What led the British public to put a liar in Downing Street?

[wilts rover]

This is an intriuging review of Peter Oborne's new book The Assault On Truth.

In it Oborne, ex-Daily Mail columist and also ex-Johnson supporter, looks at how the MSM, rather being biased against the right as some would have us believe, were at best far to compliant with Johnson's lies and at worst encouraged and were complicent in spreading them:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/07/the-assault-on-truth-by-peter-oborne-review-how-boris-johnson-played-the-press

[Ldr]

No realistic opposition at the time.....

[River Don]

Jeremy Corbyn aside, I think what it was, was the political class failing to accept the Brexit result.

So the Tories installed May, an uninspiring individual who persued a soft Brexit that didn't inspire many within the Tory party. And the vast majority of Labour were still opposed to Brexit, still clinging on to hopes it could be overturned. So there simply wasn't really the will to make the compromises to get a soft Brexit done.

So when various elections came along the public mood was ready to elect people who would get Brexit done.

What it needed was for the Tories to chose a better leader than May but I'm not sure the candidate was there. And then put Boris, the Tory leader of Brexit, in charge of Brexit. He would likely have f***ed it up, someone else would have cleared up the mess. With a better Tory leader I think a soft Brexit would have been deliverable at that point.

[Donnywolf]

I blame the Electoral system all day long. Only we and Belarussia (I think it is) in Europe still use FPTP. It long suited the big two Parties and so they never want to get rid of it

So Tories again got a massive majority 80 0r was it 81 with only 43% of the votes cast and so 57% of the others who bothered to vote did not want them as the Government but we are stuck with it as they wont be changing it any time soon

Under PR of course peoples votes would count for more (lots of people cite "my vote doesnt count so I dont bother and in a lot of circumstances they are right) - and look at The Green Party or the Liberal Party and see how they fare under FPTP and how they would do under PR

https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/how-the-2019-election-results-could-have-looked-with-proportional-representation/

We wont see it in my lifetime but I hope it comes eventually but the only way at the moment is for the non Tories to combine int 1 Party with one aim. To secure PR. Cant see them all agreeing but its all that will work unless Labour fluke it with FPTP and then declare that they are going for PR and the Libs and Greens etc support it.

They could have done so in the past though but it suited them not to - but maybe pragmatism will now rule

[BillyStubbsTears]

RD.
A soft Brexit could certainly have got through Parliament. No question of that. And in poll after poll it was overwhelmingly the preferred option of the public, with both Remain and Leave voters prepared to accept it.

The problem was, as I've been saying for 5 years, this was never about Brexit. It was about control of the Tory party. Brexit was the means not the end.

So the reason why the eminently reasonable outcome of a soft Brexit couldn't happen was that the right of the Tory party didn't want it. And they had a majority of Tory MPs. They didn't want a compromise. They wanted to use Brexit to ram through their victory in the party.

May tried to ride that tiger and it ate her.

Then Johnson finished the job by purging anyone who wasn't on the right wing of the party. Make no mistake, what we have now is by far the most right wing Tory party of any of our lifetimes. People like Heseltine and Clarke who were senior Cabinet ministers under Thatcher and Major have been purged from the party. Thatcher would NEVER have had a Cabinet with rabid far-right people like Patel and Raab in the very top positions. But that wing of the party now dominates and will do for a generation.

And here's the thing. They know that there is not and never has been a majority in this country for far right Tory policies. Not even close. So, to get and keep power, they've need to stoke a Culture War and tell enough people they are on their side.

THAT is what Brexit was always only ever about.

[BillyStubbsTears]

This is an intriuging review of Peter Oborne's new book The Assault On Truth.

In it Oborne, ex-Daily Mail columist and also ex-Johnson supporter, looks at how the MSM, rather being biased against the right as some would have us believe, were at best far to compliant with Johnson's lies and at worst encouraged and were complicent in spreading them:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/07/the-assault-on-truth-by-peter-oborne-review-how-boris-johnson-played-the-press

Oborne is a truly principled journalist. I profoundly disagree with his politics, but I am genuinely in awe of his principles.

