In the swirl of disinformation that infects global politics, it is good to hold on to the truth, to ground ourselves slightly. This is a story we tell ourselves. There are places where no one bothers to differentiate between truth and lies; other places. Such as Russia, where there is the facade of a democratic election, but what matters is simply control of the narrative. We watch as various Russian diplomats deny any Russian connection to the poisoning of the Sergei Skripal and his daughter. We look at the US, where they have lost count of Donald Trump’s untruths. He lies as he breathes; the effect is numbing. He has told so many lies that the latest ones float by.
This incessant lying wears the public down. Some Russians claim the lies that are told require a person to split into different realities, so each thing is true at the time. There is no objective truth, only versions of it. The manufacture of chaos is implicit in this deliberate destabilisation. We can locate lying within the pathology of individuals, but it requires ongoing turmoil to sustain it. Trump knows this.
Yet this creation of pandemonium to disguise dishonesty is something we too are familiar with in the burble of Boris Johnson, foreign secretary. The evasions, the metaphors, the spluttering, the wit is, to use a Johnsonian word, a miasma – a fog to hide mendacity. Johnson is a man who has been elevated rather than held accountable for his lies. Some are big: the famed £350m a week after Brexit that we will get back. (Lying about Brussels made his name as a hack.) Some are small – if extramarital affairs and children can be described in this way. It is still astonishing to me that a man of so little credibility represents our country abroad – and especially now. Over the weekend he admitted, in a BBC interview, that he had played a tennis match in 2014 with Lubov Chernukhin, wife of Vladimir Putin’s former deputy finance minister, in return for a £160,000 donation to the Conservative party. It was a matter for the authorities not him, Johnson said, “if there is evidence of gross corruption in the way [Chernukhin] obtained his wealth”. The Tory party is relaxed about donations from oligarchs and it is obvious that Johnson is more relaxed than most, although he seemed somewhat tense defending this. Perhaps because it surely makes his position asking for a unified stance on Russia more difficult.
Hypocrisy, though, is the least of it. Johnson just doesn’t “do” accountability. Why should he, when he simply gets promoted out of culpability?
This month he was questioned about possible misconduct in public office because £46m has been spent on something that did not happen: the garden bridge. How was such a huge sum of money spent? How in 2016 was funding for construction released even though the original conditions for that money had not been met? Johnson as mayor watered down these conditions. Labour and the Lib Dems are rightly asking questions about this. Johnson said the explanation “is something which, I’m afraid, I simply don’t have, at this distance in time”. In what world is this good enough? Lawyers say a charge of public misconduct could follow if Johnson’s actions showed “reckless indifference”. A casual observer may say that this is surely Johnson’s modus operandi.
How is it that someone in power can lie and cheat, we may wonder. How is fake news spread? How is disinformation used? Lying becomes simply an exercise of power. Consequences are for small people. Politics becomes simply a scripted reality show with characters. This is said of Russia, but watching Johnson, maybe these things are not so foreign to us after all.
Is it time to admit privacy is finished?
In another life, I would not use social media. I would write long and thoughtful letters and attend polite debates. I would not get moth killer delivered by Amazon. I would never take an Uber. I would live up a tree.
In this brave not particularly new world, though, all these things are linked, and I am linked through them. I may extricate myself from Facebook following the new revelations, but part of me thinks it is all too late. While, politically, of course I don’t want the engineering of elections based on the exchange of Facebook profiles, I can’t say that this feeling of being watched is novel. Or as individual that I know how to react. Once supermarkets introduced reward cards in the mid-90s, I was aware that my purchases were being tracked, but I shrugged my shoulders. It became ever more noticeable with social media that what was being advertised to me were things I had already bought. There is still this peculiar glitch in the algorithm whereby if you buy one toaster it is presumed you want another. You don’t.
The cluminess of such ads acted as a reassurance. Lately, though, there is the listening by phones, and this does feel like an invasion of privacy. Many people do still want to share pictures of their cat and baby, but there is somehow a dull acceptance that the idea of privacy is now as revolutionary and far off as the world wide web once was. Only disconnect.
Spare me the Corbynista gnashing of teeth
The cat in the hat furore – over whether the BBC photoshopped Jeremy Corbyn’s “Lenin cap” to look more “red” in front of a Kremlin backdrop on Newsnight – is one rum do. The suggestion is that the BBC made Corbyn look like a Russian stooge and that it is never fair in its coverage of him. There may be something to this, but the gnashing of teeth from his followers did not do anything but make them look cultish and obsessive as two people lay critically ill in hospital. The idea that, until we saw him in that hat, we had no idea of his geopolitical persuasions is as strange as the idea that we have never before seen any imagery that attached him to communist propaganda. Leninism is in eye of the beholder.
