8 The language of lying

NICK DUFFELL: The first thing to say is that it’s incredibly natural and normal to tell the odd porky, especially if you want to save face in a situation or avoid hurting people’s feelings. My mother used to say, ‘Never hurt anyone’s feelings’. So I didn’t see you tell the most dreadful untruths in social situations.

BARONESS FOOKES: I would describe a lie as a deliberate misrepresentation of a fact. Deliberate. And I think that’s the key thing. If I may make the comparison with a murder it has to be deliberate to be murder or so reckless of the consequences as to be the same thing, which would distinguish it from manslaughter, where you do it by mistake. It’s not intended.

ASA BENNETT: Well, to me a lie is something that’s not correct, that has been delivered by someone who is intending maliciously to deceive. The intent behind it is key.

TONY THORNE: It’s intentionally saying something, which is untrue. And I think linguists would say that lies and lying are what they call or what we call a language universal and it means that something which occurs in all languages.

NICK DUFFELL: And one of the things that in psychotherapy and counseling, people have learned to realise that in an interaction between two people, that there exists different levels of the truth, there’s my truth, and there’s your truth and actually somewhere we might meet in the middle. So the truth is, it’s philosophically complex.

TONY THORNE: The word lie is actually quite unusual in one particular way and that is that there are almost no ways of saying lie in slang. In British English only, there’s the rhyming slang porky pie, telling porky pies, telling porkies. So a porky is a lie. Again, a light-hearted word. There’s the word fib, which means a sort of little, perhaps harmless lie, which isn’t really slang, but it’s an informal word. But there aren’t any others as far as I’m aware and that is really strange because slang has a thousands words for kill or rob or for anything sexually related.

I have a sense that it’s because even for slang, which deals with some of the most awful taboos in human behaviour, lies are so-- a real lie is so absolute and so indefensible maybe that slang doesn’t go there. Now that’s a very strange thing to imagine.

NICK DUFFELL: When someone is accused of lying, it sounds like a terrible insult. And, of course, it’s even more insulting if you actually are lying. Why do we accept the lies? Why do we not see through them?

TONY THORNE: But when we’re talking about lying, euphemisms are very popular because people who do lie or people who trade in lies never want to admit that they’re lying and try and avoid using the word altogether, unless they’re accusing someone else. So there are words like half-truth, untruth, evasion. All of these words have really usually mean lie. The real euphemisms where a politician, for example, is caught out telling what most people would consider to be a lie, and one that springs to mind is to misspeak or I misspoke.

BARONESS FOOKES: It always easy or at least people will try to make their point using a euphemism on the basis that they will get away with that. An example would be I think he’s being a stranger to the truth.

ASA BENNETT: And, of course, that is why then some politicians like Winston Churchill then coined euphemisms for lying then given these things. He coined the phrase the terminological inexactitude.

TONY THORNE: But it’s part of a long tradition, a long history, not a noble tradition, an ignoble tradition perhaps. But go back to Renaissance portraits and where the prince or the king is portrayed as slim and having an enormous codpiece, when for all we know the reality was other. Later on, George IV, I was looking the other day, the portrait in which he was portly, but in fact he was apparently massively and terrifyingly obese in reality. But, of course, they didn’t paint that.

NICK DUFFELL: When you start to normalise it over time, it becomes a way of life and then you’re living with long-term duplicity. We’ve got this going on and big time in our politics now and we start to normalise it.

TONY THORNE: When politicians are accused of lying, they bristle and they bluster and they overreact, partly this is because they hope by a strong reaction, they can deflect the accusation. But partly it’s because they know they’ve got to take it seriously.

ASA BENNETT: If you’re in Westminster, of course, one of the worst things you can do is directly accuse a member of parliament in the House of Commons of lying. And so that’s why if you have the term for the parliamentarians is misleading the house. And so that’s why the most they can say if they’re trying to gently warn a colleague about something they’ve said, is they are normal, gentlemen. I think you are accidentally misleading the House.

