“The Assault on Truth” continues. Your recent review of Peter Oborne’s book with the aforementioned title highlighted how Boris Johnson now tells lies with impunity (3 February). This cannot be allowed to continue. The prime minister “misspoke” at Wednesday’s PMQs when he said, several times, that Labour had voted against a NHS pay deal (Untouchable Boris? Bluster-busting Starmer could well put him on the back foot again, 10 March). At the end of the session, Jonathan Ashworth raised the matter with the Speaker as a point of order. He accepted what Ashworth said as a point of clarification. It has to be more than that. The Speaker must uphold the convention that ministers give accurate information to parliament, “correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity”.
Johnson’s press secretary, Allegra Stratton, later declined 12 times to accept he had been wrong. Parliament and the public deserve to be told the truth and when that does not happen the record needs to be corrected.
Barbara Veale
London
• Now that our political discourse is littered with untruths, isn’t it time to discontinue the ludicrous “unparliamentary language” rule that forbids MPs from pointing out that one of their number has lied in the House of Commons? Not so long ago lying in politics was a sackable offence; it happened to Boris Johnson in 2004.
It was deemed so serious in the 1960s that John Profumo resigned and devoted his life to charity work after having done so. Nowadays, lying is not punished, but pointing out a lie is.
Cherry Weston
Wolverhampton
