The many faces of mendacity

I have a confession to make.  I still use a dictionary.  Not the online, urban variety that suggests ‘summarise’ means ‘to get ready for warm weather’, but a real one; ‘The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English’, Eighth Edition, published in 1990 and printed on paper.

Occasionally, I’ll stumble upon a word that will see me plucking it from the bookshelf and flicking through its 1,500 wafer thin pages to find what has caused me to pause in my reading.  In March, a tweet from Stephen King introduced me to the word ‘mendacious’[1].  It’s a sorry reflection on the current state of our politics that I am now hearing it repeatedly.

Another tweet I saw asked the question “What do you miss most about the past?”  One respondent said, “When getting caught lying meant a politician would resign.”  It reminded me of how much we have seen the erosion of honour in our political class and why Boris Johnson’s claim to want to “restore trust in democracy” is so hollow.  There are few people who are less likely to achieve that aim.

We are accustomed to politicians obfuscating, it is what they do.  However, their deceits are increasingly choreographed by their closest and most senior advisors.  Tony Blair’s spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, ushered in the realm of the celebrity advisor; he was brusque and brutish at times, but seemingly pursued causes that were in the country’s best interests.  Today’s current batch are considerably more sinister, their dogma overshadowing what is good for society and nakedly focusing on implementing their ideology and the interests of their self-serving benefactors.

The Brexit Party, led by Nigel Farage, has Arron Banks’ financial and strategic input to thank for its rapid rise to prominence and its disproportionate presence on mainstream media.  Mr Banks is allegedly a character of dubious moral standing.  The Observer journalist, Carole Cadwalladr, delivered an excellent TED talk in June 2019 that exposed social media manipulation, in particular on Facebook, during the EU Referendum campaign and her subsequent claim that Banks had a “covert relationship” with, and had been offered money by, the Russian Government has led him to bring a libel action against her.  Banks is a bully.  His action is designed to threaten and intimidate Ms Cadwalladr and aims to cause her financial hardship.  She is going to fight him, provided he doesn’t bankrupt her in the process.  Ms Cadwalladr has launched a funding programme aimed at supporting her case.  She can be supported here.

Her claims may not be unsubstantiated.  A British parliamentary committee report concluded; “Arron Banks is believed to have donated £8.4m to the Leave campaign, the largest political donation in British politics, but it is unclear from where he obtained that amount of money”.  It goes on to state that “He failed to satisfy us that his own donations had, in fact, come from sources within the UK.”

Banks also hired Goddard Gunster who he credits with the Leave.EU campaign’s success, saying, “What [Gunster] said early on was ‘facts don’t work’.  The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact.  It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”  In other words – lie.

Banks and Farage learnt much about their tactics from the US where they enjoy access to Trump and the man who led his campaign, and possibly the most famous advisory protagonist of them all, Steve Bannon.  Bannon served as White House Chief Strategist for the first seven months of Trump’s term before their relationship deteriorated.  He also serves on the board of Cambridge Analytica, the data-analytics firm involved in the Facebook data scandal that Cadwalladr suggests illicitly harvested the data of 87 million people.  He’s much cleverer than Banks and considerably more dangerous, with a declared intention to become “the infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement”.  I’m not sure how a person can become an infrastructure for a movement, but if there’s anyone that could achieve it, Bannon’s your man.

He has been described as a white nationalist but rejects the description, however, he is advocating for a global shift towards nationalism and actively supports extreme right-wing political parties in France, Hungary, Italy, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain and Finland.  He’s doing plenty to unite Europeans in the collective goal of dividing Europeans.

His latest leader of choice to influence is our very own Boris Johnson.  Talking about Johnson’s resignation speech as Foreign Secretary in July 2018, Bannon claimed, “I’ve been talking to him all weekend about this speech.”  For his part, Prime Minister Johnson has denied any association with Bannon, once describing the notion as “a lefty delusion.”  Who to believe?

Whether Johnson needs Bannon’s input is moot.  His poison pills are readily supplied by his own senior advisor, Dominic Cummings, a man so contemptible that Parliament is holding him in contempt after failing to appear before MPs investigating the proliferation of false news stories during the EU referendum campaign.

He served as the campaign director of the Vote Leave campaign and is said to have been the mind behind the bus message that falsely claimed we send £350 million a week to the EU and the misleadingly claims that Turkey was joining the EU.

Mr Cummings’ presence in Downing Street is troubling.  He demonstrates a massive disdain for politicians and the process of government.  Former Attorney General and Conservative MP for Beaconsfield, Dominic Grieve QC, launched an attack on Mr Cummings this week that described him as “arrogant” and “ignorant”.  When asked what he thought of the comments, Cummings brushed off the remarks telling Sky News, “I don’t think I am arrogant”, unequivocally proving that Grieve was right on both counts.

