A Guide to Social Decay
Political commentators, seeking to claim some moral vantage point, some higher ground from which to declare their penetrative insight, will frequently cite a vague point in the past when the worm turned, when things changed for the worse, when we strayed from a now lost virtuous path.
Everything is broken
We currently have a prime minister in the shape of David Cameron who tells us that everything is broken, all the fault of New Labour.
Nice try but blaming New Labour for the Nation's moral malaise, the failure of self-belief, the slide into a morose negativism over future prospects, riots, welfare scroungers and the very loss of community is far too simple.
The presumption that 'everything is broken' isn't made truer because the Prime Minister tells us its true. Since one thing we can be sure of is that the public's trust in the veracity of politicians is broken.
The failure of the Nation's political managers, chiefly their inability to inspire the public's trust, to act with integrity, to behave like leaders, to set high public standards corrodes the public consciousness.
The roots of social decay: Duplicity
What we have seen is our modern managers turning politics into a board game called Duplicity, where lying is deemed to be an acceptable part of continuing in the game for as long as you can, and when you get 'caught out', you don't leave the field of play, you lie some more.
When lying becomes the cultural norm, citizens can be forgiven for believing they are living in a banana republic and expectations will be adjusted accordingly.
Everyone knows what a lie is, well perhaps they did but today looking up the word lie in a dictionary will not help. Lying has been refined by the players at the Duplicity board, where words mean what the player thinks they mean as they seek to persuade the rest of us that we misunderstand what words mean....
The Seven Principles of Public Life
It was Lord Nolan who established the Seven Principles of Public Life; selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and leadership.
Lord Nolan was chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life between 1994 and 1997 set up under the Major Government in 1994. Nolan's obituary says of him:
"Lord Nolan .. made a profound mark on national life by substantially cleansing the Augean stable of corrupt politics as founding chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life."
The Standards Committee was set up in response to cash-for-questions scandal. Not much was learnt however, during the Blair years we had the cash for honours scandal and later, revelations over cash for influence. The expenses fiddling of recent times showed clearly that MPs had not taken on-board the seven principles and the stable was still full of crap.
Cabs for hire
Labour MP, Stephen Byers was filmed describing himself as "sort of like a cab for hire." Byers made claims of having influenced government policy in the past for money. He claimed to have spoken with Peter Mandelson and Lord Adonis in the past to influence outcomes for National Express and Tesco. Adonis admitted talking to Byers but nothing more and Mandelson said he remembered no such discussion or meeting. And then Byers said "I have not spoken to Andrew Adonis or Peter Mandelson about the matters I mentioned." When the story broke, National Express and Tesco also denied there was any truth in Byers' statements.
Well, why would you not expect deniability from all concerned but Mandelson's response is insightful. How could Mandelson remember not having a discussion or meeting. After all, if you were not there you'd be unlikely to remember it?
Mandelson, nothing to declare except his P45!
When Mandelson took a loan from fellow MP Geoffrey Robinson to buy a pad in Notting Hill he omitted to tell his mortgage company, therefore he lied by default. Mandelson also failed to declare the loan to the Register of Members Interests, he lied again by default. In his resignation letter he mangled the language to suit his lying personality, saying: "in all candour, I should not have entered into the arrangement" (Dec 1998) in other words, if he had been an honest person then he wouldn't have done it. Max Clifford commented: "The public views him as slimy and he only has himself to blame".
King Liar, Tony Blair only waited a year before bringing Mandelson back into office, this time for Northern Ireland but it wasn't long before he was up to his old tricks - not doing anything wrong obviously. The Observer claimed (Jan 2001) that Mandelson had phoned Home Office minister Mike O'brien on behalf of Srichand Hinduja, in order to promote the latter's bid for British citizenship. Mandelson had failed to mention his conversation with O'Brien to O'Brien's boss, Jack Straw. Blair gave Mandy his P45 again.
Ultimately Mandelson's dishonesty proved to be no bar to his political progress, by 2004 he was off to Euroland as Trade Commissioner and the five star time of his life. In 2008, Gordon Brown brought Mandelson back into the Cabinet as Trade Secretary and gave him a peerage. Post the death of New Labour, Mandelson has moved on in the world of business and has mighty ambitions, perhaps one day to head up the World Bank or perhaps become a slimy UN Secretary General.
Clearly Mandelson lied with impunity, perhaps his obliviousness was due to early onset Alzheimer's, whatever, his not remembering trick certainly set a trend around the Duplicity board.
"Sometimes you become the prisoner of your own lie" Aitken 1999
MP Jonathan Aitken was imprisoned for his lying but like all his ilk, he had to try to make it seem as if he was being forced by the lie to be dishonest, as if the lie had taken on some kind of agency over which he had no control. Germlike, he even persuaded his young daughter to lie for him in an attempt to persuade others that he was an upstanding citizen. When investigative journalists from the Independent, Guardian and World in Action, in April 1995, lifted the lid on the Aitken can of worms they revealed that he was nothing more than a pimping tea boy for a bunch of Saudi princes, while posing as Cabinet member and Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
Mad Frankie Fraser sums up the public's perception of Aitken. In 2001 Fraser said, "He was worried about shaking my hand but I should have been worried about shaking the hand of a scapegrace", (a person without moral scruples).
