When Piglets Write the History
By Nick Pelling
At what point does one know that someone is a liar? Occasionally there are helpful clues. Connie Francis had it sussed when she saw the ‘lipstick on your collar.’ Kirsty MacColl had it easy when considering whether the guy who worked down the chip shop really was Elvis. And then, of course, there was the Eagles’ naive notion that ‘you can’t hide your lying eyes.’ But it is rarely that simple.
A more profound lyric came from Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet secretary, Robert Armstrong. His excuse for not quite being honest was that he was being “economical with the truth.” This introduced the idea that truth is like butter and can be sliced according to taste. As David Cameron once sort of said – in an odd moment of sincerity – you simply can’t catch a piglet greased in butter. Half-truths and scurrilous slurs make a wonderful lubricant, it would seem.
But I suppose History will have the last word and, reassuringly, it tends to be unforgiving of liars. There are no great Tsars called Ivan the Unreliable or even just Catherine the Great Liar. In the end, people don’t really venerate liars.
In modern History I suppose the greatest untruth teller would have to be Joseph McCarthy. He became a huge hit in the fifties for telling the American nation just how many closet ‘Commies’ there were in the State Department. One day it was 57 and the next, 209. Nobody took the trouble to ask for these names. He was allowed to just go on and on with his false claims. How quaint it now seems that McCarthy was brought down by one lawyer’s searing question: “at long last, sir, have you no sense of decency.”
Some might say that the real prince of modern liars has to be Richard Nixon. After all, he has given the world the code word for all corruption, thanks to the shenanigans at the watery hotel ending in ‘gate.’ However, he was actually quite bad at lying. He recorded himself talking about why he was lying. A silly mistake.
But British lying is not like that. British lying is the best in the world because no one quite knows when it is happening. On the very rarest of occasions someone will have an attack of shame. The Profumo affair in 1963 is often seen as the moment when the corrupt nature of the establishment was uncovered. But what is less often stressed is that after 1963 the mortified Profumo spent the rest of his life working for the poor at Toynbee Hall in the East End. He suffered from something we used to call a sense of guilt.
Maybe we should not be so quick to judge liars. After all, we live in strange times. When, for example, being the boss of a water company that allows human faeces into our rivers merits a massive pay rise. Or when the former CEO of the Post Office is awarded a CBE despite hundreds of wrongful prosecutions of innocent sub-postmasters. And we live in an age when someone called Bernard Looney can chuckle about the fact the enormous surge in energy prices has turned his company, BP, into his own private “cash machine.” In these times truth and honour must seem as outdated as anti-macassars.
The last word should be reserved for our greatest leader of modern times. Apparently, according to an alleged historian, Winston Churchill was, before 1940, “held to be not just untrustworthy – he was thought to be congenitally untrustworthy.” And we all know that destiny had other ideas for Winston. Who was this incredible historian? It was that other great untrustworthy genius of our times: the Piglet.
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