THERESA MAY: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Can I say to the right honorable gentleman, that I think in his intervention from a sedentary position, he may have inadvertently misled the House on this matter. No, no?

SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: What was that? I hope the word lie wasn’t used. But order, order! But order! I’m perfectly capable of handling this matter with alacrity and I shall do so.

BARONESS FOOKES: The term lie or lying carries with it a moral judgement. And I think that’s what distinguishes it from other means of describing what is a lie. So that is unparliamentary. And the speaker will stop somebody saying that or ask them to withdraw.

SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: If a member on the frontbench used that word, I’m sorry, I’m not debating it. I’m not arguing. I’m not negotiating. That word must be withdrawn.

POLITICIAN: In courtesy to yourself, I withdraw for participants.

BARONESS FOOKES: Usually people do. If they don’t, the speaker has the power to name the member. And that will be followed immediately by a motion that x be suspended from service of the House. And if that is carried, and it usually I think will be because the speaker carries authority, then that person has to leave the House immediately and can’t return for five days. First offence.

TONY THORNE: Politicians sometimes have to admit that they didn’t tell the truth, but they-- no politician, I think, has ever certainly willingly used the word lie or has ever admitted to lying.

BARONESS FOOKES: When people say something outside as a politician, they are speaking in public at a meeting or on radio, television, or whatever it is. So it’s not quite the same thing as lying, specifically in the House of Commons. So that I would-- that’s where I would draw a distinction. And, of course, it can sometimes become a grey area because you can say something, which you mean, but which perhaps you’re not able to fulfill. Now this is where the promises, the manifestos, and so on come into play, or personal pledges.

But you have to remember that a politician is often dealing with a number of people who have very different points of view, probably controversial, contradictory. And if you’re trying to please somebody because you want to be elected, it is obviously a temptation to tell people what they want to hear, which may well then lead to your saying something, which you don’t believe yourself or don’t agree with, but you still say it. So that is a temptation.

NICK DUFFELL: It’s not so difficult to begin to recognise dissociation and projection, for example. You can see how that’s happened on a whole national level and over the Brexit issue, where we’ve projected all our fear of the future onto Romanian guest workers.

ASA BENNETT: When you look at something like Brexit, it does make sense and why the accusations of lying fly around because the stakes are so high and this is such an important process, that clearly the debate and rhetoric is really ratcheted up. You do encounter things that do not stand up when you scrutinise them. And so obviously it’s a responsibility of people like myself to hold these people to account, to assess their claims, and to call out when they’re not telling it straight.

TONY THORNE: And this is where I think that the mainstream media, again, whichever side you’re on, whether you’re pro-Brexit, pro-Trump, pro-Boris Johnson, pro-Theresa May, or pro-Jeremy Corbin, the mainstream media has been complicit in a sense in all of these untruths and half-truths because they haven't exposed them.

ASA BENNETT: Well, obviously, if the media isn’t there to hold politicians to account, who on earth would hold politicians to account? After all it’s our public duty to do this because if politicians feel they can get away scot-free with saying anything, then public debate itself suffers.

So, for example, we had an interesting case recently when after the referendum, an absolutely very fervent Remain campaigner was trying to haul Boris Johnson through the courts off the back of the vote Leave claim about we send 350 million per week to the EU, why not spend it on the NHS instead. It’s still rippling on today with, again, Boris Johnson only recently defending the figure with the figure having become discredited almost from the moment it was displayed.

ASA BENNETT: These spurious attempts to try and drag the courts in show why actually it’s responsible, it’s safer to rely on the media because this is our job.

TONY THORNE: It was incidentally, manifestly false. The 350 million was simply not so because it didn’t count the rebate that Margaret Thatcher had negotiated. For that reason only, it wasn’t true.

ASA BENNETT: Because effectively judges were being asked to rule on political debate, whereas actually that should be the job for the media. The court really would be Sky News, BBC News hauling out politicians, embarrassing them in that sense.

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DONALD JOHN TRUMP: As President of the United States.