He used to be a senior journalist at the Telegraph. Then he uncovered a scandal there. HSBC was a major advertiser in the Telegraph. Oborne discovered that the Telegraph was regularly spiking stories that criticised HSBC.

He could have grumbled about it in private. But he is a strongly principled man and he did what he had to do. Went public and resigned from a well paid senior job.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/why-i-have-resigned-from-telegraph/

Those are the principles we need from public figures and whatever the man's politics, I salute his principles.

[River Don]

BST

There were enough tory MPs prepared to overlook Johnson and go for the more moderate May, with the expectation of a softer Brexit.  If more Labour MPs or even Scottish MPs had been prepared to go along with it, it would have happened. But I think there were still hanging on to the hope that it might not have to happen at that time.

[BillyStubbsTears]

RD
Johnson dropped out of the race after the cat fight between him and Gove. There wasn't even a vote for May because she was the only candidate.

There was zero expectation in the Tory party of a softer Brexit. And May was never going for one. She announced in the Lancaster House speech in Jan 2021 that she interpreted the vote to mean that we had to leave the SM, CU and ECJ. From that point on, it was absolutely impossible to have a cross-party consensus.

May wasn't a moderate by any possible definition. She chose to interpret the vote as meaning we had to have a hard Brexit. What she brought to the Commons in early 2019 was effectively identical to what Johnson finally took us out with, having flounced out of Govt saying it was unacceptable in 2018.

[River Don]

BST

There was no need for a vote for May because it was clear who was going to win and another round of voting was just wasting time.

It's difficult to say what would have happened if May had remained in place but it did not progress but there must've been some reason why the right were screaming vassal state. Isn't it fair to assume the border arrangements would have been different? And May has since claimed her deal was better, particularly for financial services.

Right now, overlooking the fact that May would have delivered Brexit sooner and so the country would've been further down the track of adjustment by now... Would you have preferred the May deal that was developing or the deal Johnson has delivered this year? Or would it not have mattered because it's the same thing?

[BillyStubbsTears]

RD.

The point I'm making is that there was literally no challenger. She was unopposed. It's not that she was chosen because Tory MPs wanted a moderate and a soft Brexit. There was no other person who stood.

[selby]

  I would like someone to let me know which PM in history they didn't think was a liar, and please don't say Blair, he was one of the worst.

[Glyn_Wigley]

  I would like someone to let me know which PM in history they didn't think was a liar, and please don't say Blair, he was one of the worst.

In return, how about you telling us which PM in history was first elected after everybody knew they were a liar?

[tommy toes]

  I would like someone to let me know which PM in history they didn't think was a liar, and please don't say Blair, he was one of the worst.

Maybe some PM's did tell lies.
The difference with your dear Boris is that he's a pathological liar.
He lies about everything.
From making model buses to being a Remainer then a Brexiteer.
The bloke couldn't lay straight in bed.
He's one of those who sees which way the winds blowing and refutes everything he used to say when it blew the other way.
Reminds me of the Catholic then Protestant then Catholic again politicians depending on who was on the throne in  Elizabeth and Bloody Mary's reigns.

[albie]

TT,

Is that the Vicar of Bray, Sir?

The answer to the OP is cognitive dissonance.
People like to believe a supportive lie rather than a challenging truth.

Trump managed to hitch his fraudulent political program to a clear truth.....draining the swamp of establishment corruption. He neglected to explain that the swamp would be drained into the coffers of his family and business, and his sponsors.

Bozo Numpty Trumpty is following the same Steve Bannon playbook. Getting Brexit done was pushing at an open door with people exhausted from the prolonged farting about since the ridiculous referendum.
He has then used the Covid crisis as an opportunity to transfer public funds to Tory donors.
https://twitter.com/jon_trickett/status/1330115626589958144/photo/1

Its like deja vu, all over again!