Mr Cummings has styled members of the ERG, a publicly funded research support group for Conservative MPs that is focused on the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, as “useful idiots”.  Jason Farrell of Sky News, one of the few people who has managed to interview him, reported that Cummings told him that parliament consists of people who “to a large extent are not particularly bright, are egomaniacs and they want to be on TV”.  He also claims that Cummings has referred to Eurosceptic MPs as “particularly unbalanced” and that some of the MPs he worked with during the campaign were “completely deranged”.  His lack of respect for politicians led him to tell Farrell that “99% of MPs are dreadful characters and if you want anything professionally organised you've got to exclude them, which causes a lot of trouble”.

This would lend credence to the suggestion that Mr Cummings is attempting to subvert democracy and the parliamentary process.  He appears to have no issue with forcing through a no-deal Brexit against Parliament’s wishes through proroguing, the shutting down of Parliament.  MPs wouldn’t have a say on proroguing, that power rests with the Queen, on the advice of the prime minister, and Boris Johnson hasn’t ruled it out.  This would potentially bring the Queen into the heart of the dispute, having to decide whether to accept or deny the request.  For a man who suggests he wants to restore trust in democracy, it’s had to imagine something more undemocratic.  The Vote Leave campaign focused on “taking back control” from the EU.  There is a rich irony that by proroguing Parliament to achieve that aim, control must first be removed from MPs.

Earlier in the week, Alastair Campbell wrote a scathing article about Dominic Cummings in The New European.  He cited the Channel 4 film ‘Brexit: The Uncivil War’, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played the role of the Vote Leave strategist.  Campbell, who understands these things better than most, thinks the portrayal may have gone to Cummings’ head.  He talks about his own time as the ‘power behind [Tony Blair’s] throne’ writing, “I always had enough awareness both of myself and of my boss, Tony Blair, to know that the reports and portrayals [of Campbell being ‘the prime minister's brain’] were wildly exaggerated.  Cummings, I suspect, has no such regard for Johnson, yet an infinitely large regard for himself and his own abilities.”

Campbell also suggests that the portrayal by Cumberbatch of Cummings as “a wild genius who single-handedly persuaded a country to vote for something you suspected would harm it” may have led him to believe his own legend and that he is “capable of doing other things no other man could - like delivering a no-deal Brexit without the government, the party of government, or the country imploding? And if Cumberbatch has helped to show the world that you could bend figures as varied as Johnson and Gove, Nigel Farage and Arron Banks and much of the media to your will, why on earth should you worry about 27 presidents and prime ministers and their European governments, the Queen, the civil service, 650 MPs and the rather inconvenient fact of a single digit, single vote majority in the House of Commons?”  Let us not forget that Cummings is the man who advised Michael Gove on the ill-informed reforms in education and is now belligerently advising Boris Johnson and his Cabinet colleagues on a catastrophic course of action.

Tom Peck, the Independent’s Political Sketch Writer, was no less erudite, and somewhat more irreverant in his assessment of Cummings, writing, “the latest self-appointed genius to run 10 Downing Street, is the most deluded of them all”.  Whilst his piece is amusing, it makes a little too light of the demagogue that Johnson has installed, although his phrase, “The world is burning, and the government is being run by an arsonist” rings far too true.

Lord Adonis, in The New European, also commented on Cummings calling him the ‘joint prime minister’ and saying, “Cummings is intent on jeopardising our entire political system”.  He suggests Cummings has an obsession with Otto von Bismarck, reminding us that “Bismarck's motto was ‘blood and iron’.  He hated not just socialists and the French but liberalism and European co-operation on any basis of human rights and conciliation.”  It is worrying that Bismarck is the inspiration of the man who has the ear of our Prime Minister.

Cummings is also reported as having briefed the special advisers to cabinet ministers of a “one strike and you’re out” policy in relation to his ban on leaks (unless they make him and the government look good, preferably in that order), reportedly warning them that “if you leak you are gone” and adding that “my worth to journalists is greater than yours. For the right story they will rat you out”.  It seems to have worked, almost 10 minutes passed before his briefing was shared with the press.

Further proving that he is a bully and indifferent to employment law, The Telegraph’s Chief Political Correspondent, Christopher Hope, reported that he also told the group that “if any of them tried to take him to an employment tribunal “you will be dead to me””.

Cummings has the ear of a man who he probably disdains, but who is Machiavellian enough to want him around – for now, but who will no doubt be as loyal to him as he has been to his previous two wives.  As Trump did for Bannon, Johnson is likely to do for Cummings, discarding him when he has served his useful purpose and he starts to become too embarrassing to protect.

The trouble is, between now and then, Mr Cummings is likely to do and cause a great deal of damage.

Twitter: @GOMinTraining
Copyright © Craig Brown, 2019
9 August 2019

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[1] If, like me, ‘mendacious’ is new to you, allow me to save you the trouble of reaching for the dictionary.  The OED says:  mendacious /mɛnˈdeɪʃəs/ adj. lying, untruthful.