Beyond meaning and misspoking
When Jonathan Ross asked David Cameron if he had masturbatory fantasies over Margaret Thatcher, BBC executives called Ross 'a great talent', rendering the words 'great' and 'talent' meaningless. Not that important perhaps, if you believe that words don't have to mean anything or that what you say doesn't have to accurately convey what you mean.
Bill Clinton told a global television audience 'I did not have sexual relations with that women', responding to allegations from White House intern, Monica Lewinsky in 1998. Even when he was forced to come clean, he still wouldn't acknowledge that he had sex with Lewinsky, instead he called it an "inappropriate relationship", he said "...it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible."
He also said, "I never told any body to lie, not a single time, never." Clearly, he reserved that right to himself. At the time of this event, Clinton made much of what he understood by the term 'sexual relations', throughout the whole inquisition he sought to redefine the term, such that the word sexual had no sexual connotations. It was as if he and Monica just held hands, in Bill's mind anyway but he nearly managed to persuade the American nation as well.
Bill's wife, Hillary, to cover up her own lying invented the word 'misspoke'. Saying I lied is harsh, saying I misspoke has connotations of acceptable error. Obviously, this was all too late to save Bill's career but she salvaged her own with it.
Talking about her visit to Bosnia in 1996, Hillary said:
“I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
Unfortunately for liar Hillary, CBS News showed footage of her walking calmly across the tarmac with her daughter, Chelsea, and being greeted by dignitaries and a child. In her memoir, “Living History,” she wrote about sniper fire in the hills but it didn't trouble her hand shaking activities.
No Intention to be Factual....
Arizona senator Jon Kyle falsely accused healthcare provider Planned Parenthood, of providing abortions to ‘well over 90 per cent of its customers.' In fact, only three per cent of its work involves abortion.
A spokesman for Kyle said: his remark ‘was not intended to be a factual statement’. One reporter described Kyle's lying as evidence of the current political zeitgeist. In essence, say what you like, some fool will believe it.
However, long before the Clintons and unremarkable senators like Kyle started lying for a living, Richard Nixon changed forever the way citizens looked at those holding high office. In a sense Nixon's persistent lying over the Watergate break in reshaped the public's expectations towards the veracity of public figures.
Unknown unknowns
Blair and Bush finished things off with their dodgy dossier on weapons of mass destruction, supposedly held by Iraq. In this instance, we move away from the lie and lack of intention to be truthful to new territory, Donald Rumsfeld territory:
"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know." (2002)
Rumsfeld is an important character, he was there with Nixon, he was there with Reagan, he was there with Bush. The 'war on terror' was created in the Pentagon by Rumsfeld.
Unknown unknowns leave the door open for complete fantasy, for bigger and bigger lies - i.e. Tony Blair telling Parliament that Saddam Hussein had WMDs that could be launched in 45 minutes. Citizens were told time and again that this claim was based on credible 'intelligence'. And all those suspected of lying persist with the lie that they believed the 'intelligence'. The whole Cabinet and all the spin doctors absolving themselves by reference to some nebulous, no, nonexistent intelligence. There was no intelligence, no WMDs, and the 45 minute claim was simply ridiculous. The forty-five minutes claim actually redefined time, it meant probably never but Blair's spin doctors, chiefly, Tom Kelly and Alastair Campbell needed something emphatic and probably never didn't cover it.
The Walter Mitty Tendency
Mitty is a well known fictional fantasist, his name has passed into the language to describe outrageous liars. Blair's pet snake, Tom Kelly, tried to rubbish the noble Dr David Kelly by calling him 'a bit of a Walter Mitty character' but he was forced to apologise when the slur became public.
Jeffrey Archer, author and former politician whose political career ended with his conviction and subsequent imprisonment (2001–03) for perjury and perverting the course of justice, i.e. lying. Archer created, in his own mind, a persona out of sink with cognition and reality but the Tory Party were minded to make him their party chairman and a life peer, etc... He was one of the great and the good, someone for the plebs to look up to or so the public were led to believe.
But even Archer's fantasy world was outdone by John Stonehouse, MP, businessman, author, and soviet bloc spy. Stonehouse's mad world invoved leaving a pile of clothes on a Miami beech, in an attempt to fake his suicide, while travelling the globe, faking identities and trying to reinvent himself as Joseph Markham. It didn't do him any good, he ended up on trial for 21 charges of fraud, theft, forgery, and conspiracy to defraud. Stonehouse was sent to prison for seven years. As a Privy Counsellor he was entitled to the style "The Right Honourable", which is quite funny when you think about it.
Conclusion
Cameron's claim that everything is broken is also in the realm of Rumsfeld, the realm of the big lie. Every government action can now be premised on the imagined fact that everything needs fixing. And in this fantasy, the fixing will largely be a DIY enterprise.
Things don't need fixing, they need changing. The whole fabric of our deep democracy needs a clean out. The reason that liars like Mandelson and Blair thrive is because that all investigations into their probity are superficial, anything otherwise would result in transparency and deep democracy can only thrive due to its ability to conceal the lie until memories of wrong doing fade.
Witness how the News of the World phone hacking enquiry drags on and on and how much more do we know about the nexus between Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and David Cameron. Was Coulson hired at the behest of Murdock, passed to Cameron by Brooks - a favour for future favours.
Will you ever know the truth, don't trouble yourself; you should be focused on finding out who Adam Werritty is because Dave would really like to know?