[SydneyRover]

Jeremy Corbyn aside, I think what it was, was the political class failing to accept the Brexit result.

So the Tories installed May, an uninspiring individual who persued a soft Brexit that didn't inspire many within the Tory party. And the vast majority of Labour were still opposed to Brexit, still clinging on to hopes it could be overturned. So there simply wasn't really the will to make the compromises to get a soft Brexit done.

So when various elections came along the public mood was ready to elect people who would get Brexit done.

What it needed was for the Tories to chose a better leader than May but I'm not sure the candidate was there. And then put Boris, the Tory leader of Brexit, in charge of Brexit. He would likely have f***ed it up, someone else would have cleared up the mess. With a better Tory leader I think a soft Brexit would have been deliverable at that point.

Even with the ''get brexit done'' slogan RD the implication was that things would improve, the sunny uplands etc this was always the story behind the story, break off the chains, shackles and easy access to the richest market on the planet and we will be free.

[BillyStubbsTears]

  I would like someone to let me know which PM in history they didn't think was a liar, and please don't say Blair, he was one of the worst.

Maybe some PM's did tell lies.
The difference with your dear Boris is that he's a pathological liar.
He lies about everything.
From making model buses to being a Remainer then a Brexiteer.
The bloke couldn't lay straight in bed.
He's one of those who sees which way the winds blowing and refutes everything he used to say when it blew the other way.
Reminds me of the Catholic then Protestant then Catholic again politicians depending on who was on the throne in  Elizabeth and Bloody Mary's reigns.

This.

All politicians have to some extent played fast and loose with the concept of total honesty, when put in a corner. But we have never, ever had a PM whose entire career and life show that he is a habitual and pathological liar.

He's been at it his whole life, not just the two occasions when bosses sacked him for lying.

Remember those stories about the EU banning bent bananas and prawn cocktail crisps? Or the stories about the EU insisting on a single size "Eurocoffin"? Go on. Have a guess who made those up.

And it continues to this day. Politicians dissemble to control the agenda, but until very recently, no-one ever lied about objective truth which can easily be checked. But Johnson does. Habitually. He negotiated and signed the deal with the EU that accepted that there would be a checks and controls on goods travelling between GB and NI. That document is published. Anyone can read it. Anyone who has read it knows that it explicitly talks about control checks on goods passing between GB and NI. But Johnson immediately and repeatedly insisted that there would be no checks on goods passing between GB and NI.

This is NOT normal. Politicians have never lied about stuff where the truth is objectively unambiguous and got away with it. Doing that used to be a career-ender. Johnson here, and Trump in America have now normalised that.

I'm convinced it's a psychological issue. A combination of a need to impress and a need not to be found out. I've been professionally close to someone who turned out to be a pathological liar and the damage they can do is horrific. Johnson's approach is scarily similar.

 

[River Don]

Jeremy Corbyn aside, I think what it was, was the political class failing to accept the Brexit result.

So the Tories installed May, an uninspiring individual who persued a soft Brexit that didn't inspire many within the Tory party. And the vast majority of Labour were still opposed to Brexit, still clinging on to hopes it could be overturned. So there simply wasn't really the will to make the compromises to get a soft Brexit done.

So when various elections came along the public mood was ready to elect people who would get Brexit done.

What it needed was for the Tories to chose a better leader than May but I'm not sure the candidate was there. And then put Boris, the Tory leader of Brexit, in charge of Brexit. He would likely have f***ed it up, someone else would have cleared up the mess. With a better Tory leader I think a soft Brexit would have been deliverable at that point.

Even with the ''get brexit done'' slogan RD the implication was that things would improve, the sunny uplands etc this was always the story behind the story, break off the chains, shackles and easy access to the richest market on the planet and we will be free.