BARONESS FOOKES: Maybe people are more used to hearing or seeing people lying because we have the example over the Atlantic of President Trump. But I’m not even sure whether he knows that he’s lying or not. I mean, I’ve always taken the view that it is deliberate. But I’m not too sure whether with Trump whether he realises what he’s saying is the truth or not. I think he’s almost gone past it. I’m not a psychologist. But I think it would be very interesting to have somebody look at the state of mind which produces the effects that President Trump does.

NICK DUFFELL: And there is just so much information around. And you could see this with the confidence of, say, the way Donald Trump uses his lies to say, well, this truth is as good as any other truth. This is my truth. This could be fake news. You sort it out.

DONALD JOHN TRUMP: This is fake news put out by the media.

ASA BENNETT: But when you take the row over Trump’s inauguration, that very much was an early preview of what we’re about to see with the presidency itself, a constant rolling battle with the media in which those media rounds would distract from the substance of what was happening.

TONY THORNE: Trump’s associates actually doctored the photos, cropped them, so that they only showed the thick crowds at one end of the square, whereas Obama had filled the square. So that there’s incontrovertible documentary evidence. And still Donald Trump continued to insist that he’d drawn a bigger crowd.

ASA BENNETT: And so he was able to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to assert that actually, as his press Secretary ended up telling reporters, been the largest audience ever, period.

TONY THORNE: He knows that his hard core, his core supporters are not going to worry really whether it’s true or not. And that they will accept at face value anything he says, specifically this.

BARONESS FOOKES: I suppose one of the later ones was on the state visit when he claimed that, if we had a trade deal with America, with the United States, then the National Health Service would be included. The very next day, he said, oh, no, it wouldn’t be. Now, is that a lie or what is it? I mean, it gets almost beyond belief.

TONY THORNE: In fact, and I can’t judge the truth of this of course, but The Washington Post and other US journalists have tried to count the number of lies that they claim that Donald Trump has told since he took office. And the figure in April this year 2019 was 10,000.

BARONESS FOOKES: I know some people will compare President Trump with Boris Johnson in as much as they appear to say some contradictory things. I think there is a very vast difference between them, even though they appear to be friends. I think the trouble with Boris is that he gets carried away in a fit of exuberance and says something which perhaps he doesn’t really mean and will retract or amend at a later stage. Now, whether that is lying, I think is a grey area.

BORIS JOHNSON: Like some slumbering giant, we are going to rise and ping off the guy ropes of self-doubt.

TONY THORNE: And this goes right back, and perhaps is to some extent provable to his record when he was The Daily Telegraph correspondent in Brussels and he made up stories. He made up ludicrous stories about the bureaucracy of the European Union and their crazy pronouncements.

Some of these stories, they weren’t all attributed to Johnson, but were later repeated particularly in The Daily Mail about the idea that bananas would have to be straightened, that cows would have to wear pampers, and that Bombay mix would no longer be allowed to be called Bombay mix because it was a British imperial name, would have to be renamed. This was all nonsense.

ASA BENNETT: Well, certainly cynicism is very deeply embedded in the national psyche. And voters elsewhere around the world feel this like in the US. When it’s a distrust, not just of the political class, but also of establishment, figures, officials, and so this is why you see the BBC has been widely distrusted by some, even I, as part The Telegraph, will be distrusted by some people on Twitter and social media. This is why you have people going to alternative media outlets. They describe and decry the MSM, the mainstream media for peddling what they say is fake news, establishment narratives.

SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: The question is the amendment be agreed to. As many as of that opinion will say, content.

AUDIENCE: Content.

SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: Contrary, not content.

BARONESS FOOKES: Lying is stigmatised, I think, rightly because it shows distrust, how can you rely on somebody if they’re not telling you the truth. And so I think consistent lying, as I say, it unsettles people. It destroys integrity and trustworthiness in the system. So I think if it went on for too much, you could start to degrade the entire system. And I think that is why it’s so important.

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