliament in 1963, denying his affair with Christine Keeler, but then admitted the lie, and resigned not just from government but from all political activity. Such things do not happen when politicians lie nowadays.
Oborne refers to Edmund Burke being “the nearest thing we have to a conservative philosopher”. The quote is from Chapter Nine (page 160), in a passage that virtually repeats comments from near the end of Chapter Eight (pages 145-146).
There are other instances in the book of repetition – perhaps a reprint, after better proof reading, may follow! Oborne’s estimation of Burke follows the generally accepted view, but there has been much muddled Conservative Party thinking along the way.
Burke, an eighteenth century MP and writer, was a Whig for most of his life, before becoming a Tory in his final years. I am admittedly pedantic at times, but must question Oborne’s statement that the Tory Party / Conservative Party “was founded around 1834”.
The names are often regarded as interchangeable in political parlance, but the Tory Party dates from way back in 1681, and was renamed the Conservative Party in 1830.
Oborne is probably thinking of the “Tamworth Manifesto”, issued in 1834 by Robert Peel, a Conservative Prime Minister. This Election manifesto failed to actually mention the party Peel led!
The mention of barbarism in the sub-title of the book had me thinking of the choice, posed by Marxists, between Socialism and barbarism.
The idea appears to have originated with Karl Kautsky, and been developed by Rosa Luxembourg, both of whom were influenced by suggestions from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
None of these people get a mention from Oborne, but he does draw upon a British Socialist, namely George Orwell.
Oborne looks at Orwell’s dystopian novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (published in 1949), with its re-writing of history, and suggests – at less than a totalitarian level – the Johnson government are doing something similar.
This is combined with a mention of “The Prevention of Literature” (1946), my favourite among Orwell’s many brilliant essays.
There are other references to Orwell in the book, and I see echoes of our greatest political writer in the conversational prose style adopted by Oborne, which make for an engaging read.
Indeed “The Assault on Truth” is strangely reminiscent of Orwell’s almost forgotten book, “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, a 1941 analysis of our nation, and pointer towards a post-war Britain, which quickly proved prescient, as a radical Labour…
…government was elected four years later.
“The Assault on Truth” was published on February 4 this year, a fortnight after Trump departed office. The last few weeks have seen the case against Johnson accelerate, with a series of revelations about misconduct from himself, and other ministers.
A two minute video by Peter Stefanovic, exposing lies Johnson has told to Parliament, has been watched 15,500,000 times on social media.
The video has been endorsed by a variety of figures, ranging from Oborne to Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP, who has mentioned it in Parliament.
Another champion of the video is Alistair Campbell, who was the spin doctor in chief for the Blair government (yes people are seeing the irony!). Campbell challenged the BBC, when being interviewed by them, to show the video, but they are declining to do so.
The same is the case with ITV, Channel 4, and Sky.
Political pundits on television are starting to raise questions about allegations of cronyism, and sleaze, in the Johnson government.
Strangely these commentators, who had no problem detecting, and reporting on, the daily lies and corruption of the Trump regime in the USA, are still reticent to point out that the Johnson government in the UK follow the same blueprint.
This thread can be read here: https://andrewgodsell.wordpress.com/2021/05/08/the-assault-on-truth/