That's as maybe but the question was why did the public vote for someone as unreliable Johnson and I think the answer is because of his clear stance on Brexit.

Personally I never believed undoing all those years of integration would ever be easy or come without cost.

[selby]

 Every one of them.

[MachoMadness]

  I would like someone to let me know which PM in history they didn't think was a liar, and please don't say Blair, he was one of the worst.

Maybe some PM's did tell lies.
The difference with your dear Boris is that he's a pathological liar.
He lies about everything.
From making model buses to being a Remainer then a Brexiteer.
The bloke couldn't lay straight in bed.
He's one of those who sees which way the winds blowing and refutes everything he used to say when it blew the other way.
Reminds me of the Catholic then Protestant then Catholic again politicians depending on who was on the throne in  Elizabeth and Bloody Mary's reigns.

This.

All politicians have to some extent played fast and loose with the concept of total honesty, when put in a corner. But we have never, ever had a PM whose entire career and life show that he is a habitual and pathological liar.

He's been at it his whole life, not just the two occasions when bosses sacked him for lying.

Remember those stories about the EU banning bent bananas and prawn cocktail crisps? Or the stories about the EU insisting on a single size "Eurocoffin"? Go on. Have a guess who made those up.

And it continues to this day. Politicians dissemble to control the agenda, but until very recently, no-one ever lied about objective truth which can easily be checked. But Johnson does. Habitually. He negotiated and signed the deal with the EU that accepted that there would be a checks and controls on goods travelling between GB and NI. That document is published. Anyone can read it. Anyone who has read it knows that it explicitly talks about control checks on goods passing between GB and NI. But Johnson immediately and repeatedly insisted that there would be no checks on goods passing between GB and NI.

This is NOT normal. Politicians have never lied about stuff where the truth is objectively unambiguous and got away with it. Doing that used to be a career-ender. Johnson here, and Trump in America have now normalised that.

I'm convinced it's a psychological issue. A combination of a need to impress and a need not to be found out. I've been professionally close to someone who turned out to be a pathological liar and the damage they can do is horrific. Johnson's approach is scarily similar.

 

With our own Fox News on the way, it's going to get a lot worse.

[Bentley Bullet]

Jeremy Corbyn aside, I think what it was, was the political class failing to accept the Brexit result.

So the Tories installed May, an uninspiring individual who persued a soft Brexit that didn't inspire many within the Tory party. And the vast majority of Labour were still opposed to Brexit, still clinging on to hopes it could be overturned. So there simply wasn't really the will to make the compromises to get a soft Brexit done.

So when various elections came along the public mood was ready to elect people who would get Brexit done.

What it needed was for the Tories to chose a better leader than May but I'm not sure the candidate was there. And then put Boris, the Tory leader of Brexit, in charge of Brexit. He would likely have f***ed it up, someone else would have cleared up the mess. With a better Tory leader I think a soft Brexit would have been deliverable at that point.

Even with the ''get brexit done'' slogan RD the implication was that things would improve, the sunny uplands etc this was always the story behind the story, break off the chains, shackles and easy access to the richest market on the planet and we will be free.

That's as maybe but the question was why did the public vote for someone as unreliable Johnson and I think the answer is because of his clear stance on Brexit.

Personally I never believed undoing all those years of integration would ever be easy or come without cost.

Maybe they voted for Boris because the alternative was to vote for who they considered being an antisemitic, communist, terrorist sympathiser.

[River Don]

Jeremy Corbyn aside, I think what it was, was the political class failing to accept the Brexit result.

So the Tories installed May, an uninspiring individual who persued a soft Brexit that didn't inspire many within the Tory party. And the vast majority of Labour were still opposed to Brexit, still clinging on to hopes it could be overturned. So there simply wasn't really the will to make the compromises to get a soft Brexit done.

So when various elections came along the public mood was ready to elect people who would get Brexit done.

What it needed was for the Tories to chose a better leader than May but I'm not sure the candidate was there. And then put Boris, the Tory leader of Brexit, in charge of Brexit. He would likely have f***ed it up, someone else would have cleared up the mess. With a better Tory leader I think a soft Brexit would have been deliverable at that point.

Even with the ''get brexit done'' slogan RD the implication was that things would improve, the sunny uplands etc this was always the story behind the story, break off the chains, shackles and easy access to the richest market on the planet and we will be free.

That's as maybe but the question was why did the public vote for someone as unreliable Johnson and I think the answer is because of his clear stance on Brexit.

Personally I never believed undoing all those years of integration would ever be easy or come without cost.

Maybe they voted for Boris because the alternative was to vote for who they considered being an antisemitic, communist, terrorist sympathiser.

Well yes, it's not contraversial to say the alternative wasn't very appealing either.

[idler]

Isn't it ironic though that for all of the bad press for Jeremy Corbin's Russian sympathies he was nowhere near as close as Boris is now.

[BillyStubbsTears]

So why do 40% of people now say they will vote Tory?

[Ldr]

So why do 40% of people now say they will vote Tory?

No one knows what labour stand for. When I was growing up labour had principles, now it seems to bend with the wind and jump behind whatever cause shouts loudest

[Donnywolf]

... and yet several times lately I have heard Johnson described as a "campaigner" where by he throws straws in the wind - watches which gets most people running towards it and then runs out of the door to the fron of the queue

That certainly seemd to be what he did with his 2 Letters EU stance

[wilts rover]

Jeremy Corbyn aside, I think what it was, was the political class failing to accept the Brexit result.

So the Tories installed May, an uninspiring individual who persued a soft Brexit that didn't inspire many within the Tory party. And the vast majority of Labour were still opposed to Brexit, still clinging on to hopes it could be overturned. So there simply wasn't really the will to make the compromises to get a soft Brexit done.

So when various elections came along the public mood was ready to elect people who would get Brexit done.

What it needed was for the Tories to chose a better leader than May but I'm not sure the candidate was there. And then put Boris, the Tory leader of Brexit, in charge of Brexit. He would likely have f***ed it up, someone else would have cleared up the mess. With a better Tory leader I think a soft Brexit would have been deliverable at that point.

Even with the ''get brexit done'' slogan RD the implication was that things would improve, the sunny uplands etc this was always the story behind the story, break off the chains, shackles and easy access to the richest market on the planet and we will be free.

That's as maybe but the question was why did the public vote for someone as unreliable Johnson and I think the answer is because of his clear stance on Brexit.

Personally I never believed undoing all those years of integration would ever be easy or come without cost.

Maybe they voted for Boris because the alternative was to vote for who they considered being an antisemitic, communist, terrorist sympathiser.

Bit harsh on Jo Swinson that. Or the Green Party candidate. Or the Brexit Party. Or the Yorkshire Party.

[wilts rover]

It's fascinating that no-one has denied Johnson is a liar.

Which begs the question, did they vote for him despite him being a liar. Or because he was a liar?

As far as I can tell from the review of Oborne's book he seems to think that the media obscured his lies, despite knowing that they were lies, and that people would have voted differently if they had known the truth. Now of course if people voted for him because they like him being a liar, well.

[Ldr]

Wilts, in capitals since you keep missing it. TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC THERE WAS NO VIABLE ALTERNATIVE OFFERED AT THE TIME

[BillyStubbsTears]

Ldr.

There is a perfectly viable alternative now. And 40% still say they would vote for Johnson's party. So clearly that 40% are untroubled by him being a pathological liar. Which he unquestionably is.

[Ldr]

Ldr.

There is a perfectly viable alternative now. And 40% still say they would vote for Johnson's party. So clearly that 40% are untroubled by him being a pathological liar. Which he unquestionably is.

BST, ill refer you to my comment about not knowing what Labour stands for now, that lack of clarity isn't helping you